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Speaker 2: Meaning a live man like this man letting butterfly, flapping
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Speaker 4: Man it gonna cause the tree.
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Speaker 2: Back to day on the panel.
Speaker 4: Man Man, you don't don't matter many, all right, bug
Speaker 4: Man Hagel, Welcome to the Jay Burdon Show. How you doing?
Speaker 3: Hi, glad to be here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we got connected. We have some some mutuals
Speaker 4: on Twitter, and so, you know, I'm familiar with who
Speaker 4: you are and what you do, but some of my
Speaker 4: audience might not be. So what do you do on
Speaker 4: the internet?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I started my account of the long and
Speaker 3: short of it is. I was active on Reddit. I
Speaker 3: wasn't really active anywhere else. I got permanently banned from Reddit,
Speaker 3: and so I just started posting on Twitter. I was
Speaker 3: in law school. I was really frustrated with the environment
Speaker 3: in law school. It was it was obviously very asymmetric
Speaker 3: in terms of the opinions of the professor the students
Speaker 3: in general, and so I kind of used Twitter as
Speaker 3: my outlet to kind of lamit the cultural environment as
Speaker 3: well as the political environment. On Twitter, I have a
Speaker 3: mix of topics. I cover. I used to cover a
Speaker 3: lot more of kind of esoteric history. I covered a
Speaker 3: lot more about Hegel, kind of the hermetic influences on
Speaker 3: the Protestant Reformation, some stuff about Kabbola, how Kabla had
Speaker 3: influenced certain Protestant schism movements, the Moravians and the Atabaptists.
Speaker 3: But nowadays I'm really busy, So I just I just
Speaker 3: kind of do some like a surface level of political commentary.
Speaker 3: And that's kind of the long and short of it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's interesting because if you talk to older people,
Speaker 4: right boomers will just use that that slur. There's you know,
Speaker 4: this idea that, oh, you know, once these these college kids,
Speaker 4: you know, as broadly defined as that term is, hit
Speaker 4: the real world, then they'll realize right there, their parents
Speaker 4: were right all along. And I didn't get anything after
Speaker 4: my undergrad degree. I burnt out on education for you know,
Speaker 4: any number of reasons. But it's sort of interesting that
Speaker 4: that you know, idea of you know, getting in the
Speaker 4: real world, you know, quote unquote uh really never seems
Speaker 4: to pan out, to be perfectly honest, and that track
Speaker 4: of education, you know, from undergrad to your graduate degree
Speaker 4: post grad all that it's like this this treadmill to
Speaker 4: make you more and more of an obnoxious progressive hall monitor.
Speaker 4: You know, it's kind of like chasing gold stars. And
Speaker 4: so you mentioned, of course, right that you know law
Speaker 4: school was non representative, right, it was very much one opinion.
Speaker 4: So what was it like being a sort of a
Speaker 4: dissident in that in that space, if you will.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I I went to a Bury. My my
Speaker 3: undergrad degree is in biochemistry, and I also I did
Speaker 3: a dual jd and masters as a little background, my
Speaker 3: undergrad my undergrad, I was a bit more insulated despite
Speaker 3: going to a more liberal undergraduate program because of the
Speaker 3: fact that I was in STEM and so I was
Speaker 3: less I was less around the more kind of let's say,
Speaker 3: radical cohorts in my undergrad but I was still exposed
Speaker 3: to it here and there. I won't go into the details.
Speaker 3: So there's a couple of big scandals with uh, like
Speaker 3: people got suspended from the sports teams for let's say,
Speaker 3: throwing tortillas at a date auction and things like that.
Speaker 3: I thought they were outrageous, but I kind of kept
Speaker 3: more to myself. It like, it wasn't really in my
Speaker 3: face because of the program I was in so I
Speaker 3: was like, you know, I'm just want to get this
Speaker 3: over with. And then law school, it was it was
Speaker 3: more unavoidable because this stuff was integral to the coursework itself.
Speaker 3: Like in criminal law, you're talking about different types, different
Speaker 3: theories for justice, like you have retributive justice, you have
Speaker 3: rehabilitative justice, and then you have punitive justice. And there
Speaker 3: was obviously a clear preference among U with that particular professor,
Speaker 3: like for rehabilitative justice. And for those who don't know,
Speaker 3: that's basically where the point of incarceration is rehabilitation of
Speaker 3: criminals as opposed to protecting the public from them. And
Speaker 3: a lot of our problems in criminal justice dim from
Speaker 3: the back of the fact that the rehabilitative justice school
Speaker 3: is kind of the overarching trend we have been consistently
Speaker 3: heading to really since the night late night, And really
Speaker 3: I was being successively radicalized in the right wing direction,
Speaker 3: and it was really something that happened to me after
Speaker 3: I graduated law school and moved to Houston for a
Speaker 3: job that really kind of like just blew the whole
Speaker 3: thing up my face, because, like I was, I had
Speaker 3: been in Houston for less than a week starting my
Speaker 3: new job, and I got burglarized about four days after
Speaker 3: I moved there at two am, and it was just
Speaker 3: like I just started kind of looking into like the
Speaker 3: political environment of the city of Houston, and it was
Speaker 3: just kind of one of the first times where like
Speaker 3: my politics kind of or like the opposition to my
Speaker 3: politics viscerally interacted with me. And I was just like,
Speaker 3: this is not working. Like I'm a young new grad
Speaker 3: and I'm being I'm just having all these things like
Speaker 3: throw it in my face by no fault to my own.
Speaker 3: And I talked to like Boom or family members, and
Speaker 3: they just kind of treat it as like the cost
Speaker 3: of doing business, like the cost of existing. And I
Speaker 3: was like, why why are we accepting this? Like why
Speaker 3: why is this something that we are going to put
Speaker 3: up with as a society that like like kind of
Speaker 3: people who go out of their way to be lawbiding,
Speaker 3: productive citizens are just effectively at the whims of any
Speaker 3: petty criminal that should choose to victimize them. It was
Speaker 3: just an incoherent frame of mind.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I'm glad that you brought up the fact that,
Speaker 4: in the example of a word, I have a hard
Speaker 4: time saying justice. One of the things that I find
Speaker 4: incredibly frustrating in an academic setting with many of these
Speaker 4: people is that they don't know their own history. They
Speaker 4: assume that they are at the cutting edge of a
Speaker 4: new idea, right Whereas if you understand it, and you know,
Speaker 4: we're antribute to justice, thank you, I finally got it out.
Speaker 4: There is one of kind of this cluster of different
Speaker 4: ideas that have effectively been in academia since the late
Speaker 4: fifties to early sixties. And there's not a new experiment, right,
Speaker 4: this is this that we have tried this before with
Speaker 4: predictable results, and you know, look like, of course it
Speaker 4: produces bad results. You get broken into and you know,
Speaker 4: your apartment in Houston. But similarly, it just kind of
Speaker 4: bothers me that by alling to power, they get to
Speaker 4: sort of play pretend as radicals. Right. Play pretend is
Speaker 4: if they've come up with this great new idea that
Speaker 4: was old by the time my grandparents were going through school.
Speaker 4: It's you know, not the primary objection to it, but
Speaker 4: very much something that kind of rubs me the wrong way,
Speaker 4: if you see what I'm getting at.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think part of it is liberalism has
Speaker 3: a degree of staying power and I believe it's because
Speaker 3: it is a comforting idea, especially like just Anglo Saxons
Speaker 3: in general, but especially Anglo Saxon's post twentieth century kind
Speaker 3: of have built their I don't want to say have
Speaker 3: created new like American ethogenesis, especially postththr they kind of
Speaker 3: have where American culture espeal, specifically American Anglo Saxon culture
Speaker 3: is one of like overcoming basically the constraints of the material,
Speaker 3: and they do that through this like having this like
Speaker 3: platonic ideal that man is infinitely malleable and you can
Speaker 3: infinitely mold man by altering the conditions. It's it's almost
Speaker 3: Faustian to the degree because like it allows you to
Speaker 3: like this iterative infinitely overcoming the bounds of my bounds
Speaker 3: to my conditions. And I believe kind of this like
Speaker 3: blink slate egalitarianism is residual of that where like not
Speaker 3: even biology is a constraint for us, and you kind
Speaker 3: of see this developing in like I know, like transhumanism
Speaker 3: is kind of a buzzword, but transhumanism just in terms
Speaker 3: of let's say, widening human cognitive capacity through things like
Speaker 3: neuralink and like exploring the final Frontier, which is Elon
Speaker 3: Musk's entire project. And so I think this kind of
Speaker 3: blink slate egalitarianism is just another facet of this, of
Speaker 3: this kind of Faucian concept that you can terrorform literally everything,
Speaker 3: including like humankind individually and as groups.
Speaker 4: Well, and that's that same idea in the perfect malleability
Speaker 4: of man. I think you see it nowhere else more
Speaker 4: than in education. The idea is that, you know, the
Speaker 4: these certain fields are and kind of stasis made up
Speaker 4: of demographics that we don't approve. We want it to
Speaker 4: be more representative, more made up of our of our clients.
Speaker 4: And so the idea is by simply passing people through
Speaker 4: you know, the hallowed halls. It's like, oh, well, Harvard
Speaker 4: makes Supreme Court justices. So if we just jam a
Speaker 4: bunch of our people, you know, people we decide that
Speaker 4: we want through that door, well will just produce you know,
Speaker 4: similarly august figures, and by sort of passing through the
Speaker 4: magic door, they will become the same thing. You see
Speaker 4: this as well, honestly, probably more clearly in public school system, right,
Speaker 4: the idea is simply like the piece of paper is
Speaker 4: the signifier. And so if you can simply increase the
Speaker 4: number of people or the sort of people getting something.
Speaker 4: They can be molded into that sort of idealized form.
Speaker 4: It's very much related to the sort of magic dirt
Speaker 4: fallacy you see with immigration, where if we simply take
Speaker 4: the entire world and stick them into a place that
Speaker 4: was nice ten years ago, well they will enjoy the
Speaker 4: benefits of that place being nice, and it become the
Speaker 4: same sort of people. Weirdly enough, this kind of reminds
Speaker 4: me of the and there's no polite term for this,
Speaker 4: but the we'll go Friedman's schools after the American Civil War,
Speaker 4: where effectively you had basic you know, Massachusetts wasps coming
Speaker 4: down to the reconstructive South in designed to basically eradicate
Speaker 4: what was black culture at the time and turn them
Speaker 4: into progressive white people. Right. And it's funny because, weirdly enough,
Speaker 4: a lot of the kind of like Nation of Islam
Speaker 4: black separatist types make this exact same point, one of
Speaker 4: very few points of agreement I have with those guys.
Speaker 4: But effectively it's the same project, right. It's this idea
Speaker 4: that we can, through education and training, turn this culture
Speaker 4: into something like us. It's sort of this bizarre kind
Speaker 4: of progressive imperialism, if that term makes sense to.
Speaker 1: You, Bookman.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I believe kind of the one of the
Speaker 3: primary historical modes of operation that have or let's say
Speaker 3: substraits that have allowed for this to be facilitated. I really,
Speaker 3: I might make the stance mad, but I think Protestantism
Speaker 3: was really integral as the delivery method for a lot
Speaker 3: of these ideas. I'm an orthodox Christian and so but
Speaker 3: so take that with what you will. My biases are
Speaker 3: out there. But the kind of issue or what I
Speaker 3: see with Protestantism, especially especially kind of the more apocalyptic types,
Speaker 3: they like to compress the transcendent and the inminet and
Speaker 3: basically flatten that difference. And so therefore the idea is
Speaker 3: like this, we have to pure, imminently purify the world
Speaker 3: in order for skistological project to proceeed. And you see
Speaker 3: this kind of with the Social Gospel movement and Raush
Speaker 3: and Bush back in the eighteen fifties. And like the
Speaker 3: Social Gospel and Raush and Bush were really deprogenitors of
Speaker 3: a lot of the the Northeast social justice initial initiatives.
Speaker 3: They were the kind of inspiration behind the whole house.
Speaker 3: They're the inspiration behind a lot of a lot of
Speaker 3: the civil civil rights movements. You have a lot of
Speaker 3: progressive progressive Protestants participating and encouraging civil rights movements. And
Speaker 3: part of this is I think, I think it is
Speaker 3: specifically a type of I guess a apocalyptic strain that
Speaker 3: is especially unique to evangelicalism, where the mot the mode
Speaker 3: of thinking is that purification of the world is necessary.
Speaker 3: And so obviously you have to look at the frame
Speaker 3: of which one is purifying the world, Like if if
Speaker 3: you think the world will be pure given certain precepts,
Speaker 3: you are going to follow those precepts to their logical conclusion.
Speaker 3: And so if that kind of delivery method is combined
Speaker 3: with these pre extant, uh aggressive precepts, that that kind
Speaker 3: of religion is going to pull these precepts to their
Speaker 3: logical conclusion, which ends up being blank slade galitarianism. Part
Speaker 3: of purifying the world is this absolute state of equality.
Speaker 3: And that's why the Social Gospel where they were an
Speaker 3: integral movement with the Christian socialists, and you kind of
Speaker 3: see the Protestant influence on the Fabian society, and there's
Speaker 3: all these kind of overlapping strands that kind of point
Speaker 3: to this weird imanitizing, almost quasi apocalyptic mode of thinking
Speaker 3: about politics and human society. I mean, I don't know
Speaker 3: if you're familiar with Eric Boglin, but it's Eric Boglin's
Speaker 3: famous line of iminitizing the esketon. And that's kind of
Speaker 3: what at least the evangelical strain of Prosantism has has
Speaker 3: ushered in.
Speaker 4: Well, I think fundamentally. And it's funny. I'm not necessarily
Speaker 4: like a Southern lost cause type, but you know, they
Speaker 4: talk about this quite a bit that effectively what you
Speaker 4: have in America is two distinct cultures, right, Northern and
Speaker 4: Southern culture, with profoundly different views on human nature and
Speaker 4: effectively the perfectibility of man. So in a cultural sense,
Speaker 4: you see the output of this kind of tragic understanding
Speaker 4: of human nature and things like Southern Gothic literature, right,
Speaker 4: the idea that man is at his core deeply flawed,
Speaker 4: but there is nobility to be found in how you
Speaker 4: manage that flaw. Right. Whereas you know the concept of
Speaker 4: you know, the city on a Hill, which I believe
Speaker 4: was initially coined by oh, shoot, what was his name?
Speaker 4: He was one of the initial pilgrims. I can't quite remember, right,
Speaker 4: but this idea of setting up a new novel and
Speaker 4: perfected society is something you can sort of bring the
Speaker 4: city of God into being in the world. The idea that,
Speaker 4: in much the same way talking about education, that you
Speaker 4: can fundamentally change what a man is. And actually, if
Speaker 4: we're gonna I realized mold Bug has become sort of
Speaker 4: unfashionable recently, but he has a series of essays on Quakers,
Speaker 4: and he particularly talks about the idea of prison, you know,
Speaker 4: not simply as like a dungeon, we throw you before,
Speaker 4: we either let you go or peel your skin off
Speaker 4: and set you on fire. You know, this was more
Speaker 4: common before they came around, and the idea in that
Speaker 4: was basically that, you know, prison was a sort of
Speaker 4: like state and judicial form of purgatory or you could
Speaker 4: sort of you know, work off your sins. And so
Speaker 4: in the early days of these reformatory prism prisons are
Speaker 4: what they call them is they have these sort of
Speaker 4: like comedically like sissify and jobs, you know, like they
Speaker 4: just have a box with a paddle full of sand
Speaker 4: and they just make you turn this wheel for hours
Speaker 4: on end, and that was your prison sentence. And okay,
Speaker 4: maybe that's better than just you know, eating you know,
Speaker 4: mac and cheese and you know, getting in you know,
Speaker 4: shive fights with Mexicans or whatever we do in our
Speaker 4: prisons now. But you still you have that idea that,
Speaker 4: you know, the point of criminal justice is not to
Speaker 4: avenge the wrong, punished the guilty, but it is to
Speaker 4: produce a measurable like a moral improvement and change in
Speaker 4: the criminal himself. It sort of becomes this social engineering project,
Speaker 4: and that same idea is scaled up, of course, the
Speaker 4: idea that you can do that to an entire society,
Speaker 4: which becomes there is a moral duty to do that too,
Speaker 4: cultures who are not as enlightened as you are, that
Speaker 4: you can you know, wage a massive war or you know,
Speaker 4: with your own society, or the idea that democracy needs
Speaker 4: to be exported to the world. It's this sort of
Speaker 4: belief in both the perfectibility of man and also in
Speaker 4: your personal moral duty to expand that system as far
Speaker 4: as possible. Again, it's that same sort of kind of
Speaker 4: progressive imperialism mentioned earlier.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think two we also kind of forget what
Speaker 3: civilization is in these conversations, specifically progressive or I don't know.
Speaker 3: It's like if they forget per se, but they had
Speaker 3: this idea of civilization as this kind of abstract thing
Speaker 3: that exists independent of people. Like institutions have their kind
Speaker 3: of like own ontologically independent existence, and it's it's on
Speaker 3: the institutions are comprised of people who whom the society
Speaker 3: is comprised of institutions or kind of these like standalone
Speaker 3: things that exist independent of the society. And to that extent,
Speaker 3: like if you've sent that content of the institution to
Speaker 3: the civilization is like civilization is just a thing that
Speaker 3: exists and people happen to inhabit civilization. Whereas I think
Speaker 3: my perspective and probably probably it is probably close to
Speaker 3: your perspective, Like civilization is not independent of the people
Speaker 3: that comprisee it. Civilization is an extension of the Ethnos.
Speaker 3: It's not something that you can interchange. It is mutually
Speaker 3: dependent upon the Ethnos. And when we had this kind of.
Speaker 4: Go ahead, oh well, and this is is Demeister's whole
Speaker 4: point right writing about constitutions, where it's like the constitution
Speaker 4: does not create a people, it describes a people at
Speaker 4: a certain time. It has no power in and of
Speaker 4: itself and this idea and exactly what you just mentioned
Speaker 4: is why when I very rarely decide to post to
Speaker 4: social media on Twitter at least, I very afflic get
Speaker 4: into the dumbest arguments in the world with both constitutional conservatives,
Speaker 4: you know, for the idea that you know, a constitution
Speaker 4: does not have the ability to enforce or create a culture,
Speaker 4: which in my mind is demonstrably true. Right does America
Speaker 4: look like it did in seventeen seventy seven? I rest
Speaker 4: my point, but also right with the an caps who believe,
Speaker 4: you know, that no state should be allowed to regulate
Speaker 4: you know, who lives in a certain area and simply
Speaker 4: culture is not a factor. But at the same time,
Speaker 4: right these these even something is as kind of liberal
Speaker 4: as the conception of human rights, you know, the rights
Speaker 4: enumerated to you, you know, by God or the state,
Speaker 4: depending on your view of it. Those are highly cultural.
Speaker 4: Those are effectively Anglo conceptions, right. The other cultures do
Speaker 4: not conceptualize things in such a way. And sorry, I'll
Speaker 4: kick it back to you, but I think that's what
Speaker 4: makes Demeaster's work so interesting is because he is addressing
Speaker 4: that very very early, right, you know, briefly after the revolution,
Speaker 4: you know, the idea that you can create a sort
Speaker 4: of formalized description or a set of rules that will
Speaker 4: guide culture. And clearly that doesn't work. But excuse me,
Speaker 4: I interrupted you.
Speaker 3: And this kind of like goes back to the classical
Speaker 3: liberal idea, well, let's say the small government conservative Like
Speaker 3: the kind of point they're failing to understand is that
Speaker 3: small government is only possible when you have authoritarian government
Speaker 3: on the borders, on the edges of society. Like I
Speaker 3: like to think about as like let's say, hard and
Speaker 3: stern strictures facing the outside and a more kind of
Speaker 3: soft a soft belly. And we we kind of have
Speaker 3: this concept in the Orthodox Church with it where it's
Speaker 3: called like economia, where the priest has leave to kind
Speaker 3: of grant you, let's say a little bit of latitude
Speaker 3: on certain things, given the circumstances of your situation. And
Speaker 3: I think that that that concept is applicable to civilization.
Speaker 3: But it's only and that like basically libertarianism on the
Speaker 3: in on the inside of society, whereas a hard shell
Speaker 3: facing the outside of society, that type of like kind
Speaker 3: of free market, free association where you kind of let
Speaker 3: let society run on its own substrates is only possible
Speaker 3: if you maintain the integrity of the society from the
Speaker 3: inside facing the outside.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 4: And it's sort of based in uh a similar a
Speaker 4: similar myth, the idea of the neutral institution. You know
Speaker 4: that an institution, whether it's the judiciary or you know, education,
Speaker 4: whichever can deal with can deal with everyone fairly, that
Speaker 4: it has no I guess a negative way to say it,
Speaker 4: but it has no sort of bias or prejudice built
Speaker 4: into it. Clearly that is is not the case. And
Speaker 4: you know, as regards this kind of mix of you know,
Speaker 4: authoritarian and libertarianism, it's like, well, to be honest, it's
Speaker 4: it's freedom to do what because you know, even when
Speaker 4: you look at the constitutional conservative types they hold up
Speaker 4: you know, the era of the American founding, the kind
Speaker 4: of first American republic or if they don't know a
Speaker 4: whole lot about history, kind of the first and second
Speaker 4: you know, pre Lincoln as this example of you know,
Speaker 4: maximal freedom. And it's like, well, well, sure like from
Speaker 4: a certain perspective, you have quite a lot of freedom.
Speaker 4: You don't really have to pay a lot in taxes.
Speaker 4: You know, no one can say, you know, no one
Speaker 4: can tell you not to you know, drop gamer words
Speaker 4: or you know where you can live. But at the
Speaker 4: same time, like your other forms of kind of modern
Speaker 4: freedoms are radically restricted. You have George Washington, for example,
Speaker 4: you know, executing soldiers for sodomy. There were blasphemy laws.
Speaker 4: You know, if you slept with another man's wife, you
Speaker 4: might well end up in a duel and get shot
Speaker 4: or lynched. So again, right, it is freedom to do
Speaker 4: what and that is highly cultural, culturally contextual, and also
Speaker 4: that depends on a certain certain common cultural understanding of
Speaker 4: what is and is not acceptable. And in a multicultural society,
Speaker 4: like there's a reason that you know when you can
Speaker 4: look at Aristotle, right, this leads to tyranny because there
Speaker 4: is no common cultural understanding for that small l libertarian
Speaker 4: amount of social freedom. And again I'll reference them twice,
Speaker 4: which will said chatting to just an absolute fit of
Speaker 4: rage is mold Budd makes this exact point where he
Speaker 4: talks about speaking to libertarians, where he says, you know,
Speaker 4: the libertarian's mistake is he thinks that he can bring
Speaker 4: about and capistan by acting as if it were already
Speaker 4: the case, by acting as sort of an agorist, and
Speaker 4: his point is, no, if you were a libertarian in
Speaker 4: the current moment, you should be a fascist. You know,
Speaker 4: you should advocate for, you know, the harshest police state
Speaker 4: in the world, because you know, once you have that,
Speaker 4: once you have that, you know, that perfect security, that
Speaker 4: perfect you know, assurance of punishment of wrongdoers, then that
Speaker 4: spontaneous order quote unquote can occur, but does not come
Speaker 4: out of Somalia. You know, it does not come out
Speaker 4: of you know, a lawless, decentralized society. It's plainly not
Speaker 4: the case. And so hey, we we've been been talking
Speaker 4: a lot about these of critiques of liberalism, these critiques
Speaker 4: of progressive liberalism, and one of the things that I
Speaker 4: can't stop talking about is many of these defenders of
Speaker 4: liberalism look at that, look at that attack on the
Speaker 4: idea of neutral institutions, look at that, attacks on ideas
Speaker 4: of secularism, and they say, well, that's exactly what that,
Speaker 4: in scare quotes woke left does. Therefore, because you criticize liberalism,
Speaker 4: you are woke. Therefore the woke right is born a
Speaker 4: subject I cannot stop writing long articles on. So I
Speaker 4: assume everyone listening to this is sick to hear me
Speaker 4: talk about it, but I'm curious to get your thoughts
Speaker 4: on that term.
Speaker 3: It's just beyond idiotic and I have negative patience for
Speaker 3: this type of attempt to shoehorn, say right wingers outside
Speaker 3: of that classic libertarian conventional oh sorry, classical liberal conventional
Speaker 3: libertarian motive politics, because it's kind of like you said,
Speaker 3: in terms of like the and caps they treat they
Speaker 3: try to precipitate and capistan by treating it, treating society
Speaker 3: as if it were already in Capistan. Classical liberals and
Speaker 3: libertarians they want to implement their policies as society exists,
Speaker 3: and that requires this having this kind of platonic ideal
Speaker 3: of what society currently is and then pretending as if
Speaker 3: that's the actual way it is. And so the classical
Speaker 3: liberals they deny this, but they still operate on the
Speaker 3: basis of this kind of blank slatism, this type of
Speaker 3: almost like dialectical evolution of society where we're all poor,
Speaker 3: we're all pulled towards this ultimate constitution idea, and if anything,
Speaker 3: whenever we stray from that idea, that's because that's not
Speaker 3: because of the actual society or constitution itself. That's just
Speaker 3: because that's just how it works. That's just a temporary setback,
Speaker 3: and we cannot lose faith in the ultimate project. And
Speaker 3: and it's about to be this kind of this kind
Speaker 3: of like self referential, self referential idea where like great
Speaker 3: real classical liberalism hasn't been tried, like it's the ideal
Speaker 3: project hasn't been achieved. But they and they and they
Speaker 3: point to this era of society. I don't even really
Speaker 3: know what area era of society they American society they
Speaker 3: point to to kind of justify this point. It's always
Speaker 3: kind of some ambiguous pleading to the founders or the
Speaker 3: Federal's papers. But then you have you have other founders
Speaker 3: who directly refute their kind of concept that of American
Speaker 3: society is this kind of uh, let's say, put potentially
Speaker 3: multicultural like utopia. I can't remember. I think it was
Speaker 3: I think it was James Monroe who who it was
Speaker 3: it was to Toke Folle and then James Monroe who
Speaker 3: were speaking of the constitution specifically for white Anglo Saxon Protestants.
Speaker 3: And then so it's this like degree of cherry picking,
Speaker 3: trade picking. The founders they want to idolize, and then
Speaker 3: even then what words of the founders they want to idolize.
Speaker 3: And it's absolutely a deification of the founding. Right in
Speaker 3: order in order to have this type of fealty to
Speaker 3: this classical liberal idea, you have to you have to
Speaker 3: you have to kind of elevate the Constitution to a
Speaker 3: sacred document one and two, you have to deify the founders.
Speaker 3: The Constitution and its processional nature is therefore infallible. The
Speaker 3: Constitutional conventions are comparable to the Nicean Councils. They're given
Speaker 3: this staff of infallibility. It is the American founding myth.
Speaker 3: And if you call that into question, that all of
Speaker 3: a sudden that you are a heretic. And that's how
Speaker 3: they treat you, like the woke word, attaching woke to
Speaker 3: these kind of like political categories, all that is a
Speaker 3: synonym for you've committed a heresy. And obviously some heretics
Speaker 3: are worse than others, are more destructive, but they're effectively
Speaker 3: tranching anyone with the woke label as an equally destructive
Speaker 3: heretic and making no distinction between quote unquote heresies.
Speaker 4: Well, and the thing that bothers me about this is
Speaker 4: that they're not even and this was proven by Joel
Speaker 4: Berry's I think it was Joel Berry. I didn't watch it.
Speaker 4: I can't listen to him debate with Dave Green, the
Speaker 4: distributist or. Dave Green asked him a very simple question, right,
Speaker 4: is Thomas Jeffers and racist? Because you know, if you're
Speaker 4: an adult about it, regardless of your opinion on Thomas Jefferson,
Speaker 4: you can say, well, yes, probably by the standards of
Speaker 4: our time. But you know, I don't view that as
Speaker 4: you know, affecting other things we could or couldn't take
Speaker 4: from it. You know, it's not a sainted figure. You're
Speaker 4: simply a man, a cringe atheist, but you know, impressive
Speaker 4: in other ways. But the reason that the constitutional conservative
Speaker 4: position is especially ridiculous is that they truly are the
Speaker 4: progressives of yesteryear, and so they have to hold that,
Speaker 4: you know, simultaneously, are all of these founders sainted figures?
Speaker 4: But also they were so ahead of their time they
Speaker 4: could see into the future, and what they actually meant
Speaker 4: was something in between, you know, kind of like Ronald
Speaker 4: Reagan and you know Bill Clinton's Democratic Party platform. That's
Speaker 4: what they really meant. It's this idea that because they
Speaker 4: are infallible, and this is what I think they must
Speaker 4: you know, have all along, you've been in accordance with
Speaker 4: exactly what I think. And the progressive types run rings
Speaker 4: about them on this issue because it's it's plainly clear
Speaker 4: by again the standards of the modern left that all
Speaker 4: these men were horrifically racist, again in scare quotes, by
Speaker 4: the standards of the day. But it's because of simultaneously
Speaker 4: that kind of like deification where they must be perfect,
Speaker 4: and also the problem of deep down effectively just being progressive.
Speaker 4: And so in a way i'd almost I wouldn't agree
Speaker 4: with it, but I almost respect the position more if
Speaker 4: it were. Yes, they were, and it's awesome. You know,
Speaker 4: I want to literally, to quote Alex Jones, you know,
Speaker 4: seventeen seventy six will commence again, warts and all. But
Speaker 4: it's not that, you know, it's this sort of ten
Speaker 4: tactical invocation where you know, it is sort of bringing
Speaker 4: these figures kind of like we're casting yourself as a
Speaker 4: you know, strict constitutionalist doing exactly what you know, the
Speaker 4: sounding document said, while also kind of twisting them to
Speaker 4: meet modern standards. I am, you know, a Protestant, albeit
Speaker 4: you know, not a particularly uh when you read enough
Speaker 4: to meister right, it kind of throws you for a loop.
Speaker 4: But to me it reminds me very much of the
Speaker 4: Catholic critiques of Soul's scriptura, the idea that you know,
Speaker 4: scripture is you know, entirely preminent. You know, it's this
Speaker 4: for this literalist interpretation, because you see a sort of
Speaker 4: echo in that in the you know, constitutional liter literalists.
Speaker 4: Excuse me, it's light here, and in both cases, I
Speaker 4: maybe I shouldn't say that, but I in both of
Speaker 4: those I see a certain degree of cope because again,
Speaker 4: as we see both, you know, in the example of
Speaker 4: scripture and in law, what matters is not what's written
Speaker 4: on the page. What matters is who interprets it right,
Speaker 4: And that becomes the Schmidtian question, right, who decides? And
Speaker 4: so to me, that's what one of the many things
Speaker 4: I find frustrating is about these you know, constitutional conservative
Speaker 4: types that we could consider, you know, their their ancestors
Speaker 4: to be right, or their predecessors to be successors, excuse me,
Speaker 4: to be the sort of you know, good classical liberals,
Speaker 4: the IDW types who still kind of run around. But
Speaker 4: ultimately there is that law right, that that fundamental misunderstanding
Speaker 4: that you know, the law as written actually matters, and
Speaker 4: I think that there is a theological route to that,
Speaker 4: but I'll kick it back to you.
Speaker 3: I will add one of one of the hilarious things
Speaker 3: about constitutional conservatives in our quotes is often very they
Speaker 3: like to call themselves a originalist originalists. There's a couple
Speaker 3: of different schools the constitutional interpretation. There's originalism, purposivism, and textualism. Right,
Speaker 3: Anton Scalia was a different different Conservative judges of the
Speaker 3: Court like, they typically plead to the thing called originalism,
Speaker 3: where it's like interpreting the Constitution from the lens of
Speaker 3: the founder, or the lens in the perspective or the
Speaker 3: historical president of the time that was originally written in
Speaker 3: And so these makes the kind of jewel berrys joel
Speaker 3: Berry's retort to the distributists even more interesting and kind
Speaker 3: of incoherent, because if you actually look at the perspectives
Speaker 3: of the founders at the time that the Constitution was written,
Speaker 3: and we interpret the Constitution from that lens, what do
Speaker 3: we think the new kind of prevailing sets of precedent
Speaker 3: would be if we were actually originalist, Well, there would
Speaker 3: be no civil rights framework, there would be there would
Speaker 3: be none of this kind of this kind of progressive
Speaker 3: what have you read into the Constitution. And so it's
Speaker 3: like by the very fact that you can have and
Speaker 3: this is kind of Socrates. By Socrates preferred the spoken
Speaker 3: word the written word. When things get put into writing,
Speaker 3: there is a effectively a barrier between the person writing
Speaker 3: and the person reading it. And you can interpret interpret
Speaker 3: the same sentence and obviously how many different ways. And
Speaker 3: that's effectively how how the judiciary works. You can read
Speaker 3: almost anything you want that's politically expedient into the Constitution.
Speaker 3: You can try to put bounds on it by these
Speaker 3: different interpretive schools, but effectively you're still just doing the
Speaker 3: same thing because any like and this is kind of
Speaker 3: like the problem with doing quote unquote history even from
Speaker 3: an originalist interpretation, you're still a modern person trying to
Speaker 3: understand the historical context of the founders, and so therefore
Speaker 3: you are still there's still multiple points of mediation, like
Speaker 3: or points of distance, points of error between you and
Speaker 3: the founders. And so this type of this entire type
Speaker 3: of frame that the Constitution works as long as we
Speaker 3: as long as we defer back to the Founders is
Speaker 3: ridiculous on its face, and it's it's incoherent because it's like, sure,
Speaker 3: we can extrapolate the mentalities of the Founders, but there's
Speaker 3: many Founders and they came from many different schools of thought.
Speaker 3: So it's what motivation behind the Constitution, even from an
Speaker 3: originalist perspective, are we pursuing? And so this is the
Speaker 3: entire problem with this deification of the Constitution. The Constitution
Speaker 3: it has to run on a substrate, and that substrate
Speaker 3: is the people itself. And so when you had this
Speaker 3: idea that like, and I've seen Joe Barry tweet that
Speaker 3: I don't remember off off the top of my head,
Speaker 3: but it was like, it'd be preferential to have like
Speaker 3: browns compared to the woke, right. I cannot remember the quote,
Speaker 3: but that was the general sentiment I remember, And it's like, okay,
Speaker 3: so then you don't actually respect like the milieu of
Speaker 3: the founders because that would have been incomprehensible to the founders.
Speaker 3: But even being I believe it was Monroe or Madison,
Speaker 3: I don't remember, but I remember like reading this quote
Speaker 3: from one of the founders that was effectively like it
Speaker 3: is entirely possible that we will have a Mohammedan as
Speaker 3: president of the United States, and he expresses of woe
Speaker 3: the day that occurs. But within this framework, that is
Speaker 3: entirely possible. So it was not a foregone conclusion when
Speaker 3: the Framers wrote the Institution that this our current situation
Speaker 3: was a possibility. In fact, it was thrown out there
Speaker 3: as a possibility. And so like from that perspective, your
Speaker 3: view of the Constitution as a success or a failure
Speaker 3: just depends on your ability to reckon with the acceptability
Speaker 3: of being replaced or being subjucated, subjugated by by foreign cultures,
Speaker 3: foreign peoples in your own nation, do you have such
Speaker 3: little legions to your nation or culture that that is
Speaker 3: an acceptable proposition? And for people and for constitual conservatives,
Speaker 3: people like Joe Berry, if they are truly originalist or
Speaker 3: they are truly differing back to the Founders, it must
Speaker 3: be an acceptable proposition because that is what the founders
Speaker 3: viewed as a potential, inevitable and evitability of the document
Speaker 3: that they created.
Speaker 4: Well, and one of the things that I think is interesting,
Speaker 4: and this kind of dovetails with your recent kind of
Speaker 4: Twitter posting about student debt, but also with a lot
Speaker 4: of the data I'm seeing from Mark Mitchell at Resmusen
Speaker 4: about specifically Generation Z is that the sort of pre
Speaker 4: existing political theology is completely and totally dead. It was
Speaker 4: sort of, you know, gradually losing steam. The state religion
Speaker 4: was no longer able to produce political miracles anymore. And
Speaker 4: so you know, there's several subsequent generations who believed in
Speaker 4: it less, you know, they didn't hold to the same
Speaker 4: kind of sacred strictures of you know, impartiality or into
Speaker 4: the belief in you know, the rule of law, democratic norms.
Speaker 4: Right as someone might say, because to be perfectly honest,
Speaker 4: I don't actually care about the Constitution one way or
Speaker 4: the other. Right, there's stuff and I like their stuff,
Speaker 4: and I don't. And when it helps me, right, when
Speaker 4: there's court case going and you know, a strict literalist
Speaker 4: interpretation of the Constitution gets me what I want, then great.
Speaker 4: If not, who cares? And what Mitchell has done it
Speaker 4: Resmussen is basically go through and ask people in our
Speaker 4: rough age demographic number of questions and basically he's found
Speaker 4: that it's like almost sixty percent that basically want a
Speaker 4: dictator and look like I'm not a populist. You know,
Speaker 4: I don't believe that there's some magic significance in a
Speaker 4: lot of people wanting something, but I think it is
Speaker 4: an interesting sort of trailing indicator of the decline of
Speaker 4: liberalism per se, right, the decline of the belief in
Speaker 4: these institutions, the belief in you know, these sort of
Speaker 4: kind of lies that we've laid out earlier. And you know,
Speaker 4: among that sixty percent, and who knows, I might be
Speaker 4: wrong on that number. I saw it on Twitter several
Speaker 4: days ago, so forgive me on that. But I'm not
Speaker 4: naive enough to assume that you know, every one of
Speaker 4: those people is you know, reading through their you know,
Speaker 4: the kind of required reading list of you know, right
Speaker 4: wing reactionaries. Not at all. But I do think, you know,
Speaker 4: you see a sort of a political belief already dead,
Speaker 4: kind of dead on its feet, because you know, ultimately
Speaker 4: all these things we're talking about, like that that phrasing
Speaker 4: of the woke right is basically everyone who isn't a
Speaker 4: liberal is woke. But that basically just means everyone, and
Speaker 4: so effectively, the only people who still believe in that
Speaker 4: system like fully and truly are effectively like loser conservatives
Speaker 4: if you see what I'm getting at there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, I think in terms of people, I
Speaker 3: believe the number was fifty seven percent. I saw that.
Speaker 3: I saw that as well.
Speaker 4: Okay, three percent off as far as my ability to
Speaker 4: remember stats, not too bad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I was. I was very surprised. Like I'm partial,
Speaker 3: Like so I'm partial to monarchy as a system. I haven't.
Speaker 3: I've thought through a lot of different ideal systems, and
Speaker 3: I kind of from my position, let's say, in history,
Speaker 3: I have a hard time envisioning the United States transitioning
Speaker 3: to anything other than liberalism, just because liberalism in the
Speaker 3: United States has worked so long and it has made
Speaker 3: us a global superpower. And so just from a pragmatic,
Speaker 3: like power based perspective, liberalism has put us on top.
Speaker 3: But at what costs, And that cost is kind of
Speaker 3: this this cultural and historical sense of identity, sense of place,
Speaker 3: sense of belonging. And but we've gotten to the point
Speaker 3: where I believe, quote unquote history is accelerate, is accelerating
Speaker 3: there there there are more and more asymmetries popping up,
Speaker 3: and you kind of on the student loan point, like
Speaker 3: one of these main a symmetries is oftentimes I see
Speaker 3: and just as a caveat, I don't have any student
Speaker 3: loans like this is not from a motivated perspective. In fact,
Speaker 3: i'd be just from what I've seen, I should be
Speaker 3: disincentivized from advocating for student loans dischargeable and bankruptcy. But
Speaker 3: from like a pragmatic perspective, it does not. There is
Speaker 3: a fundamental asymmetry introduced when you prevent when you prevent
Speaker 3: student loans from being dischargeable bankruptcy, and that is obviously
Speaker 3: it allows for an unfettered ballooning of university budgets because
Speaker 3: if something cannot be discharged, you're even from let's say
Speaker 3: the libertarian visa's perspective, when you when you institute or
Speaker 3: regulation like that, you're introducing an inherent market. And official
Speaker 3: should see and we have seen that. You've seen if
Speaker 3: you've seen the called the cost of college graphs, like
Speaker 3: after two thousand and two, after there was a blanket
Speaker 3: ban on dischargeability of student loans. Since two thousand and two, uh,
Speaker 3: the cost of college has let's say, rapidly increased compared
Speaker 3: to all other all other categories of analysis on the CPI,
Speaker 3: and so the asymmetry here created is an asymmetry in
Speaker 3: preference to institutions and corporations effectively at the direct expense
Speaker 3: of the average citizen of the country. And and not
Speaker 3: to like, uh, not to crap all over the boomers
Speaker 3: too much, but the people you hear kind of this
Speaker 3: list meme where it's like luxury boomer communism, it's luxury
Speaker 3: boomer communism the at the spins of the rest of society.
Speaker 3: And so there's an acceleration of these asymmetries, and it
Speaker 3: almost seems to be I don't know if that's kind of,
Speaker 3: let's say, an emergent phenomenon, or if the asymmetries are
Speaker 3: the point, because we know in certain and certain strains
Speaker 3: of Marxism the entire kind of mo is acceleration of
Speaker 3: the contradictions, and so a widening, widening asymmetries are effectively
Speaker 3: an acceleration of the contradiction. So it creates societal unrest.
Speaker 3: But what's confusing, too is despite all of these increasingly
Speaker 3: large asymmetries, you if you look around, you like, our
Speaker 3: economy is not that bad. Like people aren't I mean,
Speaker 3: outside of let's say New York. Instantly, people aren't necessarily
Speaker 3: starving in the streets, like on mass scale, like poverty,
Speaker 3: like poverty now is much lower compared to the nineteen
Speaker 3: twenties or the nineteen fifties, And so it's like you
Speaker 3: have this degree of let's say, like cognitive dissonance where
Speaker 3: you look around and things are not that bad, but
Speaker 3: you feel this kind of sense of civilizational foreboding. And
Speaker 3: I think that that that's a degree that that dissonance
Speaker 3: is created because of these increasingly large asymmetries where society
Speaker 3: just does not seem to break or move regardless of
Speaker 3: how large these asymmetries become. And so I think, I
Speaker 3: think that's like creating a sense of unease because there
Speaker 3: there is clearly like a mechanistic a mechanistic contradiction happening here.
Speaker 3: And I think what going going in the future is
Speaker 3: going Who has power in the future is just going
Speaker 3: to depend on who capitalizes on this dissonance.
Speaker 4: Well, and I find myself in somewhat of a similar
Speaker 4: situation with housing prices, right Like I own a house
Speaker 4: relatively recently. It would be kind of convenient for me
Speaker 4: if that asset just kept inflating forever. But something needs
Speaker 4: to happen there, and going back to you know, Mitchell's data,
Speaker 4: this has been one of the really interesting things. Like,
Speaker 4: I'm not a huge voter, not a huge democracy guy
Speaker 4: per se, but you do have this sort of critical
Speaker 4: mass of primarily young white men who swung hard for
Speaker 4: Trump and have very quickly abandoned him in a relatively
Speaker 4: short amount of time. And at least according to Mitchell
Speaker 4: right that that was effectively a protest vote. Right, of
Speaker 4: this is not working for us. You can look at
Speaker 4: educational data, you can look at any sort of other
Speaker 4: method of you know, kind of tracking achievement, and the
Speaker 4: young people wouldever constitute that to be are not doing
Speaker 4: very well.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 4: If you dig into the you know, the economic stats,
Speaker 4: you see a very similar thing. And particularly for the GOP,
Speaker 4: they're in kind of a tough spot because you know,
Speaker 4: their largest voting block is Gen X, and after that
Speaker 4: the Boomers, who are proportionately quite wealthy. But the day
Speaker 4: of the pillow is nigh, right, Boomers are about to
Speaker 4: hit fifty percent mortality, and of course we understand that
Speaker 4: that moves much much much more quickly once you get
Speaker 4: past the fifty percent mark. And so at the same
Speaker 4: time we were both seeing a sort of ideological shift,
Speaker 4: you know, where the boomers who have the kind of
Speaker 4: current or not the current, but the kind of dying
Speaker 4: version of the American Republic, you know, like the FDR
Speaker 4: regime and then the kind of you know Patch put
Speaker 4: in in sixty four. They believe that more than almost
Speaker 4: anyone else, their children slightly less, their grandchildren even less.
Speaker 4: You see this on both the left and the right.
Speaker 4: You know, more and more people on the left are
Speaker 4: describing themselves as socialists. You know, they're rejecting albeit not
Speaker 4: at a fundamental level, right, but they are rejecting the
Speaker 4: kind of stricters of liberalism. So you have this both
Speaker 4: this kind of incredible economic and achievement on the ease
Speaker 4: that you were talking about, mixed with a sort of
Speaker 4: political shift. I think it's a very interesting and sort
Speaker 4: of exciting time to be in the discourse as it's described.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: Well, one of the other things I think that's interesting,
Speaker 4: and this is masic. This is my personal thoughts on
Speaker 4: the kind of student loans, which is like a very
Speaker 4: basic patronage point, which is the education system universities. The
Speaker 4: people who make their money from that are not my friends.
Speaker 4: They don't believe anything in common with me, and I
Speaker 4: did not particularly enjoy my time there for you know,
Speaker 4: political reasons as well as just you know, social ones.
Speaker 4: But why would you go to the mat right, alienate
Speaker 4: potential allies for the sake of a group of people
Speaker 4: that hate you? University professors, we understand their politics broadly speaking,
Speaker 4: and to me, setting aside any kind of principle of argument,
Speaker 4: just on a pure patronage level analysis, there's a very
Speaker 4: clear answer, which is take resources from your enemies to
Speaker 4: buy yourself new friends.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: Our opponents understand this quite well. And you know, I
Speaker 4: think that that sort of kind of you know, what
Speaker 4: Francis would have called, like the beautiful loser mentality, you know,
Speaker 4: the idea that you know, I will stick to the
Speaker 4: you know, the rules as written, the kind of you know,
Speaker 4: originalist constitution or you know, the kind of you know,
Speaker 4: upstanding correct way of doing politics. I mean, I'm not
Speaker 4: the biggest fan of Trump, but I do think that
Speaker 4: the the people who cried about him, you know, shattering
Speaker 4: democratic norms again in scare quotes, they weren't entirely wrong,
Speaker 4: and it was less that he shattered them and more
Speaker 4: realized that had become they had sort of ossified and
Speaker 4: become guardrails, right, and within that box you would never win.
Speaker 4: Albeit you know, he is far from you know, the
Speaker 4: sort of genuine reformer, you know, restructuring needed. But I
Speaker 4: think that that's another kind of interesting, interesting symptom I
Speaker 4: guess of that. So sorry, I threw a bunch at you. Heygil,
Speaker 4: I'll give you a chance to respond.
Speaker 3: And I think just in terms of the protecting institutions,
Speaker 3: I think that's just a simple consequence of like, well,
Speaker 3: there's there's this weird kind of contradiction amongst the boomers. Uh,
Speaker 3: they have this they have this almost institutional fetishism, fetishism
Speaker 3: while simultaneously being kind of the fledgling generation that attempted
Speaker 3: to usurp the institutions. The entire kind of woods Stock
Speaker 3: generation was, let's just say was was anti institution in
Speaker 3: the sense that they thought that there is an old
Speaker 3: way of doing things that they they should personally take
Speaker 3: the mantle and overturn. They weren't necessarily anti institution, and
Speaker 3: that they wanted to abolish the institutions, but they wanted
Speaker 3: they wanted to take them, they wanted to seize them.
Speaker 3: And I think if we contrast this two let's just say,
Speaker 3: the conservative way of approaching that tends to be parallelism
Speaker 3: instead of instead of let's say, sieging the institutions, like
Speaker 3: doing what is necessary at whatever costs to get those
Speaker 3: institutions back, the conservatives would rather see them even if
Speaker 3: there is still a degree of deference for them, and
Speaker 3: create parallel ones. And these parallel ones, I mean you
Speaker 3: so to kind of site redeemed Zuomer. I don't know
Speaker 3: if you're familiar with him. He's like, he's a Presbyterian,
Speaker 3: the PCUSA church, and he specifically chose to to join
Speaker 3: the more let's say, the original, the original branch the
Speaker 3: Presterian Church, despite the fact that they allow female priests
Speaker 3: or whatever pastors, and despite the fact that they endorse
Speaker 3: in certain in certain churches LGBTQ stuff. His idea was
Speaker 3: that consistently within the history of prostism, it has been
Speaker 3: Protestants leaving the established institutions and creating their own institutions
Speaker 3: when the other institutions become more liberal. So the reason
Speaker 3: why I joined the pc USA church because I'm trying
Speaker 3: to retake the institution from the inside. He's like a
Speaker 3: to for lack of a better term or phrase, like
Speaker 3: a one man kind of in reconquiste conserve entist if
Speaker 3: you will. Yeah, And I like the idea behind that,
Speaker 3: But the problem is it's just, for some reason, the
Speaker 3: position of the conservative American is just not geared towards
Speaker 3: that idea of retaking institutions. It's always parallelism. Let's create
Speaker 3: our parallel institutions. The problem is that you're giving You're
Speaker 3: just freely giving the reins uninhibited to the progressive cause
Speaker 3: of all these historical institutions. You're just giving them these
Speaker 3: culture making apparatuses and just hoping and hoping and praying
Speaker 3: that your parallel institution ends up being successful and ends
Speaker 3: up having similar cultural weight, which it almost never does.
Speaker 3: So and I tried to interrogate this where it's like,
Speaker 3: why is this kind of the base impulse of the
Speaker 3: American right? Why is parallelism the base impulse? I don't
Speaker 3: understand why we were have been perpetually in this frame
Speaker 3: of parallelism as opposed to the kind of left wing
Speaker 3: frame where it's like, if you have a problem with
Speaker 3: the institutions, let's capture them. And I'm hopeful that with
Speaker 3: gen Z, like the seven percent ras musem poll. I'm
Speaker 3: hopeful that that's changing and we're getting a bit more
Speaker 3: of an energetic propulsion on the right that that is
Speaker 3: enough to recapture some of the institutions that's opposed to
Speaker 3: just default to this parallelism. But I don't really see
Speaker 3: a lot of historical precedent for the right recapturing an
Speaker 3: integral institution once it has been culturally infiltrated. There's there's
Speaker 3: flight oscillations like we'll get it back for a little bit,
Speaker 3: or will exert some influence, but like it just ultimately
Speaker 3: reverts that base state of kind of progressivism. And so
Speaker 3: I don't know, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on
Speaker 3: how we can kind of create that propulsion for recapture
Speaker 3: as compared to parallelism.
Speaker 4: Yes, there's several things there. This is a point from
Speaker 4: land I think it's the chapter Cracker Factory in Dark Enlightenment,
Speaker 4: which is it's to be honest, it's hilarious as well
Speaker 4: as insightful. But his point is effectively that the Anglo
Speaker 4: mode of conflict resolution is effectively you fight it out
Speaker 4: and then the loser leaves to start their own thing.
Speaker 4: You could look at the English Civil War, right the
Speaker 4: Formation of America all the way down to modern day
Speaker 4: white flight. The idea is, you know, okay, well I
Speaker 4: can't have my culture here, so I'll go make my own.
Speaker 4: And I think a large part of that is you
Speaker 4: could look at it's kind of like ebagenetic almost. But
Speaker 4: also I think that the problem for conservatives with that
Speaker 4: sort of entry is that the force which effectively the
Speaker 4: progressives are aligned with entropy, and so you know, there's
Speaker 4: sort of a certain gravity to what they do. You know,
Speaker 4: it is much more difficult to you know, deprogressive ize
Speaker 4: something than it is to you know, to make it
Speaker 4: more kind of leftist. And so to me, I guess
Speaker 4: I see, you know, parallelism as a entirely rational short
Speaker 4: to medium term strategy because of the sort of power
Speaker 4: imbalance there that you know, if this is sort of
Speaker 4: a fifty to fifty struggle, then fair enough. But I
Speaker 4: don't necessarily see how with one guy and I made
Speaker 4: this point to redeemed Sumer and I am now blocked
Speaker 4: on the interne locked on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Did he really?
Speaker 4: It was years It was years ago. I got upset
Speaker 4: about it. But uh, you know, point is, so I
Speaker 4: think that you were entirely correct, and that attitude of
Speaker 4: eternal retreat, of you know, splintering forever, you know, finding
Speaker 4: the three guys who agree with you and starting your
Speaker 4: own thing is incorrect. But to me, you know, when
Speaker 4: I look at you know, the boards my friends from
Speaker 4: South Africa, you know, I think of an article written
Speaker 4: by I think it's Ernst Roots or Ernst ven Zeel,
Speaker 4: one of the Ernsts you know, wrote this article where
Speaker 4: he compared it to you know, digging a trench. And
Speaker 4: this was an article that was very impactful on me
Speaker 4: shortly before I entered, you know, the kind of internet world,
Speaker 4: you know, living after school, and you know, one of
Speaker 4: many kind of you know, godless progressive American urban centers.
Speaker 4: And his point was there is a time for retreat tactically,
Speaker 4: but you do not do that, to retreat forever. You retreat,
Speaker 4: to dig a trench, to make something defensible, to make
Speaker 4: something you can fight for. And to me, you know,
Speaker 4: the answer is neither, you know, progressivism or entryism as
Speaker 4: one universal strategy. This gets back to our point about
Speaker 4: like the Constitution or any particular law. It's like, well,
Speaker 4: there is a time for each And in my mind
Speaker 4: I completely understand, you know, the rationale that says, look like,
Speaker 4: you know, I am barred from you know, certain jobs,
Speaker 4: I'm barred from a certain place. I must you know,
Speaker 4: support my family. So there's an element of retreat to that, right,
Speaker 4: find something. But once you were there, right, that institution,
Speaker 4: that thing that you were building, that thing that you
Speaker 4: were making, must be defended. And you know, I see
Speaker 4: this in my own religious community. I see it in
Speaker 4: you know, in others, and so to me, I guess
Speaker 4: I may disagree with you on parallelism because I think
Speaker 4: that it is entirely rational in the short to mid term.
Speaker 4: It's not an eternal strategy, but I mean, hell, you
Speaker 4: can even look at uh, you know, arn't. Younger makes
Speaker 4: a very similar point in the Forest Passage and umswell
Speaker 4: both right that you know, when faced with kind of
Speaker 4: a you know, a toutalitarian system or a totalizing system,
Speaker 4: is one might more accurately say that a direct you know,
Speaker 4: head on, full frontal assault, you'll be squished like a buck.
Speaker 4: But I'll give it back to you. I guess that's
Speaker 4: kind of my thoughts on it, at least initially.
Speaker 3: But then on the other point, if you look at
Speaker 3: like let's say, like Ernst Youngers, let's say contrarianism to
Speaker 3: the Nazi regime. He he was still involved in the
Speaker 3: institution and he and he was contrariant to it, or
Speaker 3: he was let's say, opposed to it as it was
Speaker 3: comporting itself, and that ended up getting his son killed.
Speaker 3: And so kind of like there's still like I don't
Speaker 3: think we can compartmental life. It's like there's no such
Speaker 3: thing I think as discrete kind of parallelism, and that's attempted,
Speaker 3: but you're still under the shadow of these institutions, like
Speaker 3: and that was a very real consequence in Art's Younger's life,
Speaker 3: like his his kind of antagonism to the Nazi regime
Speaker 3: got his son killed in Italy, and so and that's
Speaker 3: kind of I don't necessarily disagree with you that it
Speaker 3: may be a good tactical decision in the short term,
Speaker 3: but ultimately it has to be a tactical decision positioning
Speaker 3: yourself to ultimately confront the main institutions itself. And it
Speaker 3: seems like that just that seems to not be the case,
Speaker 3: Like like the just from deferring back to redeemed Zumer situation,
Speaker 3: the I believe it's p USA as opposed to pc USA.
Speaker 3: I can't remember the other Presbyterian branch, but they are
Speaker 3: not necessarily directly antagonistic or trying to poach members of
Speaker 3: pc USA. They're kind of they're kind of in this
Speaker 3: mode of I just want to be left alone, just
Speaker 3: do not subvert this new institution I've created, And that's
Speaker 3: kind of been the conservative, like like the conservative conservative
Speaker 3: kind of mentality, I just want to be left alone,
Speaker 3: and the progressive mentalities I want to consume all things,
Speaker 3: like I want everything to be under my thumb. And
Speaker 3: so it's kind of when you have that, when you
Speaker 3: have those two kind of like fundamentally opposite dispositions, one
Speaker 3: is going to prevail. And like I said, I think
Speaker 3: parallelism is a completely rational, pragmatic decision. The problem is,
Speaker 3: I do not think it is sustainable when you when
Speaker 3: your enemy is held bent on subsubing every single institution
Speaker 3: created in parallel or not. And Eric Hoffer has this
Speaker 3: really good quote where he said, the kind of benefit
Speaker 3: of the leftist, so the progressive, is that people who
Speaker 3: lack things, or who think they lack things, are willing
Speaker 3: to fight and die for that which they do not have,
Speaker 3: but people who have are not willing to fight and
Speaker 3: die for that which they already possess. And so the
Speaker 3: entire progressive mode of operation, because it's just like devouring,
Speaker 3: it's this desire to devour, a desire to pull society,
Speaker 3: and this idolized direction that has not yet been obtained.
Speaker 3: They can frame and they can exist in this mentality
Speaker 3: where no matter how much they achieve or how many
Speaker 3: institutions they capture, it's still not enough. They do not
Speaker 3: have that kind of critical threshold that they desire to
Speaker 3: completely terrorform society. And so whereas conservatives there are let's say,
Speaker 3: more willing to be content, more willing to be contented
Speaker 3: with what they have or what they can't create, and
Speaker 3: so there isn't this kind of drive that is extant
Speaker 3: among the progressives to capture that which they think they
Speaker 3: do not have, because they think what they have is sufficient.
Speaker 3: And so that's kind of my my view. And like
Speaker 3: the critical flaw of like discrete parallelism as a as
Speaker 3: a governing strategy is it's doomed to fail just just
Speaker 3: by virtue of who the enemy is in position to
Speaker 3: who we are, or like what motivates us but obviously,
Speaker 3: like you said, like the progressive position is inclined toward entropy,
Speaker 3: order takes it like order takes a lot more energy
Speaker 3: injected into the system to actually like for thisstem to
Speaker 3: actually order itself. If the progressive kind of the progressive
Speaker 3: directionality is always in tropic, there's not. It's kind of effortless.
Speaker 3: It's an effortless, effortless march, whereas going against that requires
Speaker 3: an asymmetric amount of energy to be expended, which makes
Speaker 3: the parallels I'm totally understandable on an individual act or perspective,
Speaker 3: but as like, if we kind of scale out and
Speaker 3: look at the course of history, it's going to be
Speaker 3: a doomed a doomed strategy. I fear.
Speaker 4: It's a bug man Hagel. We're a little bit over time.
Speaker 4: It's been a fascinating discussion. Where can people find you?
Speaker 4: They want more of your work?
Speaker 3: I'm just on Twitter now. I started a podcast like
Speaker 3: two years ago, but I started getting nervous with being
Speaker 3: let's say, getting exposed and docs. I kind of like
Speaker 3: to keep my online presence and my offline presence discreete
Speaker 3: but so mainly Twitter, my handle is fed posting my
Speaker 3: use name is bug Man Hegel. You can just find
Speaker 3: me there.
Speaker 4: Well, sure thing. And also there's a few other interviews
Speaker 4: out there pretty good with you on them. Maybe link
Speaker 4: one or two of those in the description. As far
Speaker 4: as my stuff, Jay Burdens Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, this
Speaker 4: is what I do full time. If you want to
Speaker 4: support me, you can throw me a few bucks a
Speaker 4: month on Patreon, Substack or gum Road. You hit the
Speaker 4: episodes early in ad free. I know they're annoying, the ads,
Speaker 4: but I got a mortgage, guys, what can I say? Also,
Speaker 4: you can check out our sponsor, Axious Remote Fitness Coaching.
Speaker 4: JD's a good business man, he's a good friend. You
Speaker 4: should support him. And look, I've gone to enough of
Speaker 4: these events I met you guys. Some of you could
Speaker 4: use some personal training, so check out JD's work for that. Again,
Speaker 4: buck Man Hegel, it was great speaking to you.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4: Never keep your het up.
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