Speaker 1: All right, So as we've started doing on weekends, here's
Speaker 1: another compilation. This one is two of my earliest recordings
Speaker 1: with Thomas. This is all the way back in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: It's been a while. Look audio in these kind of scuffed,
Speaker 1: so remastering it making it sound better. And I was
Speaker 1: real new to the whole interview, so I've gotten better.
Speaker 1: The first one we're talking primarily about fate, about Protestant
Speaker 1: and the second one doubt kind of light ranging Conda
Speaker 1: even just as from an abat right, it's kind of
Speaker 1: interesting to at least for me maybe to hear much better.
Speaker 1: I've gotten to this anyway on the episode. Thanks all right, Thomas,
Speaker 1: we're a lot Welcome to the Jay Burton Show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you man. So it's a pleasure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. Man. I've been a big fan of your work.
Speaker 1: I've found you, like most people, at least I think
Speaker 1: through a and then later on Pequanona's Revisionism series, which
Speaker 1: has been just great. But I really wanted to ask
Speaker 1: you about something that I haven't heard you talk about before.
Speaker 1: I've heard a lot of you people talk to you
Speaker 1: about revisionism, and that's great, that's important, but I'll be
Speaker 1: perfectly honest, I'm not I'm not knowledgeable to add any
Speaker 1: more to that discussion, right, at least from my perspective,
Speaker 1: right Like they're they're more qualified people than I do.
Speaker 1: Want to talk with you about something that you've mentioned
Speaker 1: but at least never discussed deliberately. It's kind of your
Speaker 1: own faith and your own Protestant faith. So if you
Speaker 1: could just very briefly, and I'm not looking for a
Speaker 1: uh not looking for a all biography, but if you
Speaker 1: could just kind of explain your relationship to faith and
Speaker 1: where you and how you would, I guess currently describe yourself.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm I'm a Calvinist Presbyterian, and that's how
Speaker 2: I was raised, both sides of my face. You know,
Speaker 2: I've got rather deep Protestant. In tracing my genealogy, I would,
Speaker 2: which I did some years back, I only found one
Speaker 2: careful gastis in the last century and a half. In
Speaker 2: most jurisdictions in the past, one is confessional heritage as
Speaker 2: well as their race was UH was listed and for
Speaker 2: purposes a census to which is interesting. In fact, UH,
Speaker 2: I don't have an absolute I don't I don't have
Speaker 2: a complete data set you know of the last you know,
Speaker 2: two hundred years or something fantas States of America, and
Speaker 2: it varied a lot by jurisdiction in terms of how
Speaker 2: these procedures were managed and under what authority, but uh,
Speaker 2: from what in my own research, it was uh saga
Speaker 2: more common for confessional uh orientation to be listed than race,
Speaker 2: which is interesting, but that that makes sense because I
Speaker 2: mean old America that that was very very to people,
Speaker 2: not just in their own lives, but in in political terms.
Speaker 2: And I've always uh, I mean I I I'm I
Speaker 2: remain you know, a Presbyterian today. I made the point
Speaker 2: before uh, and the not like there's some idea original
Speaker 2: to me or something or not idea. It's not like
Speaker 2: there's some observation or like take that unique to me.
Speaker 2: But people really can't escape their confessional heritage anyway. I
Speaker 2: like Paul Strader, you know, the filmmaker a lot. You know,
Speaker 2: like he wrote Taxi Driver, even though sports says he
Speaker 2: directed it. Trader also made the film Hardcore, which with
Speaker 2: Georgey Scott, which I think is kind of underrated. It's
Speaker 2: a disturbing film and it's telling of a it's got
Speaker 2: a very it's got a very UH strong theological. Trader
Speaker 2: did the biopic of Buki Mishima lining board chapters. He
Speaker 2: did a great UH film called The Yakuza, with of
Speaker 2: which Ridley Scott's Black Rain is just kind of a
Speaker 2: spiritual sequel or campaigning team. In any event, Trader was
Speaker 2: a he was Trader was from Michigan, and and he
Speaker 2: was raised in a stonily Calvinist's household. Riginally, Calvinism is
Speaker 2: a faith in some and some among some people. Okay, uh,
Speaker 2: kind of categorically as you're all right, at least by
Speaker 2: kind of modern metrics, but some communities and some families
Speaker 2: are are are rigid and kind of it's it's uh,
Speaker 2: the structures in day to day affairs and particularly family
Speaker 2: and Traders always making the point that you know, he
Speaker 2: made two points that he uh when he went to
Speaker 2: Los Angeles, UH to make films is a profound culture shock,
Speaker 2: more so than it would have been, you know, obviously
Speaker 2: for a Catholic or Secondly, UH, he made the point
Speaker 2: that even people who declare themselves to be atheists or
Speaker 2: declare themselves to have you know, left their the faith
Speaker 2: of uh, of their of their family and parentage. You know,
Speaker 2: you never really escape your confessional heritage. Okay. You know,
Speaker 2: even these guys, uh, even these guys and and some
Speaker 2: ladies who you know, will claim that, you know, they're
Speaker 2: quote laughed Catholics or former Catholics. You know, when they
Speaker 2: talk about their ethics like work as their addicts may
Speaker 2: be their conceptual rise in Army's catholic you know, when
Speaker 2: you when you find these like Rockefeller Republican types or
Speaker 2: what he did, I mean they don't really exist for
Speaker 2: but you know, these these kinds of uh, these kinds
Speaker 2: of Rockefeller Republicans who oppose Nixon, and you know, we're
Speaker 2: very much uh, we're very much conservative and name only
Speaker 2: you know, in the seventies, you know, they they they
Speaker 2: were very much they were sell the clari secular humanists,
Speaker 2: a lot of them, but they they they were very
Speaker 2: Protestant and orientation. Okay. Similarly on the right, you know,
Speaker 2: you'll you know, you'll find thinkers like Anthony Woodevich, you
Speaker 2: know who was a who is it? I mean, he
Speaker 2: wasn't a he wasn't an atheist and in the way
Speaker 2: that new atheists are or like uh any and certainly
Speaker 2: wasn't a dialectical materialist. But he he was kind of
Speaker 2: a proto fascist Nischean, but you know he was he
Speaker 2: had he had this very very kind of Catholic, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, Romanist like view of of ethicts, of aesthetics,
Speaker 2: of of all these things. Okay, I'm at the point
Speaker 2: before the Soviet Union as well as the you know,
Speaker 2: as well as the as well as the countries under
Speaker 2: U under occupation, that that that shared a subcultural traits
Speaker 2: in common, you know, Uh, the Soviet Union came to
Speaker 2: be more and more Byzantine and and superficially kind of Orthodox,
Speaker 2: and it's in it's uh, in its practices, you know
Speaker 2: from uh you know, the kind of preservation of Lenin's
Speaker 2: body is a relic to the you know, the kind
Speaker 2: of pagentry of the Kremlin mausoleum, the you know, these
Speaker 2: these elaborate funerals of a state up ratric. So I
Speaker 2: don't get me wrong, like I'm not saying something bad
Speaker 2: about the Orthodox faith. And obviously what the Communists were
Speaker 2: doing was a completely warped, uh counterfeit version of of
Speaker 2: of of sacral practices, but it owed very much to
Speaker 2: the kind of Byzantine Orthodox heritage. Okay, it was a
Speaker 2: return to these familiar forms that however, like warped a capacity.
Speaker 2: So it's important to give in mind, Okay, I so
Speaker 2: to bring it back kind of down to earth, like
Speaker 2: directly respond to your query. I never really questioned my
Speaker 2: own faith. I mean, I I've asked a lot of
Speaker 2: questions on my faith from the time I would do
Speaker 2: confirmation to you know now with you know, it's about there,
Speaker 2: forty six years old. But I never want to do
Speaker 2: a faith or something where like I didn't believe in God,
Speaker 2: or where like I rejected you know, Calvinism, or I
Speaker 2: rejected the Bible or anything like that. So I've always
Speaker 2: uh throughout my life. I I I've never had a
Speaker 2: through crisis of faith, and I've never I've never been
Speaker 2: inclined to abandon the faith of my father's as. But
Speaker 2: also even if I want to do, I think like
Speaker 2: a Calvinist, you know, and people have pointed it out
Speaker 2: to me, but I knew it anyway, you know, So
Speaker 2: and then that's just you know, I agree with you,
Speaker 2: Michael Jones, Okay, with some qualifications. I mean, obviously he's
Speaker 2: a big Catholic, but and I agree with them in
Speaker 2: some senses. When he when he when he talks about
Speaker 2: the kind of intellectual poverty and historically erroneous features of
Speaker 2: white nationalism, but I think he takes it too far,
Speaker 2: and in kind of doing race is not particularly significant
Speaker 2: because politically it's it's it's got tremendousness, Okay. But at
Speaker 2: the same time he is right when he talks about
Speaker 2: how your culture really is your confessional heritage, you know,
Speaker 2: and especially in America. You know, the way to understand
Speaker 2: America is at elite levels. I mean, I'm not talking
Speaker 2: about like on the street pells kind of sociological experience,
Speaker 2: you know, with what they were in races and things
Speaker 2: and and and they're personal. So I'm talking about if
Speaker 2: you want to understand kind of at the elite level,
Speaker 2: like what what what what the kind of political intrigues involved,
Speaker 2: and what what the parties are. You know, America is
Speaker 2: more like Bosnia than it was South Africa or something.
Speaker 2: It's it's basically a fight between you know, Catholics, Protestants
Speaker 2: and Jews, and you know, there's kinds of shifting alliances
Speaker 2: they're in, and you know, sometimes two gang up against
Speaker 2: the other. Sometimes they're all like lowerheads. But that's that's
Speaker 2: the way to understand it. And uh, that's why it's
Speaker 2: peculiar when I run into guys you claim that they're
Speaker 2: like atheists but they have some kind of like a
Speaker 2: hard view on race, or they or they claim that
Speaker 2: they're these big political partisans. It's like, you know, if
Speaker 2: you don't if you don't have a confessional heritage, or
Speaker 2: you don't take it seriously or I but it's not
Speaker 2: like pretty identity. That's really kind of artificial. You know,
Speaker 2: that's not just uh, I mean, and I mean the
Speaker 2: historical experience bears that out. That's that's not just some
Speaker 2: that's not just some uh, And that's not just some
Speaker 2: conceit of mind. And maybe it's because I I'm a minor.
Speaker 2: I'm an extreme minority where I live, and I always
Speaker 2: have mans in Chicago. You know, we used to be
Speaker 2: called like white ethnic white ethnics, you know, like Catholic
Speaker 2: people and like old Stock Center prade like I am.
Speaker 2: We're very different people. I mean, we're not We're not
Speaker 2: different in the way like you know white folks and
Speaker 2: black folks are. We're not different in a way like
Speaker 2: a Christian a Moslim is. But yes, the idea that
Speaker 2: this is some super official distinction is not true at all. Man.
Speaker 2: There's very profound cultural differences, and thankfully, in a lot
Speaker 2: of ways those have been kind of bridge and I
Speaker 2: think you like people are great, you know, I I
Speaker 2: it's not an issue with that at all. But this idea,
Speaker 2: this is some sort of insignificant thing kind of people
Speaker 2: to say that they're rather intellectually very immature or there
Speaker 2: or they just don't really get not just you know,
Speaker 2: kind of the nature of deep politics and historical terms
Speaker 2: and specifically don't really get America and what it's kind
Speaker 2: of it's kind of a ethno political like uh constellation
Speaker 2: involves and like who the players are, so to speak,
Speaker 2: and like what their values are and what they're trying
Speaker 2: to do. I realize I want like far and beyond
Speaker 2: you know, the question which is just like what's my faith? What?
Speaker 2: How like how do I relate to what that's the
Speaker 2: property characterizes? But you know, I've got I dedicated in
Speaker 2: my life. They're writing about political matters and and like
Speaker 2: involving myself in these things as much as I can,
Speaker 2: so I can't really expecate a kind of a kind
Speaker 2: of historical and political orientation from my own confessional heritage,
Speaker 2: because that's the way I understand it.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, that's insightful. Yeah, I'm I'm glad to listen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's yeah, that's I mean. I don't
Speaker 2: have anywhere to add on that account unless you've got
Speaker 2: something you want me to clarify.
Speaker 1: No, not at all. If you can forgive me a digression.
Speaker 1: What you said about never being able to escape your
Speaker 1: confessional history, it reminds me of a story my grandfather
Speaker 1: told me. So, my grandfather was an aircraft mechanic in
Speaker 1: Laos during the h Wild War, and as you can imagine, right,
Speaker 1: there were a lot of a lot of Koreans there
Speaker 1: and they had horrible problems with the Korean airplanes. It
Speaker 1: would always go down. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: they found out was essentially that the Korean language made
Speaker 1: it incredibly difficult to bring an issue up the chain
Speaker 1: of command. Right, So, like look orwell is is kind
Speaker 1: of a goofy guy, but I think the way he
Speaker 1: describes language and language control and his work is essential. Right.
Speaker 1: And the point was, and what my grandfather always said
Speaker 1: was until they taught the pilots English, they couldn't bring
Speaker 1: up issues. It was just difficult in the structure of
Speaker 1: the language itself to bring up to someone over top
Speaker 1: of you, Hey, this is a problem. We need to
Speaker 1: fix this, or to say no, we're not going to
Speaker 1: do that. We need to fix the plane first. And
Speaker 1: so I kind of view religion in a similar way
Speaker 1: where it kind of it's the framework through which you
Speaker 1: view authority, right, God being the ultimate authority, and so
Speaker 1: the way that you relate to God, that you relate
Speaker 1: to your priest class is shaped by your confessional history,
Speaker 1: and that's an essential part of I guess how you
Speaker 1: view politics and kind of I guess like the ruling
Speaker 1: of men, right, No, it's.
Speaker 2: Usually and it's also too well add I want you
Speaker 2: to continue you And that's a great analogy, by the way,
Speaker 2: and I had no idea about that aspect of the
Speaker 2: Korean language. If I spent a lot of time around
Speaker 2: Koreans owing to where I live, that there's a lot
Speaker 2: of Koreans and in the reserves of cargo which people
Speaker 2: might not know. But that's that's fascinating, and that's also
Speaker 2: a very apropoe analogy. But I'll go back to you
Speaker 2: in a second, but to your point, Yeah, you're absolutely
Speaker 2: right that theology is basically the conceptual vocabulary of ah
Speaker 2: of of of one's perception and their conceptual horizon. I
Speaker 2: also add when Carl Schmid's great insights, of which there
Speaker 2: were many, was in political existential terms, is that all
Speaker 2: all political paradigms are conceptually theological. You know, you know,
Speaker 2: if they claim, you know, like to again of both example,
Speaker 2: the twentieth century, you know, Styalinus Garist states you have
Speaker 2: the system in question purpose to be quote ethan you know,
Speaker 2: liter it purports to be you know, eureligious or even
Speaker 2: like anti religious it politics. Uh, it's exactly what you said.
Speaker 2: It via the the you know, man's the conceptual horizon
Speaker 2: as relates confessional heritage. It identically, politics is the lanis
Speaker 2: through which man perceives authority, and it is it's always
Speaker 2: negatively theological, even it's dressed up in secularists or or
Speaker 2: you know, or modernist trappings, even it's purported to be
Speaker 2: a science or something. Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1: Well, and that's the thing that because I kind of
Speaker 1: came into my own kind of at the tail end
Speaker 1: of the new atheist movement, it never grabbed me, but
Speaker 1: it was something that was kind of in the water.
Speaker 1: And what was always so frustrating to me is that
Speaker 1: there is this kind of attack on religion is, oh,
Speaker 1: you can't justify it outside of his own system, right,
Speaker 1: like justify it in my system. But that Karl Schmid
Speaker 1: idea is essential, right, because any system of belief has
Speaker 1: kind of a core just assertion about the world that
Speaker 1: it's kind of all built on, you know, that kind
Speaker 1: of political theology, no matter what it is. You know,
Speaker 1: if it's if it's you know, kind of Dawkins atheism,
Speaker 1: it's communism or anything, and you kind of just have
Speaker 1: to make peace with the fact that you can't not
Speaker 1: everything as a syllogism. You know, there is some kind
Speaker 1: of initial premise on which everything is based.
Speaker 2: You know. Well, so yeah, I mean in symbolic psychological terms.
Speaker 2: I mean, even if the problem with the new atheism,
Speaker 2: the problem with the new atheism specifically, and one of
Speaker 2: the reasons why it's just kind of unceremoniously died and
Speaker 2: now people are embarrassed about it is because it it
Speaker 2: there's something I mean, first of all, it was something
Speaker 2: nasty about it. It was it was just kind of bigoted,
Speaker 2: you know, towards the towards a you know, towards religion,
Speaker 2: choa religion, but it's also I mean it was, it was,
Speaker 2: it's just on its own terms. I mean, like take
Speaker 2: the example of Dawkins or or or another lightweight kind
Speaker 2: of uh oh differous uh uh very literally character Chris Hitchins.
Speaker 2: Uh the these guys were making more these guys are
Speaker 2: making they were they were presenting absolute moral postulates, but
Speaker 2: they weren't providing the the intellectual legs for these things
Speaker 2: to stand on for really speaking, like you read Chris Hitchins,
Speaker 2: you talk about how you know, racism is a great
Speaker 2: evil whatever racism, you know, homophobia, which is an absurd term,
Speaker 2: but you know, taking it to mean, you know, opposition
Speaker 2: to sodomy and things, this is a great evil. But
Speaker 2: you can't just like why It's like, okay, if you
Speaker 2: really are an atheist, you know you can't you can't
Speaker 2: fall back on natural law arguments to prop up your atheism.
Speaker 2: Like maybe quote homophobia is bad. I don't like to
Speaker 2: see how you can argue that it's bad. But like,
Speaker 2: let's say, if you truly are an atheist, there'd be
Speaker 2: no moral content to that judgment. You know, It's like
Speaker 2: maybe it'd be like bad for business to discriminate against
Speaker 2: people based on you know, these weird habits of theirs,
Speaker 2: or maybe it's something that you know shouldn't be within
Speaker 2: the contemplation of uh of of people as regards public
Speaker 2: morals just generally, but like how how how can I
Speaker 2: be some real great I'm gonna be a moral evil
Speaker 2: to oppose something like that, you know. So there's that,
Speaker 2: and it's also the uh, the uh. There's a basic misunderstanding,
Speaker 2: Like if you read last summer, I powered my way
Speaker 2: through a lot of Marxist Lenist theory. I mean not
Speaker 2: just am a masochist or I wanted to be mean
Speaker 2: to myself, as Telvin is often art, including myself, but
Speaker 2: to a lot of what I was writing. I was
Speaker 2: kind of deep diving, you know, into the Cold War.
Speaker 2: I mean I always kind of am, but it was uh,
Speaker 2: I was. I was specifically addressing, you know, kind of
Speaker 2: the proverbial loss of faith and in Marxist Leninism that
Speaker 2: they came to characterize, uh, the last phase of of
Speaker 2: of Soviet power. And I was specifically I was kind
Speaker 2: of deep diving into what replaced it. And to understand
Speaker 2: one's got to understand that to understand the Russian feeder
Speaker 2: age of twenty one two. But any event, Marx was
Speaker 2: an incredibly destructive person. I'd go as far as even
Speaker 2: and I'm reluctant to assign these kinds of moral judgments
Speaker 2: to historical personages because it sounds like moral can't, But
Speaker 2: I think I even go as far as to say
Speaker 2: that Marx was an evil person who was intervolving in
Speaker 2: scott okay and a naked and total capacity. But you know,
Speaker 2: Marxist letting this atheism, it was fairly well thought out.
Speaker 2: It wasn't this kind of dum dum uh histrionic, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, bigoted, Uh moral can't of Dowkins and Hitchins,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of like the marks within Marxist Uh,
Speaker 2: there is a Marxian metaphysics, okay, and within that paradigm,
Speaker 2: you know, the idea is that you know, uh, religion
Speaker 2: as its religion as it existed within cycles of historical development,
Speaker 2: you know, like everything else within me. It's conceptual horizon,
Speaker 2: you know, reflected the paradigm of the production productive means,
Speaker 2: labor and authority they're in because no matter what man does.
Speaker 2: And then the Marxist paradigm he can't escape that. But
Speaker 2: if you were to like ask a Marxist, you know,
Speaker 2: like okay, like you know what what you know? What
Speaker 2: what what? Like how how can we you know, can
Speaker 2: we resolve you know, the kind of mystery of you know,
Speaker 2: the original life? They probably say like no, something is
Speaker 2: just beyond man's understanding. But that doesn't matter, because you know,
Speaker 2: the challenge to us is you know, man's existence here
Speaker 2: on Earth, and you know how to overcome this these
Speaker 2: oppressive modalities and you know and advance the end of
Speaker 2: history so that you know, uh, you know, so that
Speaker 2: you know, real like true justice can be realized on earth.
Speaker 2: You know, like they wouldn't like like no Marxists, you know,
Speaker 2: in in either in eighteen eighty five or in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty five, what is sad to regaled you with some
Speaker 2: you know, with with with some with some shrieking moral
Speaker 2: can't you know like dawk and style about how evil
Speaker 2: it is that you believe in God? You know, like
Speaker 2: this is not the way they approached it. There's something
Speaker 2: that's remarked, there's something uniquely infantile and kind of uh
Speaker 2: and and and characteristic of of the the kind of
Speaker 2: post nineteen five you know, secular humanist regime. That that's
Speaker 2: that's profoundly it's it's as anti intellectual as it is,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of smugly, uh self assured of its
Speaker 2: own righteousness, if that makes any sense, you know, I
Speaker 2: no think the long lives.
Speaker 1: What's it's odd that you bring up bring up Marx
Speaker 1: and and Satan because one of my favorite favorite works
Speaker 1: by interestingly enough a hardcore Calvinist, but is Milton's Paradise Lost.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's no secret right that Satan is essentially
Speaker 1: the main character and kind of that Promethean aspect of
Speaker 1: you know, like I would rather, you know, rule in
Speaker 1: hell than serve in heaven. It's actually something Marx was
Speaker 1: kind of obsessed with, right, Yeah. He famously called Satan
Speaker 1: the first free thinker, you know, and if you read
Speaker 1: a lot of his poetry too, you get these very odd,
Speaker 1: the dark descriptions of of you know, Satan and like
Speaker 1: just essentially murdering truth and kind of like casting down
Speaker 1: you know, kind of like the hierarchy of heaven. And
Speaker 1: again like, look, I'm not the greatest Marxist scholar. I've read,
Speaker 1: you know, I've read the Communist manifesto and a little
Speaker 1: bit of lenin. You know, I'm not going to pretend
Speaker 1: to be some academic on the subject, but in my exposure, right,
Speaker 1: it does seem like he was very conscious of that motif.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, definitely definitely what's also too in the under
Speaker 2: and I mean we can move on in a minute.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to kind of for contact some some
Speaker 2: in my mind the other day, you know, one of
Speaker 2: the ways to understanding the new atheism. And I made
Speaker 2: this I make this point a lot, and it's something
Speaker 2: I'm writing currently. I don't want to be a shill,
Speaker 2: but I my next science fiction book is dropping eminently,
Speaker 2: but I'm working on an academic text that's about two
Speaker 2: undred pages. It's kind of an introductory Uh. It's kind
Speaker 2: of an introductory text, you know, just kind of dealing
Speaker 2: with the post nineteen forty five world. So and that's
Speaker 2: keep understanding the twentieth century with hobbs Bomb. I mean,
Speaker 2: while we're on the pific of merks, like I say,
Speaker 2: Hobbs Bomb and some of his UH and some of
Speaker 2: his uh, his heterodox uh takes on on on on
Speaker 2: historical et box, you know, like he here in projected
Speaker 2: kind of like the linear review of history. So he
Speaker 2: was not this traditional Marsi in that regard. But Hobbs
Speaker 2: was always talking about the quote short century, you know,
Speaker 2: of the twentieth century with you know, entailing you know,
Speaker 2: nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighty nine and that entire you know,
Speaker 2: conflict cycle, dias in may. The thing I don the
Speaker 2: twentieth century is that religion had takes this had taken
Speaker 2: this tremendous hit, okay, and uh people just viewed you know,
Speaker 2: from the common man to to people in authority, you know,
Speaker 2: to to you know, the intelligency such that it still
Speaker 2: could have been said to exist. You know, like people
Speaker 2: just did there just was a basic absence of faith,
Speaker 2: and they're this idea that you know, the the world
Speaker 2: was explicable, you know, analysis of material quantities. You know
Speaker 2: that that's one of the things why Marxism developed the
Speaker 2: kind of momentum it did. And uh became so insinuated
Speaker 2: in the in the political life, and and this it
Speaker 2: became there was like this panumbric shadow over all discourse
Speaker 2: and and political activity in the twentieth century. You know,
Speaker 2: when people in the right you know, I made the
Speaker 2: point before, you know, people they they talk about the
Speaker 2: German Reich uh and its biological racialism as if this
Speaker 2: was not as this was both you know, this horrible
Speaker 2: evil but also this kind of this kind of strange
Speaker 2: you know, uh, kind of like outlier phenomenon, like it
Speaker 2: wasn't at all. I made the point before that every
Speaker 2: advanced country, you know, whether it was the German Reich,
Speaker 2: or the British Empire, or the or the Japanese Empire,
Speaker 2: you know, or France, like everybody viewed. You know, Man
Speaker 2: is basically a biological machine, and you know culture is
Speaker 2: derived from these biological principles. And you know, you know,
Speaker 2: your race or your bloods in those days, obviously you
Speaker 2: know that there wasn't an understanding the human genome in things.
Speaker 2: You know, the idea that you know, blood, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of not just determined you know people's uh, you know,
Speaker 2: basic behavioral proclivities, but you know that that somehow, you know,
Speaker 2: the capacity for culture and everything else was you know,
Speaker 2: coded into your into your physical make up. You know,
Speaker 2: this was this touching at this this this this conceptual
Speaker 2: prejudice like touching concerned everything and one of the things
Speaker 2: that brought down communism. I mean, it was an apocoal
Speaker 2: phenomenon that brought down communism. Okay, it was all constellation
Speaker 2: of factors and processes of history, but you know, the
Speaker 2: kind of the kind of paradigm shift. A major poet
Speaker 2: of the paradigm shift that brought it down was the
Speaker 2: fact that people rejected that that people rejected you know,
Speaker 2: not just dialectical materialism, but that entire you know, uh,
Speaker 2: that entire materialist worldview that you know, came to view
Speaker 2: everything is is grounded in physical phenomenon, you know, and
Speaker 2: there really was a return to to uh, there really
Speaker 2: was a return to the faith. You know, that's the there.
Speaker 2: There really wasn't Islamic awakening and that that directly collided
Speaker 2: with the Soviet Union, you know, not just in the
Speaker 2: battle space in Aghanistan, but you know across its entire
Speaker 2: you know, frontier and within within the all blasts where
Speaker 2: you know, the the what what what the Kremline called
Speaker 2: the nationality who were majority of Islamic resided. But also
Speaker 2: you know, uh also I mean, you know, the Pope
Speaker 2: John Paul was uh, the momentum that developed by solidarity
Speaker 2: and elect balleensa like the you know, the the fact
Speaker 2: that that was a Catholic social movement was instrumental when
Speaker 2: it's uh and it's uh and it's in the momentum
Speaker 2: it develops like orbon Is is you know, Orbon's roots
Speaker 2: are are in the the the Communists, the anti communists
Speaker 2: was movement, you know. And he mad's the point that
Speaker 2: you know, the uh, that that that the re emergent
Speaker 2: to faith was instrumental when in Hungary and uh and
Speaker 2: undermining uh the credibility of of the regime. And in
Speaker 2: absolute terms, So these new atheist types, I mean not
Speaker 2: not only were they not only they were they really
Speaker 2: uh were they really weak uh in terms of their
Speaker 2: intellectual foundations, but they you know, they were really kind
Speaker 2: of this was this was kind of them trying to
Speaker 2: like return the serve when after after their their legs
Speaker 2: have been cut off from underneath them, you know, and
Speaker 2: they were thinking and that that you know, somehow they
Speaker 2: could mount uh, they could they could mount some sort
Speaker 2: of uh, they can mound some sort of comeback in
Speaker 2: in in intellectual circles in the two thousands, and that's
Speaker 2: what it was like dog and Dogs was fixated and
Speaker 2: trying to piggyback, you know, his his his bigoted worldview
Speaker 2: on you know, on science, you know, and uh and
Speaker 2: Hitchins was had have what's finesse and a lot or
Speaker 2: crass about it. You know, Hitchin's the whole thing, uh
Speaker 2: like a typical like like a typical Trotskyist and you know,
Speaker 2: like a typical uh like like a lot of like
Speaker 2: a lot of Zionists do too. You know, he's suggesting that,
Speaker 2: you know, this kind of laundry list of a boogeyman
Speaker 2: of the post Marxist left is is the progeny of
Speaker 2: just religion. You know, whether it's you know, whether he
Speaker 2: was you know, calling for you know, genocidal assaults on
Speaker 2: Moslem people's uh, without provocation, or whether he was whether
Speaker 2: he was slandering Christians, you know, white Christians, or whether
Speaker 2: he was uh, you know, saying horrible things with the
Speaker 2: Catholic Church. You know, he he was very very cheap
Speaker 2: and crass way, you know, trying to very direct that
Speaker 2: that kind of bigoted hostility towards you know, religion, choir religion.
Speaker 2: And it's it's very I mean it it's very very grotesque,
Speaker 2: but also thankfully kind of beamed the failure and again
Speaker 2: I hade me to ramble on that. But it's an
Speaker 2: important point.
Speaker 1: No, no, not at all. It's it's odd to me too,
Speaker 1: because not to just endlessly talk about myself, but I'm
Speaker 1: in kind of the central Virginia area, in one of
Speaker 1: the capitals of the Bible belt, right, and so it's
Speaker 1: odd to me because thank you. Yeah, it's it's odd
Speaker 1: to me because there's this kind of boogeyman in the
Speaker 1: atheist liberal psychology, right, and it's that this the like
Speaker 1: classic old stock American Peckerwood is simultaneously this you know,
Speaker 1: like seventy five IQ inbred moron, and then also this
Speaker 1: like backwoods ubermench on who's secretly pulling all of the
Speaker 1: strings in power, you know, and it's just one step
Speaker 1: away from you know, plunging us into some type of
Speaker 1: like you know, absurd you know, seventeenth century Puritan theocracy.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's one of those just inherent contradictions. And my
Speaker 1: point is not, oh, look the left is a hypocrite,
Speaker 1: because that's not a particularly useful game, right, But it
Speaker 1: is one of those things that it does kind of
Speaker 1: just bother you after a while. It's like, what, just
Speaker 1: make up your mind? You know, am I dangerous? Or
Speaker 1: am I pathetic, you know.
Speaker 2: But also it's just bad propaganda. Like there's there's two
Speaker 2: things I wanted to note. I've people on the left.
Speaker 2: I've heard them, not not just like not just like
Speaker 2: you know online herds, but like in you know, in
Speaker 2: the in the real world. I've heard I've heard people.
Speaker 2: I've heard these crazy wolks I talk about, quote the
Speaker 2: church and all that, Like what is the church? I
Speaker 2: go to a church, you know, it's like, what is this?
Speaker 2: Do we live in sixteenth century Spain? Like what is
Speaker 2: the church? I mean it's I think there's like a
Speaker 2: I think among the I think when the rank and file,
Speaker 2: it just kind of like you know, slob like kind
Speaker 2: of trashy goy types. They really they really don't. There's
Speaker 2: so there's so impoverised of culture and they were raised
Speaker 2: with kind of nothing. But but you know, television and
Speaker 2: and and and like convenienced or snacks. They really don't
Speaker 2: understand that. You know, there's this whole kind of denominational
Speaker 2: aspect to Christianity and and and and the effect kind
Speaker 2: of treating the modern world. But also, uh, I remember uh,
Speaker 2: in the entire angle sphere, it's it's it's it's there's
Speaker 2: that boogy man to your point, then it's it's it's
Speaker 2: so odds with reality. It's like the most remote possible outcome.
Speaker 2: Like there's this there's this really in the early few thousands.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you remember this or not. I
Speaker 2: don't know how old you are and I don't know,
Speaker 2: but uh, there's this really moronic uh like Ellen Moore
Speaker 2: comic in the movie called V for Vendetta and like
Speaker 2: all kinds of people like misic construed that movie like
Speaker 2: it was it's it's it's just like it's it's like
Speaker 2: this huge, like Tommy woke movie. But then like these
Speaker 2: anarchists and like types and these guys who think the
Speaker 2: right wing we're running around a guy Fox masks imitation
Speaker 2: of the main character, like apparently didn't understand that the
Speaker 2: whole movie is it is basically like a commy like
Speaker 2: woke movie, but in the movie it's dystopia. Is that
Speaker 2: there's this like there's this Anglican there's this kind of
Speaker 2: radical Anglican political party that imposes this kind of like
Speaker 2: Handmaid's Tale Taliban typeergen on England, like based on Anglicanism.
Speaker 2: Like that's like Dodds that happening. Are the odds of
Speaker 2: like sentient dinosaurs re emerging or like dinosaurs re emerging
Speaker 2: becoming sentient and taking over the planet tomorrow. Like there's literally,
Speaker 2: of all possible occurrences, that is the least probable occurrence
Speaker 2: that Anglicans are going to suddenly become right wing, suddenly
Speaker 2: become like this kind of like fundamentalist Taliban type. Uh,
Speaker 2: you know, like like like theological tendency that they're gonna like,
Speaker 2: you know, conquer England and like their first sort of
Speaker 2: the day is like be mean to like middle class
Speaker 2: bougie ladies and like not let them get abortions.
Speaker 1: Like well, right, And it's to me, it's the difference
Speaker 1: between I guess we can say the last like true
Speaker 1: Protestant theocracy in the anglosphere, right, which is Cromwell, and
Speaker 1: then maybe the tradition. But if you if you look
Speaker 1: at those people and read about those people and what
Speaker 1: they were like, you know, say what you will about them.
Speaker 1: They were misguided, they may have been wrong, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a separate discussion, but these were these were fundamentally
Speaker 1: serious people, right. Jonathan Bowden has a collection of essays.
Speaker 1: He didn't write it obviously it was post it was
Speaker 1: possimously published, but it's all it's called pulp Fascism, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of a series of essays and interviews off
Speaker 1: of different you know, paulp characters. Okay, but uh he
Speaker 1: has one on it, is it Solomon Kane, the Roberty
Speaker 1: Howard Puritan witch Hunter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Solomon King Yeah.
Speaker 1: But he has a great essay on that. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's fascinating, right, essentially talking about, you know, the American
Speaker 1: Protestant tradition and talking about in one large like extended part,
Speaker 1: you know what it was like in Cromwell's armies, you know,
Speaker 1: and there was there was no horring, there was no gambling,
Speaker 1: there was no drinking. Like these were serious, hardcore people.
Speaker 1: And you look at and look like, I love these people,
Speaker 1: like Red State Christian Americans are my people. But they're
Speaker 1: not like that. You know, they can barely control themselves
Speaker 1: at a buffet let alone.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's like hardcore charging into cannon fire.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's it's a different class of people.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and it's also the uh the that's what's
Speaker 2: really Yeah, when America really started losing its way too,
Speaker 2: that's what's That's one of the things that's weird about
Speaker 2: That's one of the reasons why there have been a
Speaker 2: handful of times I've ened up at these like quote
Speaker 2: non denominational churches, you know, like quasi we don't really
Speaker 2: have mega churches in Chicago Land, but you know that
Speaker 2: it's that same sort of thing. You know, There's been
Speaker 2: a handful of times when like, you know, somebody it
Speaker 2: might have made a church for them and I didn't
Speaker 2: want to be roots like I went. And one of
Speaker 2: the reasons why I can't cotton that kind of stuff
Speaker 2: is because, uh, it's I mean, aside from the fact
Speaker 2: that I think a lot of bad theology, you know,
Speaker 2: it's not truly you know, it's not truly Bible Protestantism.
Speaker 2: They're they're fixated on like mirroring popular culture. And I
Speaker 2: mean that's really really weird. You know. I guess there're
Speaker 2: notion is that you know, the way the stay quote
Speaker 2: you know relevant is is the mirror pop culture. But
Speaker 2: that's that's really that. I mean, that's not just unsound,
Speaker 2: uh in terms of uh, in terms of uh you know,
Speaker 2: what what what God would have of uh the you know,
Speaker 2: the elect in terms of their behavior and conduct and
Speaker 2: manner which they worship. But it's that's also not why
Speaker 2: people gravitate to a church community, you know, the whole
Speaker 2: you know, you gravitate towards the congregational community because you know,
Speaker 2: we're we're mired in uh you know, we're surrounded by
Speaker 2: our enemies and we're mired in you know, gomora. You know,
Speaker 2: like I I I like going at church because it's
Speaker 2: not it's not basically like you know, the kind of
Speaker 2: clean version of you know of woke America like outside
Speaker 2: the Doors or it's not you know, like they even
Speaker 2: to this day. Like there's there's there's like a whole genre.
Speaker 2: There's like a whole sub genre like really really corny,
Speaker 2: crappy kind of like fa like you know, pop country music,
Speaker 2: but with quote unquote Christian themes. There's like these like
Speaker 2: a hokey TV shows aimed at kids, which are just
Speaker 2: you know, it's it's like he's disengaging megachurchers like stay
Speaker 2: into Hollywood like oh we got that too, Like it's
Speaker 2: really really misguided and really really undignified and also just
Speaker 2: even in practical terms, that's not white people. That's not
Speaker 2: why people, uh you know, become more become involved in
Speaker 2: or become more involved in their faith.
Speaker 1: Right, it's just becomes it's And there's a line from
Speaker 1: uh from King of the Hill that I love about
Speaker 1: Christian rock music and he says, you didn't make Christianity cooler,
Speaker 1: you just made rock music works, you know, which is
Speaker 1: which is very true.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So my uh, my fiance's family is from the Chicago
Speaker 1: Land area. The descended from you know, Swedish immigrants.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: They went to right, right, they went to uh, they
Speaker 1: went to you know, a small Swedish Covenant college. Everyone
Speaker 1: was ethnically Swedish. Everyone went to church at a Swedish
Speaker 1: Covenant church. But what's interesting is kind of post post
Speaker 1: civil rights law, right, this community's got busted up. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you're not. I'm sure you know. But what's happened
Speaker 1: to the churches is as the churches kind of followed
Speaker 1: like NPR culture, right, and as they've kind of, I guess,
Speaker 1: just rascinated the kind of you know tradition which was
Speaker 1: fairly it was a hardcore tradition, right, Like it was
Speaker 1: a Pietist tradition. You know, there were heard, there were standards,
Speaker 1: it was very much like, well, you know, the community
Speaker 1: watches what you do. When that was gone, it's now
Speaker 1: that like my my fiance is ninety something year old
Speaker 1: grandparents are you know telling us that we need to
Speaker 1: to get our government medication and how important it is
Speaker 1: that we taken Somali refugees like they have right, you know,
Speaker 1: in telling us about the true the truth.
Speaker 2: Also, yeah, I made that point. You know. It's like
Speaker 2: when people I made the point of a friend of
Speaker 2: mine the other day. He thought it was being flippant,
Speaker 2: but uh, you're talking about here talking about the church
Speaker 2: in England and how disgusting it is that it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's it's basically communists, And I'm like, okay, but that
Speaker 2: problem is gonna resolve itself because I'm like, you know,
Speaker 2: and and any church that goes woke, it's to your point,
Speaker 2: it ends up with a congregation of two and both
Speaker 2: of those and those two people are you know, ninety
Speaker 2: eight year old women. You know. I mean like it's
Speaker 2: if you're cat of laying the foundation, if you're on
Speaker 2: an extinction, you know, you know, if you're a quannabot
Speaker 2: church who decides it's gonna be uh, it's it's gonna
Speaker 2: be an instrument to the of the regime.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's like the Chinese, the Chicoms maintain what they call
Speaker 2: the quote Catholic Church, but you basically go in there
Speaker 2: and you know, you're you read like Mao's a little
Speaker 2: Red book and you learn about how like you know,
Speaker 2: Mao like made a bunch of swans up here on
Speaker 2: a mountain, and how like you know, Jesus was actually Chinese.
Speaker 2: And you know, we don't really believe in miracles because
Speaker 2: you know, we know that the cerner of the world
Speaker 2: is China, you know. And it's like, but you want
Speaker 2: to know something like nobody goes to that church. You know.
Speaker 1: It's like well, right, and like if and this is
Speaker 1: one of the I kind of enjoy making fun of
Speaker 1: because it's my area. It's the predominant domination. I think
Speaker 1: Baptists are kind of funny, you know, and they're good people,
Speaker 1: but they are amusing to a certain perspective, right, Like, look,
Speaker 1: I I grew up in the kind of the stomping
Speaker 1: grounds of Jerry Folwell, so he's a funny person, right,
Speaker 1: I can't deny that. But one of the things that
Speaker 1: I always give those type of people credit for is
Speaker 1: that the amount of I guess the amount of support
Speaker 1: those people sent to you know, this really embattered Chinese
Speaker 1: house churches is insane because there is a massive underground
Speaker 1: Christian community there. But it's much more similar to what
Speaker 1: was going on in you know, Eastern Europe in the
Speaker 1: seventies and the sixties. You know. And look, I think
Speaker 1: that Rod Dreer is a goofy guy. He's a nice guy.
Speaker 1: I met him in person, but he is kind of
Speaker 1: a goofy person. But his book Lived Not by Lies,
Speaker 1: which is in Rod Dreer, you know, form a lot
Speaker 1: of it's kind of a waste of time, but he
Speaker 1: goes through and talks to kind of the family of
Speaker 1: you know, iron Curtain Christian dissonance. And it's interesting what
Speaker 1: you said about, you know, these the kind of the
Speaker 1: state churches dying, because all of these areas had state churches.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they were party informants, right, what you said
Speaker 1: in confession meant that the check has showed up and
Speaker 1: you got shot in the back of the head, and
Speaker 1: so those churches died quickly.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, and that's why what's the same thing too,
Speaker 2: And I'm not making light of round the evil stuff.
Speaker 2: But like when all these when when all these freaks
Speaker 2: the last several months have been turning out, you know,
Speaker 2: the protests and in fear of their quote unquote right
Speaker 2: to abortion, Like have you taken a look at these
Speaker 2: freaks lately? Like they're they're disgusting obese like pathetics said,
Speaker 2: like figuratively and literally just like said, people with miserable
Speaker 2: little lives who are basically demanding that the government valid
Speaker 2: you know, the government is their god, you know, is
Speaker 2: they're kind of like rabbinic uh, you know, counsel of
Speaker 2: elders or whatever, and they're they're only moral authority in
Speaker 2: their empowershal Lie, you know, I use determined moral and
Speaker 2: you know we and it loves as possible terms, but
Speaker 2: just conceptually in their mind, that's what it represents. But
Speaker 2: these you know, if if evil people are gonna demand
Speaker 2: the quote right to you know, kill their own children,
Speaker 2: like what do I care? Like, Yeah, that's horrible and
Speaker 2: that's depraved and that's sick that people think that way.
Speaker 2: But if these people want to exterminate themselves, like why
Speaker 2: why do I care? Like they're they're going to hell
Speaker 2: and they're they're evil people, and I mean, they're they're
Speaker 2: not gonna be missed on earth. I mean, I I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't wish for anyone to die or want you know,
Speaker 2: or anything like that. But I the world, this world
Speaker 2: is certainly a better place without them. I mean, I.
Speaker 1: Agree.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not gonna stay and cry about these people
Speaker 2: being like you know, degenerate freaks and want to exterminate themselves.
Speaker 2: Like why do I care? You know, these aren't these
Speaker 2: aren't these aren't my people, and you shouldn't care about
Speaker 2: them like you should. You shouldn't celebrate you know, the
Speaker 2: fact that you know that they're that that they're mired
Speaker 2: and this kind of depravity and that they're miserable and
Speaker 2: that they're doing evil of themselves and others. But I've
Speaker 2: tried to make that point of people before again again, Like,
Speaker 2: people gotta stop thinking this. You live in this You
Speaker 2: literally live in the Empire of the Moor, and you're
Speaker 2: surrounded by You're surrounded by millions of people who are
Speaker 2: just sick and are like literally like in hell, you know,
Speaker 2: some such that such that all can exist, uh, and
Speaker 2: in this plane of existence, you know, you gotta stop
Speaker 2: thinking that that you you I mean in general cologal terms,
Speaker 2: like it's helped people like you got to stop thinking
Speaker 2: about these people was like partisan community that you you
Speaker 2: both particle of, Like these aren't your people, you know,
Speaker 2: they're they're they're an unfortunate kind of obstacle to the
Speaker 2: resolution of a of a of you know, the of
Speaker 2: of the the struggle of reason against unreason and and
Speaker 2: and evil and.
Speaker 1: And are he.
Speaker 2: And you know in a couple of generations will no
Speaker 2: longer exist, you know. Uh, that's the way you got
Speaker 2: to look at it, you know, like why are people
Speaker 2: mostly invested? It's something like there's there's something like literally
Speaker 2: demented lady running around saying that you know, she she
Speaker 2: wants children have sex changes. If there's some there's something
Speaker 2: like pathetic fat guy with kool aid hair or screaming
Speaker 2: that you know, he and some guy he masturbates with
Speaker 2: their quote unquote and married. Like but these again, these
Speaker 2: people are you should look at these people the way
Speaker 2: you do like some homeless crackhead on the subway who's
Speaker 2: like screaming at people like do you are are you?
Speaker 2: Are you really upset that because you'll get that guy's
Speaker 2: like your brother or something and you know, you've you've
Speaker 2: got to bring him the reason. No, you're like that
Speaker 2: poor man's afflicted. You know, I find it offensive that
Speaker 2: he's screaming obscenities at me, But you know, the sooner
Speaker 2: he's kind of put out of his own misery, you
Speaker 2: know by uh, or the sooner you know, becomes the
Speaker 2: reason and comes to price that the better, which are
Speaker 2: either way. But I the last thing I'm gonna do
Speaker 2: is sit around and and expend emotional energy on him
Speaker 2: or think about him, or like lament the fact that
Speaker 2: he's all fucked up because he has nothing to do
Speaker 2: with Right.
Speaker 1: It's interesting you mentioned that I guess the low caliber
Speaker 1: of the opposition because this is something our mutual friend
Speaker 1: Ace and I were discussing, right, which is that, Look,
Speaker 1: say what you will about the Red Army and Lenin.
Speaker 1: They were not good people, but they weren't embarrassing, you know.
Speaker 1: They weren't these kind of profoundly dysfunctional you know, just
Speaker 1: like refuse. You know, they were dangerous people. They were
Speaker 1: serious people. Well, yeah, on one hand, it's comforting, right
Speaker 1: because look, the oppositions they're all morons. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, you're like, well, wait a minute, everyone in
Speaker 1: power is you know, a moron with you know, a
Speaker 1: laundry list of sexual hang ups, right, and.
Speaker 2: And it's like, yeah, there's two different things. They're two different,
Speaker 2: I mean related because they were both aspects of the
Speaker 2: historical process and and they you know, one is the
Speaker 2: progeny of the other in some basic sense because the
Speaker 2: the kind of constellation of historical causes of the one,
Speaker 2: you know, resulted in the other, the other being what
Speaker 2: we're dealing with today. It's your point, you know, the
Speaker 2: threat of the Warsaw Pact, if you want to look
Speaker 2: at it, if you want to look at the war's
Speaker 2: up packed or the greater of two evils after the war, Okay,
Speaker 2: I don't want to get into that's a whole other issue.
Speaker 2: Don't want to get into it. That threat was had
Speaker 2: Moscow and pay Kitting found some way to sustain their
Speaker 2: their their strategic military concord, you know, at least the
Speaker 2: kind of limited interdependence and that kind of absolute cooperation
Speaker 2: on military strategic issues. The threat posed by a state
Speaker 2: like East Germany and the Soviet Union, and you know,
Speaker 2: the People's Republic at China when it was aligned within
Speaker 2: that block, was like quite literally this kind of oriental
Speaker 2: tyranny of Stalinism will conquer the planet and a miracle
Speaker 2: will basically become this kind of garrison state that you know,
Speaker 2: this is essentially this kind of like an island like
Speaker 2: in a planet that has been essentially bolshevi bized, as
Speaker 2: to use the kind of antiquated term that was favored
Speaker 2: in describing this potential future you know, by by people
Speaker 2: like by people like Hitler and Mussolini. That was the threat. Okay,
Speaker 2: the like like you know, post nineteen eighty nine, these
Speaker 2: these like these uh, these people were talking about, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, the people who were the people who post
Speaker 2: like BLM signs of the people who merch in fever.
Speaker 2: You know, they're in fantaside, right, like you know, the
Speaker 2: the kind of creepy, sad guy who's like screaming that
Speaker 2: you know, you accept the fact that he and his
Speaker 2: like male friend masterbat together. Like these people are not
Speaker 2: remotely related to the phenomena I just described. What they
Speaker 2: are is they're this kind of natural slave cast that
Speaker 2: is the favored constituency of the victors of the Cold War. Okay,
Speaker 2: I mean that's what they are. They're they're not they're
Speaker 2: not some physical threat to us. They're not gonna be mobilized.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm obviously being silly, but you know, they're
Speaker 2: not gonna be mobilized an outfit with clash and the
Speaker 2: coughs to conquer our cities. They're the kind of they're
Speaker 2: they're they're the natural slave cast. That is kind of
Speaker 2: the if, if the if the regime had its way,
Speaker 2: that would basically be what the majority consisted of. You know,
Speaker 2: that's kind of really like pathetic human material that's totally mailable.
Speaker 2: Let's you know, functioning on kind of an animal level.
Speaker 2: I mean that you know that that that's not that's
Speaker 2: not that's not just deracinated and you know, it's just
Speaker 2: the people that that have a relations of the history
Speaker 2: and and and have no existence outside of their discrete,
Speaker 2: isolated individual lives, you know, but that are also incapable
Speaker 2: of living historically, like that's what they would ideally want
Speaker 2: to breed. That's kind of the it's kind of the
Speaker 2: gray majority, Okay, I mean, so yeah, those people. I
Speaker 2: don't think it's always the time to sit around cultivating
Speaker 2: bad feelings about people, even if they're disgusting, and even
Speaker 2: if they're you know, entirely deserving a contempt. But that's
Speaker 2: you know, this idea that you know, like those the
Speaker 2: people we have to fight, or alternatively, like like those
Speaker 2: the people we've got to like you know, bring to
Speaker 2: Christ figuratively you're literally or those against the people when
Speaker 2: need you know, like see from themselves, Like that's that's nonsense.
Speaker 2: They're they're they're speed bump or they're like a pilot
Speaker 2: dog craft that you've got to step around or dispose of,
Speaker 2: you know, as you walk to or as you run,
Speaker 2: you know, to catch your train in the city of
Speaker 2: your thing. Like I I'm sure people are gonna say
Speaker 2: mean things about me and say you're gonna leave a
Speaker 2: snow why you're so great? Look fuck you, I'm not
Speaker 2: so great. That's not the point, you know. The The
Speaker 2: point is that, by any metric, these people were talking
Speaker 2: about are natural sleeves, like natural slaves do exist. This
Speaker 2: isn't something aristyle is made up. This isn't something that
Speaker 2: you know, self styled, you know, like herbs and watch
Speaker 2: any movies you know, did declare people to be like they?
Speaker 2: They really do exist. And you don't believe me. I
Speaker 2: refer you to exhibit a and that is this population
Speaker 2: I just described and you just describe. Okay, so they
Speaker 2: know these people these people feature way too much and
Speaker 2: and and kind of the contemplation of people on our side.
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to be some finger wagging jag Offer
Speaker 2: suggest I'm kind of the conceptual dt or of what
Speaker 2: people should focus on. What I think this is. I
Speaker 2: this isn't just my, This isn't just my, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of eccentric take on something. It's it's it's it's
Speaker 2: actually important, like funny and silly as we may be,
Speaker 2: you know, cracking wise about it.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious. Right. One of the one of the
Speaker 1: common themes you hear on our side of things, right,
Speaker 1: is that whatever you want to call the thing, we're
Speaker 1: up again, it's not what you describe, which is like
Speaker 1: the kind of the London proletariat, but like the actual force,
Speaker 1: you know, if you want to call it, you know,
Speaker 1: progressive universalism, whatever, whatever that is the pause. But some
Speaker 1: people say, like, oh, well, that's that's kind of a
Speaker 1: Protestant Christian heresy, right, that that kind of took some
Speaker 1: of the premises of Protestantism and kind of corrupted it.
Speaker 1: Do you do you agree with that analysis.
Speaker 2: No, that's nonsense. And none of these people, none of
Speaker 2: these people have read the Institutes to Christian Religion by Calvin.
Speaker 2: None of these people have read Martin Luther. Martin Luther
Speaker 2: is definitely I mean Martin Lutheranism is its own thing.
Speaker 2: I consider Lutheranism to be more I'm not putting shade
Speaker 2: on it. I've got a lot of respect for them,
Speaker 2: but I it's not the same thing as Bible Prostenism.
Speaker 2: I look at luther is more in the in the
Speaker 2: tradition of meister Eckert and the kind of German mystics
Speaker 2: than I do a than I do in the tradition
Speaker 2: of Bible Protestantism. Like people say that they're just that's
Speaker 2: like a lazy thing that a lot of a lot
Speaker 2: of people have glombed onto. It's gonna like get half
Speaker 2: understood part of it. Stead people like e Michael Jones,
Speaker 2: and I got a lot of respect for Jonason. He's
Speaker 2: a great guy and he's doing God's work. But like
Speaker 2: a lot of like a lot of like a lot
Speaker 2: of pious Catholics, he's got a prejudice against people like me,
Speaker 2: not in personal terms, but he's got a prejudice against
Speaker 2: against UH, against our faith and our dominational heritage. So
Speaker 2: like people read that and they they they developed this
Speaker 2: kind of half digested like big get the idea, like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's them Protestants. They're they're they're like Jews, and they're
Speaker 2: doing all this stuff to us. It's it's it's fucking stupid.
Speaker 2: And you know, it's like if I go, if I go,
Speaker 2: like I'm a Bible Protestant, that means that the Bible
Speaker 2: is literally the word of God, and the Bible is
Speaker 2: from where we you know, derive, Uh, how how we
Speaker 2: kind of know the mind of God? Like what in
Speaker 2: the Bible says it's okay to be woke? You know,
Speaker 2: like how how does that work? You know It's like
Speaker 2: walk into some like Methodist concregation and there's some like
Speaker 2: leady pastor there saying that, like you know, it's you
Speaker 2: know that like men should calle marry men. It's like,
Speaker 2: what's more likely that you know this lady, he's like
Speaker 2: some some creepy free who you know is is is
Speaker 2: kind of doing the same UH is engaged in the
Speaker 2: same kind of endeavor as you know, the the Chinese
Speaker 2: Communist functionaries. You know, passing off MAO with Jesus. Is
Speaker 2: it more likely she's doing that? Is it more likely
Speaker 2: that you know, actually, protimism is about you know, turning
Speaker 2: people gay under you know, because we're secretly Jewish and
Speaker 2: you know, even though like you don't see that, it's
Speaker 2: just like what we do behind closed door or like
Speaker 2: people the There's this also this idea that quote unquote
Speaker 2: you know capitalism is a is uh is a Calvinist contrivance,
Speaker 2: so that capitalism ruins everything, Like that's actually a comedy take.
Speaker 2: And this idea, you know, the relationship of Calvinism the
Speaker 2: you know, the idea is that you know, uh, they're
Speaker 2: the uh like like work and productive work, uh, you
Speaker 2: know being what is uh what you know what those
Speaker 2: who are you know, uh enjoy the grace in favor
Speaker 2: of God are inclined towards that. It's not some like
Speaker 2: oppressor idea that's not like jew you know what's Jewish
Speaker 2: is usury and uh. And there's there's few things, uh,
Speaker 2: there's there's there's a few things more literally anti Christ
Speaker 2: than usery. And what people are talking about when they
Speaker 2: invoke the man of quote capitalism is they're talking about usury.
Speaker 2: You know, to your point about the language being important
Speaker 2: and people not being lazy with it, that's another that
Speaker 2: that's actual another perfect example, like I'm conzant coming down
Speaker 2: not just on uh, you know, people that we talked
Speaker 2: on conversational terms, but academics like Meerscheimer, who damn will
Speaker 2: know better. I'm consantly telling people to stop using the
Speaker 2: term coote democracy except in nineteen eighty nine is literally
Speaker 2: a meaningless term. It's uh, it's it's a floating signifier
Speaker 2: that official that uses to mean literally good gualism.
Speaker 1: Well, right, and that's that's one of my favorite bold
Speaker 1: got free insights, you know, is yeah, his book on fascism,
Speaker 1: which he essentially has an essay where he says, look,
Speaker 1: if you if you substitute the word fascism for very
Speaker 1: bad and democracy for very good, yeah, it really means
Speaker 1: the same.
Speaker 2: Thing exactly, double plus goodism. Okay. So similarly, capitalism, if
Speaker 2: you go around saying capitalism when you really mean usury, uh,
Speaker 2: you're not only is that kind of obnoxious, because frankly,
Speaker 2: that's what that's a half educated Marxists used to used
Speaker 2: to do when you know, thirty five years ago, but
Speaker 2: it's also there's there's not you know, if you actually
Speaker 2: read scripture and if you actually understand that Christian faith,
Speaker 2: and if you actually understand Calvinism, you know there's not
Speaker 2: there's not something bad about money? Is that something dirty
Speaker 2: about wanting to profit from your labor? What the reason why,
Speaker 2: the reason why usury is uh is a gross affront
Speaker 2: to God. If you have a usury doesn't anything to
Speaker 2: do with a labor, you know, it doesn't have to
Speaker 2: do with you know, where you bring the fruits of
Speaker 2: labor is not to do with It has nothing to
Speaker 2: do with profit, which can then be utilized for the
Speaker 2: common good or uh you know, or for a or
Speaker 2: for the or for the or or for the benefit
Speaker 2: of the labor. You know, like what usery is it's
Speaker 2: quite literally trying to extract late profit from something sterile,
Speaker 2: you know, which is money. You know, like essentially you know,
Speaker 2: conning people to multiply money is is has nothing to
Speaker 2: do with work, has nothing to do with you know,
Speaker 2: it has nothing to do with uh, with justice in
Speaker 2: social terms, you know, it's it has nothing to do
Speaker 2: with uh. It has nothing to do with you know,
Speaker 2: actual prosperity, and you know, providing sustenance to uh to
Speaker 2: the conreation. You know. So it's this idea, this idea
Speaker 2: that on you know, that there's something that there's something
Speaker 2: quote unquote Jewish, that there's something you know, like dirty,
Speaker 2: you're like un Christian about you know, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: an emphasis on uh on work ethic and and uh
Speaker 2: and success. I mean that's that that's a loser mentality
Speaker 2: among other things. And and like I said, like none
Speaker 2: of these freaking people who go around claiming that like
Speaker 2: my heritage is you know, Jewish or woke, like none
Speaker 2: them can explain why. And it's like, you know, for
Speaker 2: better or worse. And you know, like I want to
Speaker 2: eat yours of Sunday School where and all you as
Speaker 2: you know, all you do in Calvin is Sunday School
Speaker 2: is read the Bible. Like I guarantee you that I
Speaker 2: know more about the Bible. I know more about Scripture
Speaker 2: than some dude who like converted to Catholicism last year
Speaker 2: has decided that I'm Jewish and I'm because like I
Speaker 2: read the Bible instead of you know, wait.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's dumb, it's it's low IQ. It's interesting
Speaker 1: that you you you bring up kind of.
Speaker 2: The yeah, yeah, I mean the point of people too,
Speaker 2: like say making that point the same thing as it's
Speaker 2: like saying that, like saying like, you know, and I've
Speaker 2: also people see like well, Kellen is bullshit because it
Speaker 2: means anybody can see the Bible means anything. I'm like, no, man,
Speaker 2: it doesn't, okay, Like the Bible actually doesn't mean something.
Speaker 2: You know, the fact that like the had some crazy
Speaker 2: Jewish guy or some crazy Marxists can claim like you know, oh, game,
Speaker 2: rriage is fine, you know according to the Gospels. That's
Speaker 2: like saying that, like, oh, actually, you know, you have
Speaker 2: a right to abortion according to the Fourth Amendment. You know,
Speaker 2: it's not really about search and seizure and you know
Speaker 2: privacy that a cruise you know in the in within
Speaker 2: the in the in the body of the person and
Speaker 2: there and and their effects. It actually has to do
Speaker 2: with you know, a woman's you know, pnumbric right, the
Speaker 2: privacy which leads to abortions. Like the fact that people
Speaker 2: are capable of saying things like they have they have
Speaker 2: no you know, in rationalizing them under a under there's
Speaker 2: a constitutional legitimacy or scriptual authority, like doesn't somehow mean
Speaker 2: like intrinsics. The US Constitution is, you know, a right
Speaker 2: to abortion, so like we need the pope to you know,
Speaker 2: interpret this force that doesn't happen Like that's ridiculous. I'm
Speaker 2: not saying most Catolets think that way, because they don't.
Speaker 2: But yeah, the kind of the kind of basic bitches
Speaker 2: who go on claiming that you know, Calvinists or you know,
Speaker 2: wolf like that, that's that's that's literally like the kind
Speaker 2: of ship that they're proceeding on.
Speaker 1: Well, it's it's a very it's a really basic intellectual
Speaker 1: mistake that you see everywhere, which is someone turned a
Speaker 1: good thing into a bad thing, therefore the original thing
Speaker 1: is bad. It's stupid, right, Like you you could see
Speaker 1: almost anything that has been corrupted and just by nature
Speaker 1: of being corrupted, you know, or a version existing rather
Speaker 1: does not mean that the original thing was not good
Speaker 1: to begin with. It's stupid.
Speaker 2: Well, it's also if you really want to, if you
Speaker 2: want to deep dive into I'm a I'm a right Hegelian. Frankly,
Speaker 2: so I don't. I don't approach things in these terms,
Speaker 2: But if you want to deep dive into into what
Speaker 2: the kind of orientation of was of these Enlightenment progressive types,
Speaker 2: and they're talking about Bentham when you're talking about Thomas Jefferson.
Speaker 2: But Frank was a Jacob and so it's crazy to
Speaker 2: me all these white nationalists think they've loved Thomas Jefferson. Okay,
Speaker 2: but it's uh, you know, if you want to know
Speaker 2: what if if you want to know what these guys
Speaker 2: were up with, like a lot of these Freemason types,
Speaker 2: if you want to know like what they were up on.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm saying like them in addition to the
Speaker 2: people I just mentioned, Uh, they had really weird like
Speaker 2: rosic Crucians. You know, they were big into that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff. You know, they like Newton into like something Jones,
Speaker 2: Michael Jones deep dives into. There's like this really really
Speaker 2: weird uh Like Newton was like he was fixated on
Speaker 2: like rebutting a bunch of a bunch of Platonic and
Speaker 2: and and also Recitilian concepts. That's not just that, that's
Speaker 2: not just some kind of like weird uh like strausy
Speaker 2: and conceited about you know, like Exegesus from you know,
Speaker 2: Newton or something like that. Like he really wasn't dialogue
Speaker 2: with with uh with uh with both the you know,
Speaker 2: the Roman Church scholastics you know as well as uh,
Speaker 2: you know as well as as well as well as
Speaker 2: Plato and uh and Aristotle, you know, and trying to
Speaker 2: and trying to kind of like rebut you know, like
Speaker 2: the foundations of uh of of the Western cannon that
Speaker 2: it preceded, uh, you know, the scientific revolution, which he
Speaker 2: considered himself to be a stride. You know, they said
Speaker 2: these guys were not reliant, they weren't like reading scripture
Speaker 2: and and and trying to tease out these kinds of
Speaker 2: destructive like radical uh radical premises you know, correctly or not,
Speaker 2: you know, from the from the letter of of the Bible.
Speaker 2: Like that's not that was not what their orientation was,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean, like I said, I think that
Speaker 2: kind of stuffs overstated. Anyway, there's apocal forces that uh
Speaker 2: that that gave rise to these these disruptions of a
Speaker 2: political and social sociological nature. And uh, the non Jewish
Speaker 2: partisans of these ideas and values and the kind of
Speaker 2: revolutionary sentiments they were basically animated by by historical perspectives
Speaker 2: that tended to profit them in their class. And some
Speaker 2: of them were just taken in by Hubrists weren't particularly
Speaker 2: committed to anything, and you know, they they they they
Speaker 2: kind of wanted to insane with themselves as a new
Speaker 2: priestly cast. And it's on common cause, frank me, more
Speaker 2: often than not with Jews, because Jews were in the
Speaker 2: odds with the ancient regime. Anyway, that's a better way
Speaker 2: to understand it. But even if your orientation is you know,
Speaker 2: you want to look at kind of what the what,
Speaker 2: what the get, what the source materials were or what,
Speaker 2: or kind of guiding velosities work of these people. You know,
Speaker 2: like I said, you're you're not You're not talking about
Speaker 2: You're not talking about Bible, progenism, you're not talking about
Speaker 2: the King James Bible. You're not. That's now they were
Speaker 2: relying upon. You know, it's it's it's really trimpha. It's
Speaker 2: really weird stuff. You know, Like even even those concepts,
Speaker 2: I mean, speaking again in a language, no concept of
Speaker 2: the quote enlightenment is strange, you know, like like look
Speaker 2: at how that's characterized like that, Like like the Middle Age.
Speaker 2: I don't like the linear you know, and I don't
Speaker 2: like the linear paradise history of each of medieval modern
Speaker 2: But you know, calling the evil period the quote Dark Ages,
Speaker 2: and then suddenly you know there you know then but
Speaker 2: then abruptly, like the light of reason, you know, it's
Speaker 2: cast upon the world, and and you know there's this
Speaker 2: this this handful of of god like men, you know,
Speaker 2: where it's words bearers. Like that's that's bizarre, and that's
Speaker 2: that's ridiculous. I mean, that's that's not that's that's not
Speaker 2: a that's not a history develops. That's not an idea
Speaker 2: is developed, well, right.
Speaker 1: And it's it's interesting because it's there are certain ideas
Speaker 1: that I've like people reiterate without realizing what they're affirming,
Speaker 1: you know what, And that idea of the Enlightenment is
Speaker 1: kind of a you're kind of reifying your enemy's premise
Speaker 1: in a way. Right, But if you look at the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, right, like obviously, like especially post the clots
Speaker 1: of the Roman Empire, there was to a certain extent
Speaker 1: a civilization will collapse, Right, that happened. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to deny that. But the idea that the next thousand
Speaker 1: years were just horrible, grinding misery for everyone is absurd. Like,
Speaker 1: don't get me wrong, Like I prefer to live in
Speaker 1: my comfortable air conditioned department then you know, a mudshack
Speaker 1: in the middle of Saxony. But that said, like, we
Speaker 1: are living in a dramatic deviation from the historical norm.
Speaker 1: And realistically, for the most of the people living through
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages, their standard of life was essentially the same,
Speaker 1: in many cases better because I mean, if you're a
Speaker 1: barbarian chieftain, you know, we're living under a barbarian chieftain
Speaker 1: in the woods, you know, Upper Germany. All all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you have a baron and all not all
Speaker 1: of a sudden. You know, I'm being flippant, right, but
Speaker 1: once you have a baron, your level of you know,
Speaker 1: civilizational and organizational structure goes up dramatically.
Speaker 2: Well, look at it like this too. Look at like
Speaker 2: you know what's called the quote, you know, Dark Ages.
Speaker 2: To your point, that literally spans a thousand years. Okay,
Speaker 2: Like think about think about a thousand years prior to
Speaker 2: this moment right now, like one thousand eight. What the
Speaker 2: fuck does like one hundred you know, it's like eleven
Speaker 2: hundred eed have in common with twenty twenty two. That
Speaker 2: is totally insane to get here. This is part of
Speaker 2: a common epoch, you know, it's like you're talking about
Speaker 2: seven hundred a D and thirteen hundred a D like
Speaker 2: where there's all these common features. You know, it was
Speaker 2: part of the same kind of like political or historical
Speaker 2: or sociological epoch like that's that's ridiculous. Like I realized
Speaker 2: that there was the scientific revolution was a real thing,
Speaker 2: that that's not some enlightenment myth. And I realized that
Speaker 2: there was punctuated there was a punt. There's a punctuatey
Speaker 2: of equilibrium to technological innovation. Okay that and Trumpeter made
Speaker 2: that point again and again, and you've got to understand
Speaker 2: that if you don't understand his entire paradigm of business cycles,
Speaker 2: among other things. But so I realized that things, you know, uh,
Speaker 2: living NaN's condition is relationship to his environment, like leap
Speaker 2: fraud in ways that were not well precedented in the
Speaker 2: last two hundred years. Yeah, two to three hundred years, Okay,
Speaker 2: But at the same time, it's still absurd the claim
Speaker 2: that you know, an eight hundred year an arbitrarily uh
Speaker 2: uh kind of corralled like eight hundred year period of
Speaker 2: time just just represented you know, some kind of like
Speaker 2: you like to your point, you know, some some kind
Speaker 2: of some kind of endless phase of grinding misery, you know.
Speaker 2: And it's like I don't ask people before like what
Speaker 2: what incredible thing? Like if you're if you if you
Speaker 2: live in uh like if you went in Terry Hood,
Speaker 2: Indiana and you're like some just kind of run of
Speaker 2: the mill, like a lormo class guy who like works
Speaker 2: at a Target or a Walmart. You know, he goes
Speaker 2: someone and plays video games and stuff and like eats
Speaker 2: bad food. Like what like like what awesome things is
Speaker 2: he up on?
Speaker 1: That?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Like a peasant in fourteen hundred AD like Romania
Speaker 2: like wasn't up on Like I don't get it, you know.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, okay, this, I mean it's good. You
Speaker 2: won't die in smallpox anymore, I guess, but you may
Speaker 2: bee well like Odie on fentanyl. I'm not I'm not
Speaker 2: even a line of that, but right, right, but yeah,
Speaker 2: you may have avellop diabetes and and have a shitty
Speaker 2: you know, like kind of last phase of your life.
Speaker 2: But like other other than some of these kuys of
Speaker 2: diseases owing to poor sanitation at the macro level, like
Speaker 2: what like like what what awesome stuff is? Like? Walmart? Man?
Speaker 2: Like doing that like peasant man like wasn't doing I Like,
Speaker 2: I honestly don't. I'm not just being flippant or or
Speaker 2: maye a plentable point, like I honestly don't get it well.
Speaker 1: And this goes back to your point about kind of
Speaker 1: the natural natural slave cast. Yeah, he's a good friend
Speaker 1: of mine, my mentor. He goes by George Bagby in
Speaker 1: these circles. He's a really interesting guy, part of the
Speaker 1: reason I'm you know, here intellectually at all. But he
Speaker 1: ended up getting doxed and fired for you know, being
Speaker 1: connected to Abbeyville and a few other institutions on our
Speaker 1: side of things. So my friends and I all, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of banded together. We're going to help this guy out,
Speaker 1: and we helped him move down to the middle of nowhere, Louisiana.
Speaker 1: And when you go through the middle of nowhere Louisiana,
Speaker 1: this is not where he lives, but it's a town,
Speaker 1: you know, within a fifty mile radio so I'm not
Speaker 1: dosing it. But there's this place called Donaldville, Louisiana, and
Speaker 1: all of the all of the houses that are old
Speaker 1: enough to have survived Katrina essentially have been there for
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty years. Right, it's how Louisiana works,
Speaker 1: you know, if it's if it's if it's sturdy enough
Speaker 1: to last one hurricane, it's can generally make most of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but but you look at the descendants of sharecroppers, right,
Speaker 1: who were essentially freed slaves. Yeah, and they're living in
Speaker 1: worse conditions to the ones they would have been living,
Speaker 1: you know, as essentially chattel. Right, the same it's the
Speaker 1: same house hasn't been it hasn't been repaired, it's horribly maintained.
Speaker 1: If it has power, it's only barely and off and on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you're like, well, look like my point is not
Speaker 1: you know, therefore I would volunteer to be first one
Speaker 1: in line to slap my hands in irons. Right. But
Speaker 1: you do look at it and you're like, well, maybe
Speaker 1: the idea that what people really need is this kind
Speaker 1: of like nebulous power to self define, you know, that oh,
Speaker 1: we we're better now because we can choose our own
Speaker 1: you know, path through life. Like to me, that seems
Speaker 1: to be very manifestly alive, you know, And.
Speaker 2: So it's particularly as citious. And I made this point before,
Speaker 2: and this is kind of in my face every day
Speaker 2: because like where I live and the demographics and some
Speaker 2: of the things that are footier. I'm not making a
Speaker 2: judgment about what I'm not sitting here. I'm not gonna
Speaker 2: I'm not qualified about to say. But I think I'm
Speaker 2: not saying that like the black race is some victim
Speaker 2: cast or anything like that. But you know, the the
Speaker 2: regime has a credibility to claim to to devoke these
Speaker 2: myths because it proceeded after the Civil Rights Revolution failed,
Speaker 2: or after after you know, turning uh, you know, turning turning,
Speaker 2: you know ethnically you know, breaking up white uh, breaking
Speaker 2: up uh, you know, ethnically cleansing uh, white parish communities,
Speaker 2: you know, by using blacks of their proxy warriors. After
Speaker 2: after blacks no longer useful, the regime locked them all
Speaker 2: in prison. I mean, so it's like, like I'm not
Speaker 2: saying that some conspiracy as blacks, but it's like you
Speaker 2: can't claim it like blacks are better off in prison
Speaker 2: than as slatens, you know, Like it's not so, I mean,
Speaker 2: it's like it's even more punctual. Yeah, your point is
Speaker 2: absolutely correct too. Like a lot of people in modernity,
Speaker 2: their lives are not any better and arguably or worse
Speaker 2: than that of you know, agreeing slaves. But like the
Speaker 2: regime literally took these people where the descendants of those slaves,
Speaker 2: you know, locked them in prison like literally and then
Speaker 2: says like, yeah, slavery was the greatest human evil ever
Speaker 2: to occur, and now these people are free, Like that's
Speaker 2: that's literally at odds with the reality, you know, like
Speaker 2: it's it's it'd be one thing if uh, if the
Speaker 2: relations to a blash the regime was not pathologically dysfunctional
Speaker 2: or if uh, you know, blacks were basically out of
Speaker 2: sight and kind of like living like reservation Indians and
Speaker 2: you know, however, like this functional led me be but
Speaker 2: you know, but the fact of the matter is it's
Speaker 2: like literally what I said, and uh, I don't get
Speaker 2: it's something like big discussion like what the cause of
Speaker 2: that are And again I'm not I'm not saying as
Speaker 2: some like conspiracy or quote racism, which is a meaningless
Speaker 2: term anyway. But you can't. You can't. You can't. You
Speaker 2: can't look at the population that you've you've locked in
Speaker 2: prison and claim that they're now better off because you know,
Speaker 2: their status as slaves has been abolished by constitutional amendments.
Speaker 2: And plus it's folksing on slavery is a gross moral evil,
Speaker 2: that's totally arbitrary. That makes some civilization five years and
Speaker 2: the few future declaring that, you know, twentieth century France
Speaker 2: was the most evil country ever. They had abortion on demand.
Speaker 2: Like abortion, to me, it is terrible. But that's that's
Speaker 2: an arbitrary, like singular thing to focus on. It's like
Speaker 2: why is why is slavery the worst thing ever? Yeah,
Speaker 2: they're like why, you know, I'm gonna explain.
Speaker 1: It's a relative human constant. And look like you and
Speaker 1: I have a have a pretty deep understanding of human depravity. Right,
Speaker 1: just because people do it doesn't mean it's okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it is. It is an odd It is an
Speaker 1: odd variable to choose to match the point of your society.
Speaker 1: And the thing I always think about, right is like, look,
Speaker 1: I'm not a medievalist, but if you look at the
Speaker 1: amount of protections the medieval peasant had, you know, it's
Speaker 1: kind of it's kind of absurd, right, the amount of
Speaker 1: mandatory feast days, the amount of time essentially off they had,
Speaker 1: you know, and you look at that, and not only
Speaker 1: the fact that like well, you don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about a job. You know, no, no lord is going
Speaker 1: to kick you off your land. You know when that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that your life is perfect by any means, right,
Speaker 1: Like it was a it was a harsh existence. But
Speaker 1: this idea that you know, that this is the exact
Speaker 1: perfect way to run to run a society is just absurd,
Speaker 1: you know, No.
Speaker 2: It's crazy. And it's also it's it's it's anti human
Speaker 2: Like I I at the point of people, I mean,
Speaker 2: just one of these things about the like the COVID nonsense.
Speaker 2: It was. I didn't think things about it, including that
Speaker 2: it was you know this, I mean it was a
Speaker 2: case of like totally bizarre mass hysteria over you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, and and it is it was a fun
Speaker 2: example of of of of of the regime you know,
Speaker 2: owing to it's it's you know, it's it's mouf owing
Speaker 2: to its obsolescence. That's you know, since nineteen eighty since
Speaker 2: you know, November nineth, nineteen eighty nine. You know, it's
Speaker 2: it's constantly trying to confabulate some raison detra for it
Speaker 2: for it's to continue to exist. But beside all of that,
Speaker 2: I was, like I was fascinated that, like the kind
Speaker 2: of the normies. It took that from the realize that
Speaker 2: it doesn't make any sense from the like send their
Speaker 2: kid to public school. It's like, so you're going to
Speaker 2: force your kid to go to a building for eight
Speaker 2: hours with these weird you know, like mediocre, kind of
Speaker 2: troubled people who you find, you know, working as public
Speaker 2: school teachers like have have like for them to do
Speaker 2: math problems over and over? Why like what would that accomplish?
Speaker 2: Like even I mean even like like even if even
Speaker 2: if I accept the premise that like, you know, children
Speaker 2: need some sort of some sort of training to do things,
Speaker 2: which I don't think makes a lot of sense either frankly,
Speaker 2: like just in general terms. But it's like, what was
Speaker 2: that college by the idea that this is like something
Speaker 2: that like that that's naturally like benefitial the children to
Speaker 2: force them to sit in a room for eight hours
Speaker 2: or in a series of rooms, like doing busy work
Speaker 2: over and over, Like why what could then possibly accomplish? Well?
Speaker 1: Right, And like you could at least see the argument
Speaker 1: if well, we were you know, we had flying cars,
Speaker 1: and you know, we were one step away from the travel, right,
Speaker 1: Like if we lived in the Justins world. It's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well it's weird, but at least it's working. But I
Speaker 1: think you have to be a truly singularly delusional person
Speaker 1: to look at American public education say that seems to
Speaker 1: be working perfectly right.
Speaker 2: No, exactly, and it's like, uh, it's it's just like
Speaker 2: it's just really strange. You know, it's just strange of
Speaker 2: people can't put these things together and realize that, you know,
Speaker 2: not only were a lot of these things pointless from inception,
Speaker 2: but it's also the you know, America really is, Uh,
Speaker 2: there's these obsolete You're surrounded by obsolescent structures, Like the
Speaker 2: entire regime itself is obsolescents. Like that's what's interesting. Like
Speaker 2: it I if you if you look at a regime
Speaker 2: like Russia or like China or like Turkey, like those
Speaker 2: regimes are all screwed up, and those aren't particularly nice
Speaker 2: places to live, and there's like all kinds of corruption
Speaker 2: to those systems. But they're they're they're actually like more
Speaker 2: kind of they were they more reflect the twenty first
Speaker 2: century in a lot of ways than America does, like
Speaker 2: in terms of I'm not talking like culturally or something
Speaker 2: here in terms of technological development, although America is very
Speaker 2: much slipping in that regard to But what I mean
Speaker 2: is it like America America is gonna for America's just
Speaker 2: forever pretending it's the twentieth century, and and and and
Speaker 2: these these institutions that are tailored to fight the Cold
Speaker 2: War just must exist in perpetuity. Like do you realize that,
Speaker 2: like America, America's largest quote NATO ally is Turkey, and
Speaker 2: America is fighting a proxy shooting war against Turkey right
Speaker 2: now while they say I'm claiming NATO exists.
Speaker 1: Right, it's a it's a it's vestigial. Is too kind
Speaker 1: of work?
Speaker 2: Right? I mean, should should America attack itself? Because Turkey
Speaker 2: is at work with America and it's obligated by the
Speaker 2: NATO charter to like attack people, to attack Turkey? I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, it's like the like you know, and people
Speaker 2: think I The kind of pitfall of his Storian is
Speaker 2: that he tends to he can develop tunnel vision about
Speaker 2: the institutions as well as the epoch that is kind
Speaker 2: of the subject of his focus. People periodically accuse me
Speaker 2: of having Cold War on the brain. I don't think
Speaker 2: I do. But even if I did. The point is
Speaker 2: it's you know, national governments, aren't you know, modern state garments.
Speaker 2: I'm talking post West failure state garments. They're not. They're
Speaker 2: not capable of doing much, and they're not tailored to
Speaker 2: do much. Like what they're there to do is basically
Speaker 2: to wage war against other regimes that are structured like
Speaker 2: they are. You know, it's not it's not this thing
Speaker 2: that you know, it's tailored to you know, colonized space
Speaker 2: and you know, make children smarter, and you know, to
Speaker 2: help men and women get along better and you know,
Speaker 2: like like we're like solve people's medical problems. And like
Speaker 2: the fact that people would think it is is really
Speaker 2: really strange. And as structured the US regime, which is basically,
Speaker 2: you know that the New Deal regime, because that's that's
Speaker 2: when this whole restructuring was was implemented. Okay, it's it's
Speaker 2: it's everything about it is tailored to wage a major war.
Speaker 2: And that's it. And after you know, after the after
Speaker 2: the early fifties, it became structured very much to wage
Speaker 2: it general nuclear war. And what we're doing right now
Speaker 2: is on the talking on the internet, we're talking over
Speaker 2: what was developed as a secondary commanding control mechanism that
Speaker 2: can survive after a first strike. That's why it exists, okay,
Speaker 2: and that they can't be denied. Okay, Like it's not
Speaker 2: it's not it's not me just you know, kind of uh,
Speaker 2: but I'm getting old and cantankerous and inflexible in my
Speaker 2: thought or something, just you know, kind of kind of
Speaker 2: trying to pigeonhole all phenomenon that is under discussion into
Speaker 2: this kind of paradigm that I I'm fixated on.
Speaker 1: But no, no, that's that's insightful, man. And again I
Speaker 1: don't want to keep you too long. You've you've already talked.
Speaker 2: Open a matic is frankly, like, I gotta I don't
Speaker 2: mean to sound like an old I don't mean to
Speaker 2: sound like an old woman, but I don't know that pain.
Speaker 2: I kind of got to let myself get out of
Speaker 2: the seated position.
Speaker 1: But yeah, well we'll sure thing.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: So if you could just get your plugs out of
Speaker 1: the way and then I'll let you go.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, this was great and we can we
Speaker 2: can do this again next week, but week after if
Speaker 2: you want to, like, don't be noneadays to reach out
Speaker 2: and you should join me in ace when we go
Speaker 2: live sometime two. I mean, just don't be shy about
Speaker 2: insinuating your solveny such things. You know, it's it wouldn't
Speaker 2: be opportunity for you to be so. But yeah, you
Speaker 2: can find I'm a my uh. I've got a science
Speaker 2: fiction brand called steel Storm. The I published the Imperium Press,
Speaker 2: which are great guys, and they're a great brand. You
Speaker 2: should check out their entire catalog. But the sequel to
Speaker 2: my first book, steel Storm, is dropping eminently. I behoove
Speaker 2: you to buy it through Imperium Press because they're dear
Speaker 2: friends of mine and friends of ours, you know, and
Speaker 2: they're they're very much alignment our cause. You can find
Speaker 2: me on a telegram. Telegram has been blowing up. We've
Speaker 2: got a really great community there and it's a great
Speaker 2: place to get you know, real news and and and
Speaker 2: real kind of takes, not just on what's underway in
Speaker 2: our circles, but you know, just generally there's this there's
Speaker 2: if you can find me there at t dot ne
Speaker 2: E slash the th h E number seven h m
Speaker 2: A S seven seven seven. You can find me on gap.
Speaker 2: I can know that against a gap, But I am
Speaker 2: not super up on like that, you know, social media
Speaker 2: and short form blogging, but gab is basically a mirror
Speaker 2: of what I post on my substick and on Telegram.
Speaker 2: You can find me there at Real Thomas seven seven seven.
Speaker 2: You can find me on substack, which is on my podcast.
Speaker 2: It is where my long form is. It's only five
Speaker 2: dollars a month to join. You can afford that unless
Speaker 2: you're a hobo. I behoove, but about half the content
Speaker 2: theorist only free. It's real Thomas seven seven seven dot
Speaker 2: substack dot com and that is how you can find me.
Speaker 2: And don't odate to reach out on any of these
Speaker 2: platforms if you want to talk to me direct.
Speaker 1: I'm very brief, Thomas. Welcome back to the Jay Burden Show.
Speaker 1: How are you doing?
Speaker 2: Very good? Thank you man, I appreciate Uh, I'm a
Speaker 2: I'm very I'm very blessed and honored. Did you invited
Speaker 2: me back? Well? Thanks man.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed it a lot, likewile continuing my theme
Speaker 1: of asking you the questions I feel like no one
Speaker 1: else has right, like look, I'm not a historian, and
Speaker 1: I enjoy your work on you know, revisionist topics, but
Speaker 1: there's only so much I can really add to that discussion.
Speaker 1: But I want to talk with you about about the
Speaker 1: other thing you're kind of notable for or known for
Speaker 1: in these circles, which is, uh, which is your sci fi.
Speaker 1: So if you could just give a general introduction to
Speaker 1: steel Storm and kind of I guess if you could
Speaker 1: like explain your relationship with science fiction.
Speaker 2: Certainly steel Storm to me. I mean, I in order
Speaker 2: to in order to explain what it's kind of it's
Speaker 2: it's creative origins, I sort of, you know, got to
Speaker 2: delve into what what what sci fi represents to me
Speaker 2: and always represented, you know, I became what I became
Speaker 2: old enough to perceive such things. Science fiction was very
Speaker 2: much bound up with the twentieth century, Okay, Uh, I
Speaker 2: mean there was still science fiction written the day. I mean,
Speaker 2: I am a contemporary science fiction writer, but I I
Speaker 2: I'm the framing device of of the the universe I
Speaker 2: created is uh the twentieth century and specifically you know,
Speaker 2: the uh, the strategic nuclear paradigm of the twentieth century.
Speaker 2: And that's really what allowed science fiction to come into
Speaker 2: its own as a genre, because there was a way
Speaker 2: in which people could discuss, you know, UH questions of theology,
Speaker 2: questions of ethics, particularly as related to war and peace questions.
Speaker 2: You know, topics like artificial intelligence could.
Speaker 1: Be explored.
Speaker 2: When there were limited mediums wherein these things could be discussed.
Speaker 2: You know, it's a way uh people had an interest
Speaker 2: in kind of speculative futurist topics as well as people
Speaker 2: who had an interest in in uh in in deep
Speaker 2: uh in deep theories of military science and and political theory.
Speaker 2: You know, they could explore these ideas with the kind
Speaker 2: of alibi that they were just writing stories. But also uh,
Speaker 2: you know, aside from kind of uh you know, of
Speaker 2: avoiding uh the wrath of the sensors, uh, figuratively and literally,
Speaker 2: you know, the way to present ideas. You know, a
Speaker 2: lot of a lot of a lot of intelligent lay people,
Speaker 2: you know less so today, but you know, the this
Speaker 2: tendency remains unfortunately that they're just not exposed, you know,
Speaker 2: to a lot of a lot of complex theoretical ideas,
Speaker 2: you know, particularly as relates particularly as relates to you know,
Speaker 2: the power political questions, but also technology, you know, and
Speaker 2: and where these where these things intersect, there really is
Speaker 2: like a dearth of public discussion on on on these matters.
Speaker 2: Even when America had a more normal regime. Uh that
Speaker 2: that that that kind of managed its its public uh theureocracy.
Speaker 2: This kind of thing just wasn't really addressed and in
Speaker 2: any more than the most kind of rudimentary and concrete terms.
Speaker 2: So science fiction was a way of kind of educating
Speaker 2: you know again like intelligent lay people, you know, people
Speaker 2: capable of being educated about these kinds of topics. But
Speaker 2: it also did so in a way that wasn't dry
Speaker 2: and that you know was you know, it was presented
Speaker 2: in narrative form, you know, and it also allowed to
Speaker 2: write the indulgence of you know, exploring theoretical worlds you know,
Speaker 2: some completely phantasmagoric and metaphorical, some you know, quite quite
Speaker 2: literally possible futures, you know, and that came to inform
Speaker 2: that came to inform public policy debate. Man in intellectual circles,
Speaker 2: you know, Jerry Purnell like the sci fi guys, and
Speaker 2: they are mostly guys a lit. There are some ladies
Speaker 2: who dig sci fi, but they are definitely the minority.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Jerry Parnell, Uh, the guys who are who are keen
Speaker 2: to science fiction, uh you know know of him. He
Speaker 2: passed away about ten years ago, I think. But Parnell's
Speaker 2: kind of seminal book was Lucifer's Hammer, which is a
Speaker 2: great work, a kind of survivalist post apocalyptic fiction, but
Speaker 2: it's got, you know, a very positive kind of message
Speaker 2: to it. I try and turn people onto that instead
Speaker 2: of nonsense like The Walking Dead and things. Parnell also
Speaker 2: did he The Mode in God's Eye with I can't
Speaker 2: remember uh he co authored The Mote in God's Eye
Speaker 2: with another kind of esteemed uh sci fi author of
Speaker 2: the era. But any event, the the these books dealt
Speaker 2: with serious stuff, I mean know somewhere better than others.
Speaker 2: But uh. Parnell went on to uh participate uh in
Speaker 2: in these political action committees that uh that worked to
Speaker 2: their work to win appropriations, you know, for strategic defensing.
Speaker 2: This strategic defense initiative known colloquially and somewhat punitively as
Speaker 2: star Wars. You know, the uh for the youngsters who
Speaker 2: don't recall and for who might not even know strategic
Speaker 2: defense initiative was was that proposed uh uh missile shield
Speaker 2: quite literally, you know, it was under the UH operating
Speaker 2: on the same principles as things like the Night like
Speaker 2: the like the terrestrial earth bound nike Zeus anti missile
Speaker 2: system or probably more familiar to people my agent all younger,
Speaker 2: the Patriot missile system. But obviously this would be a
Speaker 2: space based platform that uh, that would destroy incoming uh
Speaker 2: strategic nuclear weapons before they were able to reach their target.
Speaker 2: And uh obviously, you know what if something could of
Speaker 2: this sort could be implemented, that would be a game changer.
Speaker 2: I mean, it wouldn't totally obviate the nuclear threat presented
Speaker 2: by the worst of uppact, but it would have it
Speaker 2: would have U it would have all been guaranteed with
Speaker 2: then extant technolology that you know, the United States could
Speaker 2: survive a boat on the blue first strike, okay, and
Speaker 2: and wage and win in nuclear war even after a
Speaker 2: devastating surprise attack and uh aliens it seems today did
Speaker 2: this This was the forefront of of of public policy
Speaker 2: debate really, uh, you know, until the genuine thought set
Speaker 2: in between the Moscow reformist regime led by Gorbia show
Speaker 2: around nineteen eighty eight, you know, and then a year later,
Speaker 2: obviously the you know, the the entire the entire structure
Speaker 2: ceased to exist, you know, the Eastern Block structure but
Speaker 2: point being Jerry Purnell. Might I I digress quite a bit,
Speaker 2: but my point is that Jerry Parnell is a prime
Speaker 2: example of a guy who literally was a science fiction
Speaker 2: author you know who who who participated in in n
Speaker 2: G O S and became the public face of h
Speaker 2: of a proposed uh applied technology that that quite literally
Speaker 2: had global implications for the strategic landscape. And and and
Speaker 2: uh the kind of shorthand description of which you know
Speaker 2: was on the lips of of of every news anchor
Speaker 2: in in the eighty four UH presidential election. I mean
Speaker 2: that's remarkable. So this is not just some you know
Speaker 2: science fiction was not It was not just some kind
Speaker 2: of weird like genre where you know of of you
Speaker 2: know that appeals to guys who you know who kind
Speaker 2: of enjoy thought experiments that don't impact the real world
Speaker 2: in any meaningful way. So that's what kind of drew
Speaker 2: me into it and interrupted me at any time, man
Speaker 2: if I'm being boring or if I'm going too far
Speaker 2: a feel, okay? And what turned me up? What turned
Speaker 2: me onto science fiction? I never read a lot of fiction.
Speaker 2: I mean I enjoyed stuff, and I still do, you know,
Speaker 2: like Shakespeare obviously when I got turned into it turned
Speaker 2: onto that in high school. You know, I'm a I'm
Speaker 2: a Bible Protestant, So I mean I was always in
Speaker 2: remain mood by the language of the King James. Bible
Speaker 2: did a handful of literary works like Wuthering Heights that
Speaker 2: really moved me. I mean I that that might inspire
Speaker 2: people to make fun of me, because that seem I
Speaker 2: might not seem that that kind of thing would appeal
Speaker 2: to me, But I I am at base of romantic
Speaker 2: person capital R. I mean, I don't mean I fancy
Speaker 2: myself similar Thurio, obviously, but the you know, other than
Speaker 2: the kinds of fiction that I read, uh, with the
Speaker 2: exception of of of of a couple, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: unorthodox classics like Goustive Hassards, the Short Timers, which became
Speaker 2: a very loose adapt which was very loosely adapted into
Speaker 2: the film Full Metal Jacket, and this this hard boiled
Speaker 2: crime writer named Shane Stevens who wrote what I consider
Speaker 2: to be the seminal kind of American crime novel about
Speaker 2: the mafia called Dead City. It's sort of like the
Speaker 2: anti Godfather. Like I talked about this in my podcasts
Speaker 2: with what the kid is that city is. It's truly
Speaker 2: it's truly gruesome. I mean it's it's like more of
Speaker 2: a horror like you know, it was kind of it
Speaker 2: was released around the same time as The Godfather, and
Speaker 2: it's very much like an underground book and uh it's
Speaker 2: it's a kind of book that actually appealed to guys
Speaker 2: we're kind of like in that lifestyle, like in the era,
Speaker 2: and it it's more it's more horror story then then
Speaker 2: kind of a then kind of cheap, uh, paperback opera
Speaker 2: like The Godfather was. And but other than that, you know,
Speaker 2: the fiction I read was was sci fi because you know,
Speaker 2: it grabbed me for the reasons I just indicated, you know, uh,
Speaker 2: it it presented it. It presented world events in particularly
Speaker 2: things relating to war and peace and historical processes in
Speaker 2: a way that I could grasp, but also in a
Speaker 2: narrative form that gave it context, you know, like and
Speaker 2: I always tended towards you asked before we went to uh,
Speaker 2: before he went live. Uh, he asked about my influences
Speaker 2: Frank Herbert for it first and foremost. It goes without
Speaker 2: saying not just Dune in the entire Dune Universe. But
Speaker 2: a lot of his other a lot of his other
Speaker 2: books that are lesser known, like The Santa Roga Barrier
Speaker 2: is a great book. I highly recommend it, you know.
Speaker 2: And Herbert Herbert. Herbert's a very unusual science fiction author
Speaker 2: because it he's not properly hard science fiction, because he
Speaker 2: doesn't deal with you know, the concrete theoretical technologies and
Speaker 2: potentialities that they're in of of of uh, of the
Speaker 2: imagined future. No, but nor is he soft sci fi.
Speaker 2: He's not really dealing with fantastical beings and and things
Speaker 2: like that and just you know, abstract symbolism.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: He really, what he's really doing is he's writing about
Speaker 2: He's writing about political theory. He's writing about race, you know,
Speaker 2: he's writing about you know, religious and social infrastructure. Sure
Speaker 2: that quite literally creates culture over time. He's talking about
Speaker 2: man's relationship to these things well as an individual and
Speaker 2: as a member of a racial or ethno sectarian or
Speaker 2: cultural community, you know. And what he's doing so in
Speaker 2: a fantastical setting far far removed from our present. But
Speaker 2: that's part of the point, is that it's so far removed.
Speaker 2: There's these familiar forms you know that cannot be escaped
Speaker 2: from or done away.
Speaker 1: It's interesting to bring this up because going back to
Speaker 1: kind of the start of our conversation, right, and then
Speaker 1: this might be reductive, but really the thing that makes
Speaker 1: science fiction different from fiction generally, right, is the relationship
Speaker 1: to technology.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The question is always kind of the question the conflict
Speaker 1: is if not started by but it's kind of pushed
Speaker 1: along by technology, kind of beyond our current state. It's
Speaker 1: almost the definition of sci fi, right. And so in
Speaker 1: the very early days, the very early sci fi, which
Speaker 1: I don't particularly enjoy talking people like Wells. You know,
Speaker 1: it's fun enough to read, but it's kind of a gimmick, right,
Speaker 1: It's a normal story, you know, but we have an
Speaker 1: invisible car or something like that. Like it's it's there,
Speaker 1: you know, And it might be a fun enough read.
Speaker 1: But I feel like the point at which sci fi
Speaker 1: gets really interesting to me at least, right, is the
Speaker 1: point at which we've essentially created technology that very much
Speaker 1: can destroy us. You know, that full scale extinction of
Speaker 1: the human race is beyond a theoretical possibility, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's something that you know, if the cards fall a
Speaker 1: certain way, could happen and I think that's what at
Speaker 1: that moment, kind of sci fi became not realer, but more,
Speaker 1: I guess, a place where you could really answer real
Speaker 1: questions of how I guess humans kind of deal and extremists.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting you bring up Herbert because I don't
Speaker 1: know if you could call me a sci fi fan,
Speaker 1: but I like a lot of sci fi. Right. I
Speaker 1: think that a lot of it is not particularly good,
Speaker 1: but the highs are really good. They're really they're they're high.
Speaker 1: As I guess it's somewhat redundant, but to me that
Speaker 1: the core question is basically, how does the author view technology?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Is technology something that redeems human? Right, that change how
Speaker 1: humans act and kind of elevates them, Which I think
Speaker 1: that's kind of unsatisfying and not particularly interesting. Versus well,
Speaker 1: how to humans with kind of a constant nature, how
Speaker 1: do they react when we've given them grand scale tool?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And that's part of the reason I like doing so
Speaker 1: much and I like Frank Herbert so much. Is essentially right, Like,
Speaker 1: obviously the technology is kind of beyond our comprehension, you know,
Speaker 1: the ability to edit the human genome, you know, traveling
Speaker 1: faster than light and all of that, but realistically, right,
Speaker 1: the events are not too different from what we can
Speaker 1: imagine is kind of a is kind of a you know,
Speaker 1: behind the scenes like European royal drama. Right, there's intrigues,
Speaker 1: there's royal houses, and so it's a very human story
Speaker 1: kind of transposed over the starts. And I think that
Speaker 1: that kind of I guess, like those perennial themes played
Speaker 1: out to an extreme level, is what makes sci fi
Speaker 1: interesting to me. Do you see what I'm kind of
Speaker 1: grasping at there?
Speaker 2: No, absolutely, And that's the yeah, I mean, the point
Speaker 2: you make about a lot of science fiction, I mean,
Speaker 2: particularly the early iterations of it, but even now, it's
Speaker 2: very gimmicky, and it just it's it's it showcases hypothetical
Speaker 2: technologies as like set pieces or just as you know,
Speaker 2: you know that the framing device takes the place of
Speaker 2: of character driven uh narrative and uh yeah, that that
Speaker 2: that that appeal. That's a very simple minded sort of,
Speaker 2: uh sort of orientation, I mean, And and the part
Speaker 2: of the people who write that kind of thing, I mean,
Speaker 2: the issue with Dune is that it you know, and uh,
Speaker 2: you know, like I said a minute ago, the reason
Speaker 2: why science fiction belongs to the twentieth century, like whether
Speaker 2: people accept kind of the the sociology of of the epoch.
Speaker 2: You know, guys like Alvin Toffler and even Herman Khan,
Speaker 2: you know who I mean, he wrote it was musically
Speaker 2: on on on game theory and military dimensions of these things.
Speaker 2: But you know, the uh, like future shock was a
Speaker 2: very real thing in the twentieth century. And you know
Speaker 2: in Midwinter Constant is saying, like history reputes itself. Actually
Speaker 2: it doesn't. And uh, you know there's patterns within Uh,
Speaker 2: there's there's the certain patterns the human behavior, particularly at scale.
Speaker 2: So I mean just predict there's a certain predictability of outcomes,
Speaker 2: you know when we're talking about state craft and we're
Speaker 2: talking about political occurrences. But like history appslug does not
Speaker 2: quote repeat itself, and if you think it does, there's
Speaker 2: something of an idiots and you know, conceptualize the twentieth century.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know in night at uh at the
Speaker 2: turn of the twentieth century, Europe was still ruled by monarchs.
Speaker 2: By mid century, there's a burgaining still nuclear standof up
Speaker 2: between two superpowers, and uh, you know, jet air craft
Speaker 2: was a common modality of travel. Like think about that,
Speaker 2: you know, I mean, frankly, like fifty years is not
Speaker 2: even a blink of an eye in historical time. And
Speaker 2: for pretty much the last forty thousand years, you know,
Speaker 2: not much change. For centuries. You know, there was punctuated innovasions,
Speaker 2: you know, uh that that definitely changed things. But even that,
Speaker 2: I mean it was punctuated in relative terms, you know,
Speaker 2: like over the course of a century, you know, uh,
Speaker 2: something like field artillery like emerged, you know, or you know,
Speaker 2: the internal combustion engine you know, over decades kind of
Speaker 2: became perfected, you know. But this truly, this truly punctuated
Speaker 2: equilibrium I'm of like a radically game changing technology that
Speaker 2: that's really alters everybody, not just their daiity life. But
Speaker 2: they're not a conceptual horizon. Not not only did that
Speaker 2: happen in the twentieth century, it happened over and over
Speaker 2: and over again, you know. And well the.
Speaker 1: Analogy I like to use, and that this has to
Speaker 1: do with my background, right, is that we're essential living
Speaker 1: in the most unparalleled stock market run in history, right
Speaker 1: like kind of throughout it and obviously they're there are advancements,
Speaker 1: right like iron tools that's a huge deal if you're
Speaker 1: the only guy who has them. But from kind of
Speaker 1: a thirty thousand foot view, the difference between an iron
Speaker 1: sword when a bronze one, you know, that's not that significant, right, No,
Speaker 1: But I mean you look at and a great example,
Speaker 1: right is you look at the people who lived who
Speaker 1: fought in wars in kind of the eighteen eighties and
Speaker 1: eighteen nineties, and the absolute horror at which those people saw,
Speaker 1: you know, even the First World War, right like the
Speaker 1: beginning of truly mechanized warfare. And obviously there's another order
Speaker 1: of magnitude change just what twenty twenty five years later.
Speaker 1: And so I agree with your point, right that the
Speaker 1: doubling and redoubling of technological change, I mean almost it's
Speaker 1: almost impossible to dispute that that shifted society fundamentally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it also one of the reasons why Herbert
Speaker 2: is so important is because Herbert, I mean, he addressed
Speaker 2: those things the very Onino's way. I mean, the entire
Speaker 2: the entire framing device of Dune, like in situ, when
Speaker 2: like we're introduced to the you know, the setting and
Speaker 2: the and the characters of Dune. You know it ten
Speaker 2: thousand years after uh, after after a jahad against like
Speaker 2: a literal jahad against thinking machines, you know, and and
Speaker 2: owing to the fact that you know, the the emergence
Speaker 2: of thinking machines. Not only did it, you know, lead
Speaker 2: to the physical enslavement of mankind ultimately, but even when
Speaker 2: man had at least you know, nominal dominion over artificial intelligence,
Speaker 2: it had the effect of just precluding the possibility of culture.
Speaker 2: You know it, you surfed and sabotaged you know, man's
Speaker 2: entire concept of value. You know it is aesthetic judgment,
Speaker 2: his ability to discern beauty any longer. You know, it
Speaker 2: created a truly like pointless existence. And Herbert owes a lot.
Speaker 2: I believed the Heidegger, even though he probably would have
Speaker 2: denied it because he was very kind of canny and
Speaker 2: elusive when people try to pin down his own influences.
Speaker 2: But you discerned a lot. You just you're decerted, and
Speaker 2: and and in Herbert, everything from meister Eckert, you know,
Speaker 2: to to uh you know, the esoteric Islamic thinkers, you know,
Speaker 2: to to what I believe, or Zen Buddhist influency, although
Speaker 2: I don't know anything about Zen Buddhism other than the
Speaker 2: very you know, uh, very kind of cursory understanding of
Speaker 2: its its core concepts. But you know, Heidegger's I mean
Speaker 2: it be in political terms if you know, uh, what
Speaker 2: what what kind of brings what kind of what kind
Speaker 2: of draws a Heidegger into the into the political sphere
Speaker 2: of human activity is his description of what it is
Speaker 2: to live historically? Okay, And Nolty, Ernst Nolty, who was
Speaker 2: his accolyte, and you know was was the great historian
Speaker 2: and a very controversial revisionist. But I mean Nolty really
Speaker 2: really kind of uh took uh this kind of Heidigerian
Speaker 2: paradigm of his of you know, of what it is
Speaker 2: to live historically to its logical conclusion and conceptual terms.
Speaker 2: And you know, the only the only thing that really
Speaker 2: mitigates the the the the terror of oblivion and death
Speaker 2: is uh and the only thing that really makes you know, uh,
Speaker 2: intimacy between people possible in life is you know, the
Speaker 2: capacity to live historically and uh, you know, new ageas
Speaker 2: as might sound, the people who aren't really unpacking the
Speaker 2: meaning of these terms, a people uh who come to
Speaker 2: share a consciousness in common, you know, wanting to I
Speaker 2: share biology, which is only one component of a historically
Speaker 2: communitarian experience. But over time, you know, a community of
Speaker 2: people becomes a truly perennial community and a very real way, uh,
Speaker 2: they they partake of a consciousness that that trans sense
Speaker 2: the death of individual members, like I mean quite literally
Speaker 2: in terms of you know, the transmission of common modalities
Speaker 2: of thought, Okay, in concepts and uh, symbolic psychological features
Speaker 2: and things of this nature. I'm not talking about anything
Speaker 2: aerie or mystical or like about spirits ra aining of
Speaker 2: that nature, okay. And Herbert was very very uh fixated
Speaker 2: on this, I mean as am I. That's one of
Speaker 2: the things that dream into Herbert. And the converse of that,
Speaker 2: uh is that if if you remove people individually and
Speaker 2: collectively from historical existence, you know, by by preventing the
Speaker 2: development or this maintenance of that you know, linear uh
Speaker 2: uh consciousness and experience of being held in common over generations,
Speaker 2: you're you're you're in a real, very real way, like
Speaker 2: murdering an entire world of consciousness for all time. And
Speaker 2: and if you want to understand why people fight so
Speaker 2: hard to preserve their way of life or their way
Speaker 2: of being in more properly descriptive terms, that is why.
Speaker 2: And I'm not saying the common man who is mired
Speaker 2: in these circumstances and fighting to preserve, you know, his
Speaker 2: his way of being in existential terms, contemplates it this
Speaker 2: way or could even articulate this way, but instinctively he
Speaker 2: recognizes that is what it is, that that is what
Speaker 2: is at stake. And this is also why, although it's
Speaker 2: an uncomfortable topic, if people want to understand what happened
Speaker 2: in the twentieth century involving the categorical annihilation of entire populations,
Speaker 2: which was first devised and implemented by the Communists, escalated
Speaker 2: and and sort of returned in kind as a is
Speaker 2: a modality of political violence by the German Reich, and
Speaker 2: then ultimately the normalization of it in uh, the planned
Speaker 2: waging of strategic nuclear warfare where the attrition tipping point was, uh,
Speaker 2: what volume of of of of of mortal attrition would
Speaker 2: cause it too, the literal death of of the enemy society.
Speaker 2: I realize, Uh, I just threw a lot at you.
Speaker 2: Could you excuse me for like two minutes, I've got
Speaker 2: to go pop a couple of ani inflammatories rank lament
Speaker 2: a little bit of pain.
Speaker 1: No, not at all, Thomas h yeah, I'll be right back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, forgive me man, sure.
Speaker 1: Thing, So I'll fill up air while Thomas is out
Speaker 1: to me. This it reminds me of and if you've
Speaker 1: ever read and I know, scholar, right, if ever read
Speaker 1: both the Old Testament and anything about kind of Mesopotamian civilizations,
Speaker 1: right like if you go to the you know, the
Speaker 1: British Museum or even just read the scans that it's
Speaker 1: it's you noticed this that this like language of annihilation,
Speaker 1: right like we we we struck them all down, you know,
Speaker 1: we dashed out the brains of their infants. We we
Speaker 1: left not one stone standing, and none of them were left.
Speaker 1: And then three years later they're fighting again, right, And
Speaker 1: then that's to a certain extent a literary device, right
Speaker 1: like they was certainly a crushing victory, but it should
Speaker 1: be read as you know, like oh yeah, how the
Speaker 1: football game go oh pretty rough? We got slaughtered. You know,
Speaker 1: obviously they didn't actually you know, make a pyramid of
Speaker 1: skulls a fifty yard line, right, but that that real
Speaker 1: capacity for human exter extermination. And look I understand, right,
Speaker 1: like Caesar Wage to genocide. You know, the Mongolians killed
Speaker 1: a lot of people. Do you really the ability to
Speaker 1: really fully scrub you know, an area from you know,
Speaker 1: from from human habitation is kind of unprecedented. And look again,
Speaker 1: I understand their historical examples somewhat to the contrary, but
Speaker 1: that that real not only ability, but kind of normalization
Speaker 1: of I guess, just full scale and complete genocide is
Speaker 1: kind of unprecedented. To Thomas, I was just kind of
Speaker 1: talking about the difference between wars of annihilation and kind
Speaker 1: of the pre technological era. You know, like, look like
Speaker 1: Caesar killed an awful lot of gulls, you know, the
Speaker 1: Mongols killed an awful lot of everyone. The ability to
Speaker 1: essentially push a button and wipe a civilization from the
Speaker 1: earth is kind of unprecedented, right.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the uh, the uh, the instrumentalities of such
Speaker 2: things were, uh were unprecedented, of course. I mean that
Speaker 2: when the rubber means the road, that uh, that was
Speaker 2: the concrete game change or however, something happened in the
Speaker 2: twentieth century owing the a dialectical process. I mean that
Speaker 2: was underway, I mean for centuries beforehand, but wars became
Speaker 2: total when they became truly events that could be characterized
Speaker 2: as velt and shawn krieg the uh.
Speaker 1: So can you I've heard you say that phrase before,
Speaker 1: but I'm not familiar with the actual meaning of it.
Speaker 1: What does that German phrase mean?
Speaker 2: I mean literally, uh, worldview war or worldview struggled. I
Speaker 2: agree with all these basic thesis that there is something
Speaker 2: in there is something not just intrinsically homicidal on a
Speaker 2: massive scale, but axiomatically so to Marxist Leninism. That's not
Speaker 2: some cheap polemical UH take saying like oh those you know,
Speaker 2: those reds are evil? Like what I mean is that
Speaker 2: the uh? What what communism demands in order for it
Speaker 2: to be implemented. It's it's got to completely restructure man's
Speaker 2: conceptual horizon. Okay, it's from the ground up. It's it's
Speaker 2: it's it's got to literally eradicate everything that came before
Speaker 2: and any conceptual biases that uh would derive from what
Speaker 2: preceded it.
Speaker 1: And and uh, I agree with you, but I would
Speaker 1: also I would also say that there we see the
Speaker 1: advent of total war I guess, kind of dawning slightly before,
Speaker 1: you know, in the very in the late nineteenth century, right.
Speaker 2: I mean there was always there was always instances of
Speaker 2: of of of genocide and categorical annihilation of enemy forces.
Speaker 2: You know, I made a point before, you know that
Speaker 2: the Greeks, the thing between Hassis and and Nimicus, you know,
Speaker 2: conflicts within a common uh basically common moral paradigm, and
Speaker 2: conflicts waged you know, against people's outside of that paradigm, Okay,
Speaker 2: in which case, you know, no quarter would be afforded
Speaker 2: to them. And yes there were instances of genocide, but
Speaker 2: they had had a more I was.
Speaker 1: More talking about and and forgive me because I just
Speaker 1: want to interject this quickly because I think this is
Speaker 1: an interesting discussion that that kind of war of ideology,
Speaker 1: right is it less of like like the Creek War
Speaker 1: would be an example of that. That's kind of basic
Speaker 1: human stuff, not to take away from the horror of it,
Speaker 1: but it's a pattern we see.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I noticed it with with things like the you know,
Speaker 1: with with the UH, with with the war between the states, right,
Speaker 1: but this really was viewed as kind of a like
Speaker 1: even though it was essentially an internacing conflict, right, it
Speaker 1: is kind of viewed as like, I don't know, like
Speaker 1: a war between the army of one and the and
Speaker 1: I guess like the the the wicked citizens of another. Right,
Speaker 1: like I live in an area that was essentially burned
Speaker 1: to the ground.
Speaker 2: No, No, definitely, and there was always there there were
Speaker 2: there was, there was, There was always crusader wars metaphorically
Speaker 2: and literally, okay, and and and in clashes of world
Speaker 2: views that you know, we're essentially the driving impetus of
Speaker 2: of violence rather than any kind of material cause. But
Speaker 2: what we're talking about with the twentieth century and velden
Speaker 2: Jung Greek was something different, Like what communism calls for
Speaker 2: is literally the categorical extermination of entire populations of people
Speaker 2: owing to the fact that they simply cannot be assimilated
Speaker 2: into the new order, and by the fact that they're
Speaker 2: the standard bearers of uh of ideas or even just
Speaker 2: you know, knowledge that of the prior regime. You know,
Speaker 2: they they they they can't be permitted to exist because
Speaker 2: the only way to annihilate ideas ideas only exist within
Speaker 2: the human vessels that you know, uh, that bear them, Okay,
Speaker 2: And declaring that, you know, you've got to exterminate every man,
Speaker 2: woman and child who cost it's a counter revolutionary element
Speaker 2: and do so dispassionately in order to create a talleric utopia.
Speaker 2: Like that's that's something totally different than anything that's been
Speaker 2: seen before. Okay, Okay, I understand, Yeah, and thus that's
Speaker 2: why the uh I mean, I I don't know. I
Speaker 2: don't know if people think I'm being flippant about these things,
Speaker 2: but you know, I don't think. I don't think the
Speaker 2: annihilation of h of Jewish civilians by the German Reich,
Speaker 2: and it's l I was particularly remarkable because that was
Speaker 2: just something that was underway during the war years. But
Speaker 2: the internal logic of it also is a way of
Speaker 2: returning to serve, you know, like I, like I indicated
Speaker 2: a few weeks ago in an episode I cut, whether
Speaker 2: Dear Front Pete canone is as NULTI indicated, you know,
Speaker 2: the the German Reich was was aiming to exterminate the exterminator. Okay,
Speaker 2: if you accept and I'm saying from the perspective of
Speaker 2: the German Reich, Okay, if communism is literally annihilating the
Speaker 2: European way of life, and the progenitor of communism is
Speaker 2: the Jewish world of social existence, the only way to
Speaker 2: annihilate communism is to annihilate the standard bearers and progenitors
Speaker 2: of that idea. And if that is European Jewry, you
Speaker 2: categorically annihilate it, just as that population is the progenitor
Speaker 2: of an ideology that axiomatically is is exterminating europe In.
Speaker 2: It's it's biological stock, it's it's its conceptual existence, it's
Speaker 2: it's ability to its ability to live historically, you know,
Speaker 2: and and and and perpetuate itself. Like that is the
Speaker 2: way to understand it. And if people think the sounds
Speaker 2: abstract again like I'm not in in in esoteric again,
Speaker 2: I'm not saying And now there was no dy suggesting,
Speaker 2: and now there was a height of girl although he
Speaker 2: was dealing with things in a far less kind of
Speaker 2: concrete a particular way that when people are mired in
Speaker 2: these circumstances, that this is what they're consciously thinking or
Speaker 2: acting out. What he's saying is that at scale or
Speaker 2: what these thinkers were saying. What I'm saying is that
Speaker 2: at scale in uh, in psychological and sociological terms, UH,
Speaker 2: this is how uh veld In Shawn Kreeg develops and resolves.
Speaker 2: And it's a unique phenomenon to the twentieth century. That's
Speaker 2: why interesting, Well, I find myself when, uh, when when
Speaker 2: people say that, like, you know, the the various genocides
Speaker 2: of the Second World War were we're unprecedented. I I
Speaker 2: disagree with them obviously when they're when they're as when
Speaker 2: they're aim is to transform these events into an ethnosectarium,
Speaker 2: the narrative of murdered them. But they are correct, however
Speaker 2: unintentionally so or inadvertently so. Rather that these things were
Speaker 2: basically unprecedented, We're not just talking about, you know, the
Speaker 2: callous extermination of non combatants. We're not just talking about
Speaker 2: you know, enmity within within a conflict paradigm, you know,
Speaker 2: leading the you know, leading the combatant states. Uh, not
Speaker 2: distinguishing between sould and civilian. That Uh, that, yes, that's
Speaker 2: something that's always happened to varying degrees, albeit at at
Speaker 2: at lesser scale. But uh, we're talking about a very
Speaker 2: different phenomenon, and I'm splitting hers here. So I realized
Speaker 2: that was a lot just now. But no, no, that
Speaker 2: wasn't a topics that we be It's fundamentally important understanding understanding.
Speaker 1: I misunderstood what you meant at first, But that that
Speaker 1: cleared it up. So I've read not a great deal
Speaker 1: of Marx, but I've read, you know, the Communist Manifesto
Speaker 1: and some of his poems, and I can't remember exactly where,
Speaker 1: but it's his early poetry. He writes a lot about Satan,
Speaker 1: I mean kind of a yeah, an odd amount about Satan.
Speaker 1: And I need to talked the last time about the
Speaker 1: like Milton's concept of Satan right as the kind of
Speaker 1: the eternal rebel. So where do you think, I guess
Speaker 1: where do you think the innovation is in Marx that
Speaker 1: I guess allowed for this this like this, I guess philosophy, extermination.
Speaker 2: I mean, I just think that I don't think Marx
Speaker 2: was I mean I think Marx frankly was a was a.
Speaker 2: I go as far as to say that, in many
Speaker 2: respects Marx was an evil man. Okay, I do not
Speaker 2: think he was an art I don't. I don't not
Speaker 2: think he was an architect of extermination in concrete terms,
Speaker 2: but I I I do believe he was basically a
Speaker 2: Jewish thinker. And when I say that too, people don't.
Speaker 2: People misunderstand that as well, Like they're like, oh, but
Speaker 2: Marx was an atheist That's not what I'm saying. I'm
Speaker 2: not saying that Marx was going to synagogue every week.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying he said a ringa talmud. I'm not
Speaker 2: even saying he valued his heritage. Like what I'm saying
Speaker 2: is that conceptually, we can't really escape our confessional heritage. Okay,
Speaker 2: there's guys who are you know I made the point of,
Speaker 2: you know, like Paul Schrader used to comment that when
Speaker 2: he was at his most debased, you know, and this
Speaker 2: comes down in a lot of his films, particularly films
Speaker 2: like Hardcore and like Taxi Driver. You know, he even
Speaker 2: even you know, he he he always had kind of
Speaker 2: a calvin Hist orientation, even when he totally rejected the faith,
Speaker 2: you know, in terms and and the way the manner
Speaker 2: wish he abused himself was was was was was it
Speaker 2: kind of in verse like self flagellation. You know, like
Speaker 2: I people who I've read a lot of, like some
Speaker 2: of these world systems, theorists, you know, who are you know,
Speaker 2: we're who are people who are raised you know, in
Speaker 2: the Catholic faith and you know and and uh, throughout
Speaker 2: their entire adult life, you know, they've rejected a religious belief.
Speaker 2: But uh, you know, the when when their their discussion
Speaker 2: of ethics, they're you know, they're invoking you know, Thomas
Speaker 2: ethics in the you know, in the Scholastics. You know,
Speaker 2: they're making like Catholic arguments but trying to remove God
Speaker 2: from the equation. Okay, So when I talk about Marx
Speaker 2: being a Jewish thinker, I'm not saying that in conspirale
Speaker 2: conspiratorial terms are suggesting that you know, you know, people
Speaker 2: are somehow pre programmed to think certain ways, won't get
Speaker 2: their race. I'm saying that this uh, this this this
Speaker 2: belief and a Tulluric utopia, you know, this belief that
Speaker 2: you know, uh, this belief that Marx was something of
Speaker 2: a uh you know, had was with something of the
Speaker 2: and you know, uh was ordained by God, you know,
Speaker 2: or you know, by you know, historical dialectical process standing
Speaker 2: in for providence. You know, he was ordained you know,
Speaker 2: to kind of lead a cadre of the anointed, even
Speaker 2: long after his death, like through his writing and the
Speaker 2: concepts that he transmitted even from beyond the grave, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, to to create a Tolleric utopia. In the
Speaker 2: most apocalyptic terms, I mean that that's that's that's literally
Speaker 2: uh a Jewish paradigm, Okay, I mean secular as it
Speaker 2: may be, not particularly self aware, as the author would
Speaker 2: be of his own intrinsic prejudices like that can't really
Speaker 2: be avoided. And anybody who spends a lot of time
Speaker 2: with uh A a guy who's basically a Jewish thinker culturally,
Speaker 2: I mean, but probably especially if he's lapsed, he's gonna
Speaker 2: spend a lot of time thinking about the devil. I mean,
Speaker 2: not for any purell reason lego Jews worship the douvile.
Speaker 2: But what I mean is that kind of that uh
Speaker 2: that that that intractable and the intractable adversary is is
Speaker 2: a figure, if nothing else, in symbolic psychological terms, that
Speaker 2: somebody like Marx is going to identify with. Okay. And
Speaker 2: also any historical process is going to entail creative destruction.
Speaker 2: Like Shrumpeter coined that phrase, and I think I Shumpeter wasn't.
Speaker 2: He gets a lot of credit as being a brilliant
Speaker 2: heterodox economist, but he's not praise enough as a historian
Speaker 2: and a political theorist, and that's unfortunate. But you know,
Speaker 2: if you're talking about when I when I say that
Speaker 2: there's that megacide. Uh you know ho, categorical homicide at
Speaker 2: scale is axiomatically built into Marxist Leninism. I mean again, how,
Speaker 2: how how do we like, what do we do with
Speaker 2: these people who who cannot abandon the conceptual prejudice of
Speaker 2: the ancient regime? You know, like how the only way
Speaker 2: for communism to be realized is to completely restructure man's
Speaker 2: conceptual horizon. I mean that entails the destruction of entire
Speaker 2: worlds of social existence and the only way. And again,
Speaker 2: humans are the bearers of ideas, and humans are the
Speaker 2: standard bearers of of the social existences that that that
Speaker 2: create these ideas. So if we're talking about whipping the
Speaker 2: verbial slate clean, we're talking about annihilating human means. I
Speaker 2: come back to the example of democratic Campuccia a lot,
Speaker 2: and I've made the point, and this has made a
Speaker 2: lot of people upset. People on the rights I think
Speaker 2: I'm being flippant and engaging in elaborate apologia for oriental savagery.
Speaker 2: People on the life because they think I'm invoking a
Speaker 2: horrendous example of of Averan mass homicide and suggesting that
Speaker 2: it's normative for Marxist Leninism. Paul Pott was a Pharma
Speaker 2: orthodox Marxist and ho Chi Mint and Maw and certainly
Speaker 2: h Kim Il Sung and frankly, uh, virtually all of
Speaker 2: the UH, all of the UH, all the communist revolutionary
Speaker 2: figures after nineteen forty nine or so, I really believe that.
Speaker 2: And uh he had no qualms obviously about the fact
Speaker 2: that categorical extermination was the only way to facilitate the
Speaker 2: revolutionary process. That is not to say that individual men
Speaker 2: can somehow devise these processes, because obviously that's absurd, and
Speaker 2: that's a peculiar and ridiculous American conceit. It's kind of
Speaker 2: an inversion of the great Man theory of history. Uh,
Speaker 2: it's uh, it's kind of it's not even with this
Speaker 2: kind of Simpleton's idea that that that these that these
Speaker 2: villains who insinuate themselves in the role as heads of state,
Speaker 2: it's all manufacture history and move move apocal events or
Speaker 2: like will apocal events into into reality. I mean that
Speaker 2: that's so absurd. I don't even know how to rebut it.
Speaker 2: It's because it's it's that fucking stupid. But you know,
Speaker 2: Paul Pott I he was remarkeadbly candid about the horrific
Speaker 2: uh things that he presided over. And uh he spoke
Speaker 2: of these things like sort of dispassionate, uh curiosity almost
Speaker 2: But he never sought out an alibi, historical or otherwise.
Speaker 2: And some things are lost in translation. But I I
Speaker 2: don't think i'm I don't think i'm i'm. I don't
Speaker 2: think I'm fishing for, you know, staments to confirm my
Speaker 2: pre existing biases. When I say that he was very
Speaker 2: aware of this in a way that probably none of
Speaker 2: his uh none of his ideological fellows were, uh, save
Speaker 2: maybe for Lamin himself.
Speaker 1: It's and I want to kind of I agree with you,
Speaker 1: right that there is that Yeah, yeah, that Paul Pot
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, is the most is the most
Speaker 1: honest about it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: There is no like, there's no kind of like cringing justification.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's pretty much like, oh, this is how it has
Speaker 1: to be. And weirdly enough, there's a there's a sci
Speaker 1: fi book that's kind of come into popularity recently, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of a midway sci fi book. It has
Speaker 1: a blurb on the back by Obama. Because I should
Speaker 1: tell you but it's the Three Body Problem by a
Speaker 1: Chinese author, and it's a fine enough book, but the
Speaker 1: whole first third of it basically follows our main character
Speaker 1: as a girl living through the Chinese cultural revolute interesting.
Speaker 1: The worst part about it is it's kind of the
Speaker 1: best part of the book. You know. The rest of
Speaker 1: the book is fine enough, but to me at least,
Speaker 1: I've kind of forgotten all about it except for that part. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean calling subject what's interesting, and it kind of
Speaker 1: dovetails in what you're talking about is that there there's
Speaker 1: the scene where essentially all of the all of the
Speaker 1: professors who haven't been executed have essentially been put on
Speaker 1: like labor gangs, right, essentially to put them in the
Speaker 1: same plight as the peasantry, right, right. And there's this
Speaker 1: extended session where some of the professors who were a
Speaker 1: cologists are being forced to DeForest vast swaths of China
Speaker 1: for essentially no reason. And there's this conversation which and
Speaker 1: again I'm remembering this through the haze of a couple
Speaker 1: of years, right, or essentially comes out that like, oh no,
Speaker 1: they're not doing this for the land, right, They're doing
Speaker 1: it for you, you know, they're doing it to essentially
Speaker 1: kind of in like an odd like science version of
Speaker 1: a black mass, right like, force you to kind of
Speaker 1: desecrate your life's work and force you to, in order
Speaker 1: to survive, kind of remake yourself. And it's interesting because
Speaker 1: to me, at least, right like, there's something kind of
Speaker 1: genuinely terrifying about that, right Like it it's outside and again,
Speaker 1: like what you said about a lot of with you
Speaker 1: and I write with our our with our like religious tradition, right,
Speaker 1: we have a pretty dark understanding of human right like,
Speaker 1: kind of every part of us is to some degree
Speaker 1: or another corrupted. But there's also kind of a comfort
Speaker 1: in that, right that realistically, like humans are kind of
Speaker 1: a known quantity, you know. And but at the same time,
Speaker 1: there is something profoundly disturbing at that kind of like
Speaker 1: new level of I guess like human horror, if that
Speaker 1: makes sense, right, that it's not just someone robbing a
Speaker 1: liquor store or someone sacking a city, right there does
Speaker 1: seem to be this kind of odd and this is
Speaker 1: very clear in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and also in Cambodia. Right,
Speaker 1: but this odd almost joy in it, you know, this
Speaker 1: like joy in degradation that's kind of frightening at least
Speaker 1: to me.
Speaker 2: Well there's also yeah, and I mean part of that
Speaker 2: is I I'm not any kind of Orientalist I've got
Speaker 2: to read. I mean, I'm fascinated by the East, but
Speaker 2: I've got pretty much a dilettants understanding of it because
Speaker 2: it's not my wheelhouse. But there is uh, there is
Speaker 2: uh It's not it's it's not just a Western showing
Speaker 2: his perspective that oh, when you know, when the orient
Speaker 2: life is abundant and cheap, or this idea that you know,
Speaker 2: there's uh there, there's there's an there's a there's a
Speaker 2: sanguinary amorality to uh, these Eastern religions. I mean, I,
Speaker 2: for one, find it fascinating that you know, these that people,
Speaker 2: these kind of like these kind of dopey, uh like
Speaker 2: bougie white people. I think that Tibet is some it's
Speaker 2: some kind of like land of sublime piece. Tibetan Buddhism
Speaker 2: is abjectly horrifying. It's it's a pantheon of terror gods
Speaker 2: that uh like Khaali I guess in the Hindu pantheon
Speaker 2: like to exists beyond good and evil and are only
Speaker 2: and are only uh and only placated by by the
Speaker 2: most horrendous uh the forms of suffering. And again I
Speaker 2: don't purport to have any kind of insight into the
Speaker 2: orient I don't. I don't have any fluency in any
Speaker 2: of their languages, and I it's it's not something of
Speaker 2: expertise on. But so there's that that I believe plays
Speaker 2: into plays into these uh these uh, these darker episodes
Speaker 2: and in Chinese political life. But also there's a tendency,
Speaker 2: I mean, owing to what you mentioned uh about Mark
Speaker 2: seving genuine sympathy for the double there's something about revolutionary
Speaker 2: communism that believed very much in in the in the
Speaker 2: degradation of the person. I don't just mean breaking down
Speaker 2: to the individual idea of self. I mean in assault
Speaker 2: kind of in the intimate moral core of the person.
Speaker 2: And uh this played out in Romania too. There was
Speaker 2: these horrible prison experiments, uh, the things that don't even
Speaker 2: really want our peaks, that rather think about out them
Speaker 2: and it would be distasteful, these really really grotesque tortures
Speaker 2: often that took on ah uh a psycho sexual dimension.
Speaker 2: Uh that were that that that that Romanians prisoners were
Speaker 2: subjected to immediately after a cessation of hostilities, when you know,
Speaker 2: in the Communists were consolidated their satellite regime there and
Speaker 2: and some of these people had you know, been manustered
Speaker 2: in the Iron Guard or in the Behrmacht. But some
Speaker 2: of these people, they've just been denounced, you know, by
Speaker 2: personal enemies or something. And you know, there was the
Speaker 2: there was an effort to destroy these people above and
Speaker 2: beyond you know, merely punitive measures or or or terror tactic.
Speaker 2: Sam that you know, guaranteeing the compliance of others might
Speaker 2: be similarly inclined to resistance. And uh, even though he's
Speaker 2: overly uh, even though he's overly sighted by kind of
Speaker 2: midwoods all and sundry like Orwell, George Orwell actually had
Speaker 2: quite a bit of insight to that. I don't think
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty four is a great book overall, but the
Speaker 2: process by which it describes, uh, what the regimes and
Speaker 2: ambitions are with respect to their treatment of the individual
Speaker 2: in order to break down his psychic resistance and eradicate
Speaker 2: his inner self, to quite literally preclude the possibility of
Speaker 2: any dissident ideas even formulating because you know, again communism,
Speaker 2: despite the fact that it places haig aliens UH paradigm
Speaker 2: on its head. You know, when UH and and and
Speaker 2: and brain drags cause and effect and and human motivations
Speaker 2: and historical occurrences into the into the realm of the
Speaker 2: purely physical. I mean sort of alleges. I mean anyone
Speaker 2: who any any any any theoretical construct or UH or
Speaker 2: ideological structure that suggests that a dialectical process is the
Speaker 2: prime movement of history. They're talking about ideas, Okay, they did,
Speaker 2: that's inescapable. Okay. And if you're talking about ideas, you
Speaker 2: know you're talking about uh, you're you're talking about uh,
Speaker 2: the transcendental existence of things beyond the tangible. I'm not
Speaker 2: even talling, I'm not dennoying some platonist argument or I'm
Speaker 2: not even saying, you know that things have some spiritual lessons.
Speaker 2: I'm saying that so long as the idea of something
Speaker 2: exists within a human mind or minds, that thing exists. Okay.
Speaker 2: And that's that's UH. That's what's terrified with nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: four is that O'Brien, the party Apparatrick and Master Torture.
Speaker 2: He's a based uh, he's a based as psychiatrists, okay,
Speaker 2: or a psychic or a psychic or a surgeon of
Speaker 2: of of the mind, if one will, okay in the
Speaker 2: most insidious terms. And again that that's intrinsic to communism
Speaker 2: because it never aimed at mere compliance, never aimed at,
Speaker 2: you know, simply directing people to behave in certain ways
Speaker 2: or mouth certain platitudes or abide certain realities. It required
Speaker 2: the complete and total restructuring of the human consciousness in
Speaker 2: accordance with the revolutionary idea.
Speaker 1: Well, so it's interesting because I'm not super well read
Speaker 1: on what happened in Eastern Europe, but from the accounts
Speaker 1: that I have read, specifically, they targeted priests particularly gruesomely, right,
Speaker 1: And the Black Mass is actually not a bad thing
Speaker 1: to bring back up because and again I won't go
Speaker 1: into the details because they're distasteful in the extreme, but
Speaker 1: the things that they forced those men to do to
Speaker 1: essentially desecrate Christianity and Christian symbols, to kind of break
Speaker 1: them or kind of horrifying, and going back to nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four, and this is a slight digression, it's actually
Speaker 1: part of the reason I refuse to kind of use
Speaker 1: things like like the neo pronouns, disease ms are that
Speaker 1: kind of ridiculous stuff. It is because there's kind of
Speaker 1: a psychological mechanism behind it. I don't fully understand the
Speaker 1: science of but by kind of making yourself complicit with
Speaker 1: a lie, oh definitely, kind of buying into it, right,
Speaker 1: And that's that's that's what happens. And again that's my
Speaker 1: favorite part of nineteen eighty four. It's awful. It is
Speaker 1: to say, is when they're breaking him. Not because I
Speaker 1: enjoy it, you know, some siko who gets off on it.
Speaker 2: But no, no, no, it's it's the most important. Uh.
Speaker 2: It's the most important aspect of the book, I believe
Speaker 2: because it's and it's not it's not just some wild metaphor.
Speaker 2: I mean the things everything in that book is everything
Speaker 2: that book describes, everything that happens in it. I mean,
Speaker 2: these are things that happened, you know. I mean the
Speaker 2: setting is ah, it's a science fiction setting, but uh,
Speaker 2: I mean adjusting for adjusting for uh for those uh
Speaker 2: elements of the story. I mean these were things that
Speaker 2: these are things that were pressed on it and documented,
Speaker 2: you know, the and the uh I mean the point
Speaker 2: of people before too. I mean not just as a revisionist,
Speaker 2: but just in kind of non adversarial discussions of of
Speaker 2: of history where people who you know aren't aren't properly
Speaker 2: students of history, but you know, are a receptive uh
Speaker 2: to new ideas and want and want to want to
Speaker 2: educate themselves further on things, particularly but political in nature.
Speaker 2: You know, Uh, it's not really reductionists to say that
Speaker 2: in a very real sense, Uh, the history of the
Speaker 2: twentieth century and uh is is really the the history
Speaker 2: of the emergence of revolutionary communism. You know, it's uh,
Speaker 2: it's it's it's violent, and it's it's the established the
Speaker 2: megacitl arrival of it in Europe and uh then in
Speaker 2: Asia and uh you know, the the dialectical and then
Speaker 2: the military and uh existential revolt against it by the
Speaker 2: German Reich and and part of Japan and allies, and
Speaker 2: then the and then it's ultimate demise and capitulation. You know,
Speaker 2: it's the dialectical process created uh, you know, a kind
Speaker 2: of world society, you know, in the image of uh,
Speaker 2: in the image of ole Trotsky in the free market.
Speaker 2: I mean that's like history didn't end and the people
Speaker 2: in both that term generally don't really understand what what
Speaker 2: what left to galiens meant by the end of history.
Speaker 2: But it's uh, you really, the history of the twentieth
Speaker 2: century is uh is uh is, it's why, it's the
Speaker 2: history of it's it's the it's the history of it's
Speaker 2: the history of Marxism and Zionism, and there were bolts
Speaker 2: uh against it and the the ultimate triumph of of
Speaker 2: both ideologies, albeit in a dialectically altered form, And that's uh.
Speaker 1: I agree with that. I think that that's well said.
Speaker 1: So if you don't mind, I'd like to slightly veer
Speaker 1: back on topic because I do want to talk more
Speaker 1: about about steel Storm.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, definitely, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So I understand right that the the I guess like
Speaker 1: looking at things bimotally right, Like every every sci fi
Speaker 1: story is either a utopia or a dystopia. I understand
Speaker 1: that that's that's simplistic, but it's helpful for this for them.
Speaker 2: I think it's physically true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, where where would you say that steel Storm
Speaker 1: falls on that that spectrum? And do you think that
Speaker 1: one of those ways of viewing science fiction is more
Speaker 1: or less helpful than the other.
Speaker 2: Steelstorm is definitely dystopian, but it's not. It's it's not
Speaker 2: gratuitously so science fiction that is gratuitously dystopian. I've got
Speaker 2: mixed feelings about the film and the book The Road
Speaker 2: about Cormack McCarthy. On the one hand, I think it's
Speaker 2: a splendid antidote to foolishness like uh, like The Walking Dead.
Speaker 2: And I think the way it characterizes civilizational collapse and
Speaker 2: an environmental catasrophe and and and and situations of of
Speaker 2: shortage creating true savity. I mean, it's a horrifying movie,
Speaker 2: but it's so bleak and so unrelenting, unrelentingly so it's
Speaker 2: really like I said, it's it's gratuitous. It's almost it's
Speaker 2: almost uh. When when I come across things like that,
Speaker 2: it almost it almost evinces a contempt for the for
Speaker 2: the reader or the viewer. And that's not to say
Speaker 2: that I'm averse to exploring disturbing topics of my writing.
Speaker 2: I mean, as sometimes I worry I take it too
Speaker 2: far in the Steel Storm books, because you know, there's
Speaker 2: the deal is pretty frankly with some some pretty horrific stuff,
Speaker 2: you know, particularly you know, relating to violence and and
Speaker 2: and sexual violence and and and and violence at scales
Speaker 2: perpetuated by you know, by regimes and things like that.
Speaker 2: But it's UH, it's it's it's apocalyptic fiction with a
Speaker 2: capital A. I don't just mean because the framing device
Speaker 2: is an alternative. UH. Nineteen eighty three, we're in uh,
Speaker 2: you know, NATO and Warsaw Pact UH collide in a
Speaker 2: in a general uh thermonuclear war, which as time goes on,
Speaker 2: it's revealed UH that the orders of this oh not
Speaker 2: merely the structural features of the strategic landscape, but o
Speaker 2: to a deliberate UH and conspiratorial web of intrigues. But
Speaker 2: I don't want to spoil the plot for those who
Speaker 2: wish to reach Steel Storm, which I hope many people do.
Speaker 2: But within that dystopian UH setting, I'm trying to convey
Speaker 2: something about UH redemption, but not in a corny way.
Speaker 2: The UH intrinsic to the there's there's there's two basic
Speaker 2: timelines in Steel Storm. There's a timeline in the late
Speaker 2: twentieth century into the twenty first century where Billy Wong
Speaker 2: becomes a messianic figure in history, and Billy Wong begins
Speaker 2: we're introduced to him is about the most contemptible cre
Speaker 2: you're imaginable. He's a drug addicts, he's a street person,
Speaker 2: he's a sexual sadist, and he's a serial killer. For
Speaker 2: all practical purposes, you know, if if Billy Wong can
Speaker 2: be redeemed, uh, and not just redeemed, but you know,
Speaker 2: can uh it can become a a messianic personage uh
Speaker 2: lowercase M. Not not messianic in terms of you know,
Speaker 2: but yeah, in historical political terms. It uh I I'm
Speaker 2: I'm trying to convey something about the different lives people
Speaker 2: live when they're availed to these punctuated historical catastrophees that
Speaker 2: truly do uh you know, uh sweep up you know,
Speaker 2: human material, individually and severally into the into their fold,
Speaker 2: you know, like drift water, seaweed on a tumbling ocean,
Speaker 2: you know. And uh, Billy Wong is redeemed because circumstances
Speaker 2: allow him to be redeemed. And that and that's the
Speaker 2: cunning of reason and history. And and as to what
Speaker 2: many men who we view as as uh as these
Speaker 2: kind of great men of history, you know, who we
Speaker 2: consider above kind of the you know, their fellow man
Speaker 2: in terms of their moral moral integrity. Uh. That that's
Speaker 2: that's girls he misplaced. You know. Obviously you know God uh,
Speaker 2: God uh softened uh their will to resist, to resist
Speaker 2: his grace and uh you know allowed them uh to
Speaker 2: become capable of salvation. But you know it was the
Speaker 2: it was, it was it was the hand of providence
Speaker 2: in history that that allows Billy Wang to be redeemed.
Speaker 2: So that's first and foremost. And also, I mean, I
Speaker 2: melodramatics may sound, I mean, and I'm not absolutely proud
Speaker 2: of it, nor do I dwell on it. Though I
Speaker 2: do know something the Chicago street that Billy Wong indoors
Speaker 2: day to day. And I've met Billy Wong himself as
Speaker 2: a compositive people. I knew that very well. Okay, everything
Speaker 2: from his physical features to his to his UH to
Speaker 2: his his tendencies uh as a polymath, to his his
Speaker 2: sense of humor, you know, to his uh sociopathy. I
Speaker 2: I I I I knew people like this, you know,
Speaker 2: and I Uh, this wasn't something remote. I mean, I
Speaker 2: I I'm not playing murder, but I I I lived
Speaker 2: a fairly nightmarish existence for a fairly a long time.
Speaker 2: So there's that. And uh, in terms of the uh.
Speaker 2: The framing device of UH of war day, I will
Speaker 2: I tried to convey to younger people. I mean I
Speaker 2: first became aware of, uh, my kind of civic consciousness,
Speaker 2: my awareness of like the world around me in you know,
Speaker 2: political terms and structural terms. That first came about right
Speaker 2: around the time that of the final sort of crisis
Speaker 2: cycle between the United States and the Worst Uppact. And
Speaker 2: it was quite terrifying, not just to me as a
Speaker 2: little kid, because but but to everybody, you know, and
Speaker 2: people today, they they don't get that what that was like.
Speaker 2: It's it seemed that there was a it seemed as
Speaker 2: if there was nobody really at the helm like here
Speaker 2: or on the other side, and that at any moment,
Speaker 2: h armageddon was possible.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's it really felt that way. You could feel it,
Speaker 2: you know, you could it was tangible. You know. That's
Speaker 2: one of the reason that so absurd to me, especially
Speaker 2: when I see older people, like a being terrified of COVID.
Speaker 2: It's like, you you know better, you know what a
Speaker 2: real state of emergency is like.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: So the framing device I wanted to I kind of
Speaker 2: wanted to convey with that was like because there's like
Speaker 2: an older I think I've got something to offer in
Speaker 2: terms of my own historical memory. But it's also the
Speaker 2: the uh the way in which uh the you know,
Speaker 2: the the way in which catastrophe, catastrophes and apocalyptic events
Speaker 2: truly do shape human destiny, not just in historical terms,
Speaker 2: but in theological ones, and and how these things relate
Speaker 2: to man's ability to create and sustained culture, and how
Speaker 2: culture deals with As we talked about the ability to
Speaker 2: live historically and thus overcome the kind of the kind
Speaker 2: of void of death, that really is kind of what
Speaker 2: the the binding uh moral narrative is of steel Storm.
Speaker 2: You know, it's about people coming to learn to live
Speaker 2: historically again, and the hebres of those who would set
Speaker 2: about to simply preserve their own discrete coshness and definitely
Speaker 2: you know, by transmitting it to infernal machines, or by
Speaker 2: forcing those enslaved by the regimes they serve to uh
Speaker 2: worship them as gods. And ultimately Zartacs, who himself itself
Speaker 2: is an infernal machine, you know, he becomes he goes
Speaker 2: from the demonium pejorative, this object of utter terror to
Speaker 2: whom uh people literally sacrifice youth so that he might
Speaker 2: spare the lot of them. He goes from the demonium
Speaker 2: pejorative to the villainous redeemer, and he liberates man from
Speaker 2: UH from the shackles of the worst tyranny that has
Speaker 2: ever existed. So I believe it's a very positive UH.
Speaker 2: I believe it's a very positive UH story said within yea,
Speaker 2: I'm really ystopian narrative. I'm sorry if that was too
Speaker 2: long wounded. No, no, not at all.
Speaker 1: I that was well said you. I. I those were
Speaker 1: themes that I had picked up from reading it myself.
Speaker 1: But you stated at various syncs. But it's odd that
Speaker 1: you bring up Cormack McCarthy because I have similar feelings
Speaker 1: to him that it sounds like you do. And actually
Speaker 1: I have this in general with kind of things that
Speaker 1: are viewed as dark right, where darkness has a purpose.
Speaker 1: But I actually feel similarly about it to how I
Speaker 1: feel about sarcasm, right, that it's a tonic. Right, it
Speaker 1: can't be everything because if it's everything, it just becomes
Speaker 1: this like gray colorless goo. And look, if everything is
Speaker 1: that pointless, like why am I reading your story? You know?
Speaker 1: Because if there is no redemption and I'm not even
Speaker 1: asking for some type of you know, Hallmark style, you know,
Speaker 1: like overly you know SACS redemption story. But it does
Speaker 1: start to become where nihilism can become almost paralyzing, you know,
Speaker 1: in a narrative, and the ability to redeem someone in
Speaker 1: a story who's truly a terrible person, right like on
Speaker 1: every metric, right, is both interesting to read and it
Speaker 1: is also oddly hopeful in a way, right because obviously, look,
Speaker 1: I I deearly hope that neither you or I ever
Speaker 1: kind of descends to the levels of Billy Wong, Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that that's probably just mathematically improbable, But all
Speaker 1: the same, there's a little bit of there's a little
Speaker 1: bit of me and him, you know, probably more than
Speaker 1: a little bit. But I think seeing yourself in a
Speaker 1: character who is truly despicable and seeing that I guess
Speaker 1: that truly despicable man become the historical Messiah is deeply inspiring.
Speaker 1: And I think that in much the same way. And
Speaker 1: look like this this is more serious than something like Conan,
Speaker 1: but it offers something similar, right, which I guess is
Speaker 1: a is a technically fictitious but still deeply realistic I
Speaker 1: guess goal to strive for x, especially for young men.
Speaker 2: I'd like to think. So, oh yeah, definitely, yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean that's that's uh yeah, I mean I nihilism really
Speaker 2: is a poison man, and that's why. But at the
Speaker 2: same time, you know, the the people need to not
Speaker 2: be afraid. I mean, there's the world is populated by horrors.
Speaker 2: I mean that's not to say one should lock himself
Speaker 2: for herself in their room and and uh you know
Speaker 2: or that that you know, you should you know, join
Speaker 2: a monastery like figurably or literally, because you know, the
Speaker 2: world is nothing but evil. You know, we we've got
Speaker 2: to live in the world, and it's it's God's will
Speaker 2: that we live in the world. But you know, we
Speaker 2: we've got to be prepared. H We've got to be
Speaker 2: prepared to negotiate. It's it's horrors and it is it
Speaker 2: is full of horrors, but it's it's also full of uh.
Speaker 2: It's also full of beautiful things and the uh the
Speaker 2: capacity to uh for uh for redemption and you know,
Speaker 2: and not not just in the eyes of one's fellow man,
Speaker 2: but also uh you know, through the grace of God
Speaker 2: is ever present. And that's that's part of the uh,
Speaker 2: that's part of the that's part of the point of
Speaker 2: Steel Storm. And and the third book what it'll get
Speaker 2: into is it's hinted at, but it's it hasn't been
Speaker 2: fleshed out yet. You know, the first value more than
Speaker 2: the second one that I just finished. You know, like
Speaker 2: how how civilization is restructured. But I mean after War Day,
Speaker 2: after the veritable destruction of uh of of civilization on Earth,
Speaker 2: you know, within a millennia and a half, you know,
Speaker 2: civilization has returned full bore, and and and and and
Speaker 2: and there's truly a space during civilization where once there
Speaker 2: was a an ashen uh irradiated wasteland, you know. And
Speaker 2: that's uh, that's uh, that's that's constantly hopeful in my opinion.
Speaker 2: I mean, I I'm kind of a space geek, but
Speaker 2: I'm really excited about like the web space telescope because
Speaker 2: I love exole planets, and uh, I'm like a dilaton
Speaker 2: when it comes like astronomy and stuff. But when I
Speaker 2: was a kid at a telescope and even like in
Speaker 2: even in college at a telescope, but you know, and
Speaker 2: I always love looking at stars and things, and uh,
Speaker 2: I was always like really really fascinated by by the
Speaker 2: concept of exole planets and and now you know they're
Speaker 2: this kind of thing is going to be brought into
Speaker 2: uh into uh into view quite literally. And that if
Speaker 2: I mean, if you if you can, if you can
Speaker 2: look at things like that, you know, like uh like
Speaker 2: the uh like the like the data returned like the
Speaker 2: visual data returned by the by the web telescope, and
Speaker 2: not not believe in in in God, you know, the
Speaker 2: creator like I. You're hopeless. I don't know how one
Speaker 2: could think that. You know, this is just accidental architecture
Speaker 2: that's just spontaneously created itself for no Well I do
Speaker 2: in a minute, man, I don't mean to cut these. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but I it's a great conversation man, and I I
Speaker 2: really appreciate you give me the chance to to plug
Speaker 2: steel Storm two. I'm happy to We should do this
Speaker 2: again anytime you wish. Man, it's given me a couple
Speaker 2: of days. Notice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, Man, I enjoyed it so obviously you know
Speaker 1: I've got my copy. But where can everyone else at
Speaker 1: home pick up a copy of Steel Storm? And where
Speaker 1: should they look for a volume two?
Speaker 2: I would prefer if people would go through Imperium Press,
Speaker 2: because they're dear friends of mine, and UH, I don't
Speaker 2: think anyone needs to give Jeff Bezos their money to
Speaker 2: just go to uh imperium press dot com. You can
Speaker 2: find it on Amazon and there's a few other booksellers
Speaker 2: that can find it through also. Yeah, and I mean
Speaker 2: steel Storm Volume one has been available for you know,
Speaker 2: a over a over a year now, but steel Storm two,
Speaker 2: I'm hoping the manuscript is I mean, the manuscript is done.
Speaker 2: I'm hoping, UH it's gonna it's gonna drop by early autumn,
Speaker 2: you know, uh or September, October, you know, it will
Speaker 2: be available for purchase, available for purchase, and I'll make
Speaker 2: sure everybody is aware when it does drop. You can
Speaker 2: find me. We've got a really active community on Telegram,
Speaker 2: which I think is a great platform and it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's devoid of of ah, the kind of censorship regime
Speaker 2: that is common to some of these other uh other platforms.
Speaker 2: You can find this there at T dot M E
Speaker 2: slash the number seven h M A S seven seven seven.
Speaker 2: And you can find me uh on substack, where I
Speaker 2: post UH long form essays and every other week we
Speaker 2: do a podcast. It's UH real R E A L
Speaker 2: Thomas seven seven seven dot substack dot com. I am I.
Speaker 2: I do periodically back up stuff like this video uh
Speaker 2: an audio that we're doing right now on a gab,
Speaker 2: but I'm not particularly there and I don't I mean,
Speaker 2: God love GAB. I like the people on there, I
Speaker 2: like the people who maintain it, but I just don't
Speaker 2: really like the micro blogging platform. But I do back
Speaker 2: up my own content and that of our friends at
Speaker 2: real Thomas seven seven seven on gab. That's the best
Speaker 2: way to get hold of me. You can always hit
Speaker 2: me up direct through Telegram or by email orion contact
Speaker 2: me and my substack and I again, I can't, I
Speaker 2: can't thank enough for hosting me. Man, this was really
Speaker 2: great and I really hope we can do it against
Speaker 2: so