Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Peaking Yana
Show returning see Jangle, how you doing, CJ doing good?
Speaker 2: Pete?
Speaker 1: Thanks. So let's see how many people we can really
trigger today. Let's do it's let's talk about rights.
Speaker 2: All right?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: What is that? I don't even know what that is anymore.
I used to hear about it all the time. There's
always like a qualifier is behind it. But once you
start getting and getting down to it and thinking about it,
it's like, well, what's anybody talking about? So when you
hear the term rights, what do you think?
Speaker 3: I think about subversion? Like that's the first thing I
hear is like rights. There's a historical aspect to our
heritage that includes rights rhetoric. There's been a place for that.
But I think if you're still talking about rights in
twenty twenty four, you don't realize that the entire tapestry
that sustained us for hundreds of years has been completely
burned to the ground, and now rights are mechanism by
which the regime can instill its own totalitarian vision on
Heritage America in the Heritage West. So I really think
that when we hear rights, we need to think about
them occupying us culturally, morally, spiritually, and in every aspect
of our society. Rights has always been, or not always been,
but in the last several decades it's been the justification
by which it burns us to the ground.
Speaker 1: One can argue that that has nothing to do with rights. Rights.
You know, it's like anarchy. Anarchy just means without rulers.
Speaker 2: Bro.
Speaker 1: You know, you just have to understand, you have to
be able to if you don't know Greek or Latin,
don't even use the word.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But when it comes when it comes to rights, people
are going to say, well, the fact that rights are
being used improperly doesn't make it doesn't mean that rights
need to be thrown away or negated. They'll never make
that same argument about the state. They always want the
state to go away, But rights, I mean, how do
we how do we live without rights?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I think the best way to approach politics is that phrase,
the purpose of a system is what it does, and
rights were something that once sustained us and now something
that's leveraged against us. So if you think about that
paradigm right, like we've all been sharing, you know, the
Wikipedia entry the purpose of a system is what it does.
And when you when you address politics and you try
to interpret the means by which they're justifying their own
regime behavior and their own regime objectives, that's that's where
politics lies. So rights is something that we have to
interpret within the context of our own political dynamics. You know,
when we sit there and we blueprint out the ideal
society or how society should actually function in some utopian situation,
we're actually deviating from the purpose of politics. The purpose
of politics is to leverage and weaponize our own interests
based on what we can do and based on what
we want to see to protect ourselves from our enemies
and push back against it. And right now, our enemies
are the ones that set the framing, they set the
rhetorical dynamics, and they're the ones that set you know,
they're the ones that define everything. They control the institutions,
they control political theory, and they're the ones that are
weaponizing words like rights for their own purposes. So I
don't think we I mean, we can sit there and
we can talk about the historical nature of rights, but
we also have to understand that rights were born within
a specific political and cultural, even ethnic context and to
rip those out and apply it to today. I think
it undermines our own ability to act politically and to
think in a realistic way. So like, well, I'm sure
we'll get into people like burn them and the Machiavellians
and people like that. But when when you understand the
particularistic nature of political rhetoric, you understand that you can't
rely on idealized and universalized paradigms in order to protect
yourself from our political enemies.
Speaker 1: What I've been told by people who are a lot
smarter than I am is that there's this thing called
natural rights, and that natural rights are just inherent. They
cannot be in no way, shape or form. Can you
argue against them, because they just stand up to nature.
They're a part of There is natural as breathing. If
we don't have if we don't breathe, we die. If
we don't have natural rights, we die.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think I think that's sort of a that's that
world has basically been liquidated. And I think that natural
rights were something that came out of a specific context
and there's no justification or rational I mean, you don't
look out nature and see rights. You have to realize
that when we talk about rights, we're actually talking about
something that was rooted in a social situation. Like I
love this phrase. Paul Gottfried uses it in so of
a place is socially situated. And you'll notice that there's
all these other civilizations out there, there's all these other
cultures out there, and none of them seem to have
picked up on what we call natural rights. And so
this idea that there's this nature out there and that
as individual human beings we can look out and we
can discover these things. It's actually not something that's universally applicable,
but it's actually something that's much more culturally contextual. That's
something that came out of our own struggle, in our
own historical context. And so I would distinguish between inherited
rights and natural rights. And I think that natural rights
cannot be, you know, rationally sustained. I think the inherited
rights are something that can be within specific contexts, you know,
and then you have the question of what happens once
our inheritance has been completely decimated, you know, and then
you know, what is the role for rights? Then, So
a lot of like if you look at the rhetoric
of the neo conservatives and the neoliberals and you know,
and the people in the eighties nineties, and they've totally
adopted this paradigm of natural rights, and you begin to
learn that the rights that are suddenly you know, permanent
and natural and universal are all of these things that
are actually undermining our own culture. And so now like
suddenly you know, there's there's transsexual rights, and you know
there's there's like squatter's rights, and there's all these things
that are supposedly natural, and somehow they're being there. These
these rights, these natural rights, are facilitating our own destruction.
And so at some point the right wing has to
come to a point where it's like, look, we can
sit all day in the back room of an office
and talk about natural rights, or we can act politically
and we can work out we can work out the
details later, because if we don't protect ourselves, natural rights
is going to be this mechanism of complete and utter
decimation of everything that we hold.
Speaker 1: Dear well, we can definitely get to Schmidt later on,
but let's let's get through these rights. So the one
that immediately comes to mind after natural rights is God
given rights. And I remember one of the first times
that I was really shook to my core as a
libertarian was when a famous libertarian I'm not going to
say who it was, said that he was a universalist,
that he believed that right, that libertarianism was for everyone
on the planet. And even as I would call myself
a Laubert, at that time, I was like, well, that's
just not true. I mean, the Aboriginals in Australia are
not going to understand what we're talking about. You have
countries in this world with an average IQ under seventy,
which basically makes them functionally retarded. They're not even they're
even equipped to stand trial in this country. How are
they going to understand these things when you know they're
seem to be Their whole thing seems to be violence
and huffing, huffing gasoline. And it also I think the
thing that when I hear God given rights, what I
hear is I hear universalism. I hear that you know,
anyone from any country that border that border down down
between Mexico and Texas is an imaginary, an imaginary line.
And if everybody has the same rights as I do,
if everybody's entitled to the same things, I am. Then
anybody should be able to come over that border and
do whatever they want. It doesn't hurt as long as
it doesn't hurt anybody else or damage to their property
or body.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like that meme, you know, the guy's like
with the with the complete chaos destruction of civilization in
the background. He's like, but how does this affect you personally?
You know what I mean? So, I mean, that's that's
kind of and this is this is the trick. This
is exactly how rights rhetoric is being leverage. Weaponized is
a good word to destroy us, And so yeah, I
think that that's actually I think this is one of
the problems I have with libertarianism. There are decent libertarians
out there who are trying to make the case for borders,
but I actually think if you're going to talk about
rights in a universalistic way, I don't think you can
get over the fact that there are individuals around the
world that have these rights and there's nothing you can
do politically within your own borders to stop it. I
think that is a natural implication of rights thinking, and
so I think that you know, they can come up
with exceptions about that, they can come up with the
fact that we are, you know, in a political situation
where the it's existential and we have to ignore some
of those abstract concepts. But what they're doing when they
when they say those is they're admitting that there are
more important things than rights, That there are things like identity,
cultural stability, cultural integrity in our own you know, the
continuity of our heritage that provide the garden or the
context through which we could we could have something like rights.
And if you have a garden or a context, a
political context in which we can use rights rhetoric, what
you've done is you've you've basically admitted that rights are
socially situated, they're contextual, and they're politically derived rather than universal.
So I don't I don't hold to this view. We
can talk about the idea of a god given right
in my view, because I don't think that rights are
actually just generated by the state as some sort of
like fiat raw bureaucratic decision, which is much more of
like the utilitarian you know, like like class not classical liberal,
but like twentieth century managerial liberalism. That's sort of their
conception of rights. So I can speak of rights as
God given. The difference is is I don't think they're
imputed from on high to all individuals equally in a
universal sense, which is how I conceive of something like
natural rights that might be more of a Jean Jacques
Rousseau or some sort of Enlightenment conception of rights. I
think of them as mediated through history. And when they're
mediated through history, they're mediated through a cultural context. This
is why I agree with like, you know, you know
how influenced I am by Paul Gotfried. He does take,
like the Joseph de Maistre and Edmund burkline, that rights
are something that are discovered organically in society, and there's
a certain historical dynamic between the state and that society,
and they uncover and define and implement something that can
be called rights. But all of those things are bound
and contextualized within a given, you know, political order. So
English Englishmen had rights, and that they were rights by
virtue of the fact that they were born Englishmen and
they inherited the work and the discoveries of their fathers.
And Frenchmen have similar rights because they're all European, but
the French rights are distinct from the English tradition and
so you have all of these socially situated rights that
are inherited. The problem is, when you absoluteize or universalize
these rights, you're going to get the liquidation of rights.
You're going to get the liquidation of your heritage, and
in pursuit of some sort of abstract and universalistic world
in which every individual can be conceived of as being
a God given rights bearer, you actually destroy society and
civilization itself. You wake up to find yourself subject to
a managerial regime that hates you well.
Speaker 1: When it comes to individual rights, when you make rights
universal that basically that means that every single individual is
derastinated from any possible culture heritage that they have there.
And what it basically does is it means that no
matter what culture or heritage somebody came from, they have
the same individual rights as you do. And that means
that there's no problem with inviting them into your polity.
And it doesn't matter what. It doesn't matter if you
don't believe that you know, touching a female you don't
know in public is wrong, and they believe in their
culture says it's perfectly fine. The individual the individual rights
the only thing that's going to matter at that point.
Now is that individual female and that that's getting touched
and that individual who's doing the touching. This has nothing
to do with culture. This just has to do with hey,
don't touch her. And what happens is you basically have
to write that down on paper. And as soon as
you write something down on paper, in my opinion, you're
if you're not just formalizing it, because this is something
that the culture. You know, this is something that the
culture accepts without question. Hey, we're just going to formalize this.
We know, we agree on this and everything. If you
have to write it down on paper to say, hey,
you're not allowed to do this, you're you've basically invited
people into a culture, into a heritage that are now
disrupting it. And basically everybody's going to become an individual.
And you have what New York You have a big city,
you have the New York City subway system.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, there's this idea that is it's it's
goofy like so okay, so at first you have this
idea of a propositional nation where as long as everybody
a sense to these like abstract propositions about what rights are,
then we can get along as a country. As it
turns out, though, not only does this ignore the fact
that culture is more foundational and fundamental than just these
mirror tractions, but the fact of the matter is that
all these people coming here, they couldn't articulate a single
proposition if they wanted to, if they were paid to
do it, if they were if they were given a
welfare check to do it. So this idea that like
even propositionalism, you know, as goofy as it was, it
fails just by consideration of the fact that the are
you know, there's like intellectual differences that stem from different cultures,
and you have this worldwide phenomenon where all these people
are supposed to be individuals and culture is just something
that holds you back in society. And if they can
just be free to come here and intermingle with each other,
we can have this growing prosperous society. But the fact
of the matter is that cultural actually matters more than
formulations of rights do, and that's been proven. I think
I think you have to be you have to be
a very nefarious individual to deny that. Today, Like when
you think of the people that are pushing for more
and more just completely unhinged levels of immigration. What they're
doing is they're just denying the reality that's stirring them
in the face. And the reality that's stirring him in
the face is that culture does matter more than abstract
formulations of rights. And when you try to build a
society on abstractions, you're going to get In York, you're
going to get chaos in the subways, and you're going
to get people that are forced to flee their homeland.
Speaker 2: There the regions where they look.
Speaker 3: I live in California, I've witnessed it's in the in
the seventies, my grandfather was going door to door warning
about what would happen if immigration got out of control
in Oakland. And you know, he used to tell me,
you know, stories of the fact that people thought he
was nuts. You know, that every individual should be treated equally,
that we should get to know the person first before
we make, you know, prejudices about their culture. And if
anyone knows anything about Oakland or Stockton here in northern California,
they know how completely unbearable it is. And you know,
so everybody left, and they call that white flight, but
they're they're looking out for their own safety.
Speaker 2: There's that there's that great tweet.
Speaker 3: By the Vida Air what his name James Vdair on
Twitter where you just said, like all of modern life,
all of current present life, is structured around us trying
to abandon the consequences of the civil rights movement, and
you just begin to realize that culture is more fundamental
than abstract formulations of rights, and the consequences of ignoring
that fact are basically it's built into the cake. You're
not allowed to admit it today, but people really are
having to make very specific political, life changing decisions because
we've ignored the fact that rights cannot be conceived of
as individualized and universalized without there being very serious culture consequences.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, you have people nowadays who will say, yeah, oh,
why are you if you're a right winger, why are
you leaving the city now, why would you leave New York?
You have to stay there and fight for it. If somebody,
if somebody comes into your neighborhood and you know, starts
causing trouble, you and your friends should go out there
and you should beat the crap out of them and
kick them out, because you don't want to give up
the cities you're giving up your culture. You're going to
leave and you're going to give up your culture, And
I'm like, what's what's left there? What do you what
kind of culture can you really build in a city anymore?
I mean, there was a time for that. And then
when you say, well there was a time for that,
you can't do it. Well, the reason we can't do
it is because everyone left. Everyone is scared. And I'm like,
but yeah, the cities were forced integrated at one point,
and that's what created the suburbs. All the good people
fled to the suburbs. Why because they didn't want to
get killed. They didn't want violence against them, So well,
you should be fighting. They should have fought, and they
should have kept those people out. What I mean. You'll
hear this from people on the right now, you know.
I mean, it's very easy to pick on people people
on the left because they're so on the left end. Libertarians,
same thing, because they're they just they're not even in
the game. Yeah, especially libertarians, and the left has power,
so they just they don't care. They want to see
you punished. But you have people on the right now
who are just arguing, well, why did you leave the city.
Why did you leave the Bronx, Pete, Why would you
want to leave the Bronx to what you used to
You can have a better life somewhere else. I mean
it's literally like almost the almost the question that you
get asked at that point is like yeah, end, yeah,
and well we need to stay in this. How are
you going to take over the how are you how
are you going to do this?
Speaker 3: Yeah, It's it's funny because like there's this complete ignorance
and I'd consider this like a conservative problem more than
a right wing problem, and you would agree with that obviously,
But like these these conservatives, they just they're off. They're
still operating on this idea that that power is somehow
downstream from like our ability to to build a culture,
and that that power is downstream for culture, that if
we can stay in the cities or stay in these.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, they believe that Andrew Breitbart thing, which yeah,
completely wrong, Yeah, which is completely reversed.
Speaker 2: Right exactly.
Speaker 3: So like if we if we just stay put and
we you know, continue to you know, teach our kids
or whatever, just within our house, within our within our neighborhood,
you know, will we could play a long game on
that it's like, no, this entire culture has been massaged
and engineered and planned, This cultural degradation has been completely
planned by power. And this is one of the things
that if you treat if you try to address the
the the power that's there creating culture around you, if
you try to address that by adhering to rights theory,
you're gonna squished like a bug. Because, like, I mean
that even even people like you know, like Mesis and
other like liberals, understood the fact that power is stronger
than your philosophic formulations, right like, it doesn't matter what
you believe. It doesn't matter you know, how tightly knit
and nuanced your description of of you know, rights are
at individual rights, all of that is nothing in the
face of a gun, in face of economic power, in
the face of them being able to shut down your
your resources and close your bank account. They don't care
about your rights. Their rights is something that they leverage
in order to subdue you. That's what That's what the
whole transsexual rights movement's about. It's about humiliation. It's about
erasing heritage America. It's about undermining the legacy of Americans
who used to have a culturally inherited basis of rights.
Speaker 2: I mean that was that.
Speaker 3: I mean the the American experiment was basically this context,
Uh and constant have inherited rights, something that we received
from our forefathers. And the minute we abandon that for
natural rights, well you get the entire third world, because
why not everybody has equal rights. You don't have a
right to the quality of your neighborhood. All you have
is the right to your bedroom. Well, it turns out
that the neighborhood is controlled by those in power and
they do want bad things for you. And you're not
allowed to fight back though, because you've already agreed that
you have in universal individual rights. This is the Sorry
to keep like monologuing here, but this is they do
this all the time, and people fall for it all
the time. You're not allowed to do anything about your
neighborhood or about your community and your locality because you've
already adopted a framework that prevents you from acting politically right.
Speaker 1: And the cope is, and you hear this cope from
conservatives and libertarians, well, even if we have das that
will will prosecute us if we protect ourselves from you know,
BLM rioters coming on our property. Well, that doesn't negate
the fact that we still have rights. They want to
keep arguing about the theory of rights even as it's
being trampled. I mean, what do you I guess because
it hasn't happened to them personally yet where it's like, well, okay,
you have rights. Okay, the DA just arrested you for
The DA just arrested you for protecting your home from
intruders from you know, from a you know, a push
in or a home invasion. Okay, how are your rights doing? Well,
they still exist though, Okay, okay, they exist in theory.
Speaker 3: When they shut your bank account down and take all
your money for saying the wrong thing, and you know,
you're just like, my rights are going to be pissed
when they hear about this, you.
Speaker 1: Know well, or if they hear about somebody having the
bank account take in or being put on the no
fly list, well they were they're a racist. Oh so
you're just a leftist. So you've just adopted your part.
You've just adopted the regime's religion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1: You're making excuses for the regime. I mean, isn't it
amazing that most of the people who would bring up
their rights and make these arguments pretty much are they're
not a threat to the regime. The regime. The reason
why no one's coming after them is because they're not
a threat to the regime. They're actually helping the regime.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a that's a that's a really good point,
and people need to talk about that more. There's this
sort of like and it's the same thing with those
who cite like the Constitution. There's this sort of pigeonholing
where they your enemies don't care about rights. Obviously, they
don't care about the Constitution or limited government or any
of the things that you do. So what they do
is they they leverage the things that you talk about
against you and then they ignore it when it comes
to them. And so what that tells you is that
power is at the top and all the cultural things
are downstream from power. That power is the thing that
you need to have in order to address abuses of power.
If you're if you're completely dissatisfied, as we all should be,
with the way the culture is moving and with the
way you know, the political you know, the managerial state
is continuing to develop. The solution there is to acquire
power and confront the other power base with your own power,
not to stand there like like like that, like you
imagine yourself as as what's that picture of the tank
where the guys standing in front of the tank, you know,
yeah exactly, And it's like you're sitting there reading, you know,
the Bill of Rights or something, and they've got like
a canon against you. It's like, I wonder who's gonna
win that war. So I don't think that the right
should continue to focus on rights. What they can do,
I think is they can use rights as sort of
a a like a like a signal or a rallying
cry that say, like, these are our rights as heritage,
a marrias right. We're making a cultural statement that these
are our right as children of those who came before.
We're the posterity that the founding fathers were referring to
in the creation of their documents, and we have rights
that we're going to assert with power against other factions
of power that are using rights to get in the
Third World, to get in all of these like culturally humiliating,
sexual degeneracy, all these things that the regime is doing.
It's using rights to do so. And I think what
we need to do is we we should countersignal that, like, actually, no,
we don't care about trans rights. What we care about
is my right, for instance, to discriminate against trand that's
that's much more of a of a heritage right that
we have is the right to make to make discriminatory
decisions about who we associate with. Right, these are these
are things that we should be talking about, not these
abstract universal rights that apply to all people in all places.
And therefore we have no political mechanism of opposing those
who are coming to destroy our way of life.
Speaker 1: Well, the rights of freedom of association is great, and
so you realize that conservatives and libertarians have just basically
ingested everything, every line and narrative from the civil rights era.
So it's like, you know, if you I'm sorry, if
you do not have the right to be racist, you
do not have rights. That's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what I'm talking That's how they pigeonhole you. Right,
So they like you, you have this conception of rights
and it prevents you from acting politically, and they know that,
so they're going to use this rhetoric of rights against you,
and then they're going to use that rhetoric of rights
in order to facilitate your enemies into power. And so
this is how the Constitution is used like this all
the time. Obviously those in power don't care about the Constitution.
But if somebody like Trump gets up and he says that,
you know what, I'm on day one, I'm going to
make this executive decision that's going to round up all
the illegals and send them home, It's like, oh, you
know you that's that's a betrayal of the Constitution.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: So they always are using the Conservative's own priorities and
you know, framing against them, and the right is so
bad about countering that with its own I mean, we
should be countering that all the time with our own
you know, complex of ideas. And the left is just
a master at using our own language against us, and
we fall for it every single year. This is the
GOP is a master at falling for rights rhetoric. They
just literally cannot cope with the fact that power has
its own rules, power has its own way of doing things,
and no claim to abstract universal rights is going to
help you in your situation.
Speaker 1: Where did this allergy to power on the right not
on the right. But let's say conservatism and libertarianism. Where
did this allergy? Where did this power is immoral? Where
did this come from? I mean, it could have only
come from the left. It could only come from your enemy,
because it has to come from your enemy. And if
if you think, and whoever's telling you that, if they're
like standing next to you and they're like, hey, we're
on the same side, your enemy is standing right next
to you. Because the person who's telling you power is
immoral and to use power as immoral, they're clearly not
on your side.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, Yeah.
Speaker 3: The question of where it came from is interesting because
I think there were aspects of that way of thinking
that were present, Like you know when you talk about
thinking like the Declaration of Independence, Okay, A good example
of this would be someone like Thomas Paine, Right, he
had this mentality, and like I agree with with Gottfrid again,
who who would think that, Like if Jean Jacques Rousseau
or Thomas Paine could have scene where it all would
have come, they never would have opened their mouths about it,
all right, they would have been horrified. So I do
agree with that too. But there's just when you treat
these principles as some sort of absolute, tized thing that
you can never abandon or never push to the side
in order to fight politically. What you're doing is you're
basically digging yourself a deeper grave. Every time you open
your mouth about rights in the face of an attack,
you're basically digging your grave another foot deeper. So I
think that there were aspects of rights rhetoric that were
there at the beginning, and I think if history assure
us anything over the last two hundred and fifty years,
it's that we never should have gone down that path
at all. We should have stuck with Joseph de Maiestra
and Needlard Brooks's conception of inherited rights. Our rights are
something that we receive as a people, and we're a
people who's rooted in a particular past, and therefore there's
boundaries on us as a people, and we have to
differentiate between inside and outsiders. I mean, this is what
it means to protect the integrity and stability of a
culture is to treat rights as something that belongs to
you and your kin, or you in your nation, or
you know. However the political boundaries might work within a
given context. But if you begin to absoluteize things, what
you're going to do is you're going to tear down
the very metaphysical boundaries that defined you as a people.
Speaker 1: In the very beginning, you mentioned Burnham, and I'm reminded,
especially when you read like Suicide of the West, of
what he talks about ideologies and how where did this
come from? Where did this ideology as religion, ideology, as identity, ideology,
as all basically an ideology is in San Francis said,
this properly is something that's basically created in a lab,
and as soon as it's introduced reality, it gets, you know,
it gets shots to pieces. Where did this ideology, this
idea of ideology come from, because ideology is probably the
one one of the greatest tools that and Burnham talks
about this too, that those in power use against you.
They give you an ideology, they put you inside of
a box. And if they put you inside of a
box that says power is immoral, well, they're they're in charge.
They can do whatever they want. They're they can trample
all over whatever rights you think you have. So I mean,
it seems to me ideology has a lot to do
with this too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, I agree.
Speaker 3: I think I really think you know, we talk about
on the right all the time, and you know, my
outside kind of cliche, but I do think that the
Enlightenment was the source of this type of thinking. I
think there were certain I think I think the essence
of the political Enlightenment was taking ideas that were inherited
and absolute tizing them. I think that's basically what the
Enlightenment political project did is it took things that as
Western people's we had been given, we had been bequeathed
by those are forebearers, and it took those things, these
these treasures that belonged to our heritage, and it made
them something that could be graspable by the world. And
it's it's hard to like sort out, you know, what
aspect of that was nefarious, you know, like because obviously
the elite, the elite take advantage of this, and obviously
the elite don't really care about rights, but they do
leverage this type of thinking. So it's like, you know,
there's like that debate between Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried
over whether the elite actually believed their own myths, and
Sam Francis believes that historically, they don't believe it. They're
just basically written to control the masses. Whereas you know,
Paul believed that, you know, they were true believers, the
people pushing the ideas. I think that now and in
the twenty first century, Paul Gotfrey is basically right. They
believe their own crap, you know, they believe everything they're pushing.
But I do think they historically, like in the nineteenth century,
people really did recognize the power like in progressivism, like
Woodrow Wilson, they did recognize the power of having some
sort of myth that they could use to rationalize their
own pursuit of power. I think that's a very important
aspect of the story. So where it all came from,
you know, you could say the Enlightenment and things like that,
But I think in the progressive movement you begin to
really see in managerialism this usage of abstractions and these
like utopian visions of how just society should be organized
and structured. And you see that as sort of the
veil under which they can have their economic interests fulfilled,
their political objectives fulfilled, their foreign policy objectives fulfilled, and
so ideology is a very powerful I mean even in
the making of christiendom like look about look at Constantine,
like you know, whether you agree with it or not,
I tend to think it's great. But Constantine basically advanced
the ideology of Christianity in order to justify justify his
power expansion. That's just how power moves. Power controls ideology,
It writes ideology for its own purposes, and we on
the right need to be aware of that because our
elites have their own ideology, and whether or not they
believe it, the fact of the matter is that they
are weaponizing the masses to act on behalf of there
objectives and interests using the rhetoric of ideology.
Speaker 1: I think something people miss from the managerial system is
that the managers know, as you've already mentioned, know how
to manipulate your rights, know how to use them against
you what you think are your rights. But also I
think that most people who when they first start hearing
about managerialism they start seeing it, they think about them
managing the way the governments run war policy, the economy,
things like that. I don't think that they The one
thing that they don't notice, especially with progressivism, is they
don't understand how they've managed to what you believe is
what they want you to believe. Yeah, it's I mean,
you're a thought criminal. If you say something like you
said earlier, you say I don't care about trans rights,
you are You've just become an enemy of progressivism. Because
you're going to have conservatives, You're going to have libertarians
who are going to be like, well, no, they're individuals
and they have rights too, and you know, if they're
being attacked, we need to extend we need to maybe
even extend more rights to them. Maybe we need to
do something special like we did with the rights fact.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. No, that's I think couching it.
In terms of a religion, there is there is an
obvious connection between ideology and religion. They're essentially the same thing.
Ideology might be described as a secularization of religion, you know,
like Philip Reef has his you know, first world, second World,
third world paradigms, and you know this as as you
become like a secularized society, you still need something to
unify society on. You can't actually you can't actually have
this individualized, you know, derationalized, de resonated society. You have
to have something that binds everybody. And this new paradigm
is this obsession with sort.
Speaker 2: Of like like like the rights given to.
Speaker 3: Like all kinds of people that have nefarious interests and
whose very presence will undermine the stability and integrity of
of everything that you hold dear. So rights is very ideological,
and therefore it's very religious. In an anti religious age,
ideology replaces that. And I think the state knows that
there's always been I mean, Murray Rothbard talks about this.
There's always been a cozy relationship between religion and the state.
And today, when you know religion is you know, supposedly
on the downswing, you have the connection between ideology and
the state. So the state needs ideology and it uses
it to push its own regime laden interests.
Speaker 1: One of the arguments I was making for a while,
and then I realized how how wrong I was. I
was saying that people, people who have a tendency to
be all about rights, they also you know, sound money people.
And I've made the argument that the richer off of
like inflate because of inflation things like that, that society
has become the more decadent they become. And then somebody said, well,
how does that explain why Mar? Whymar did inflate? But
it wasn't a rich society. And then it all occurred
to me. It's like, well, what do we what's what's
the one thing that Whymar didn't have and what's the
one thing we don't have? We're not have culture? Their
culture was destroyed in Whymar. Culture is destroyed. Now, I
mean you can get culture at the most local level.
I mean culture basically. Now, if you find somebody who
is culture, it's their family. It's their family who's doing it.
It's their family who's keeping them together, their church, their faith.
But people don't realize that you how much culture matters.
And bringing culture back to rights is like you're saying
your rights are inherited. So if your rights are inherited,
you're inheriting it through your culture. So when you look
at when you look at something now and you're like, well,
I don't know. It seems like I don't have any rights,
or I do have rights because their natural rights and
their universal but no I can't. I can't declare them,
and they're not protecting me from anything. And then you
go back to something like hym Are and it's like, well,
what rights did people have there? I mean people were
being robbed, beaten and stolen from all the time, and
there was they had no rights to step up and say,
what's happening to my country? Well? Why because there's no culture,
there's no there is nothing those safety nets. Everybody wants
to talk about safety nets, like, you know, having a
million dollars in the bank is a safety net or
something like that. Having land is a safety net. No,
the safety net is your culture. Yeah, it's it's the
rights that you get because your you've brought your culture
forward from the previous generation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I I agree.
Speaker 3: In fact, like a good example of this would be
like if you had, like it, like during COVID, you
had like a bunch of libertarians living in the city
and they are like masters at libertarian theory, right, and
and suddenly like COVID comes along and the governor issues
these policies about you know, what you have to do
as a as a as a city. They are going
to laugh in your face when you quote your favorite
you know, rights philosopher, if you quote like Nozick or
something like, they're just gonna laugh at you. Whereas where
I live and presumably you know, wherever you live. If
if the governor, governor Newsom mandated something and and told
the sheriffs, you know, what to do, the sheriffs would
basically tell them to piss off, because not because they
believed in rights, but because they understand that, you know,
the cultural cohesion and stability rests on the continuity of
how we actually live our life as free people has
nothing to do with rights.
Speaker 2: The life.
Speaker 3: So the rights are actually protected by the culture, the
way that we do things here, like that meme of
the Italian like, we don't do that here, like you know,
like I'm not I'm not quoting my rights.
Speaker 2: I didn't.
Speaker 3: The sheriffs aren't justifying, you know, their decisions based on
natural rights. They're justifying it based on the fact that
we don't do that here. Like that's culture, and culture
is much more sustaining and powerful as a mechanism against
arbitrary power than rights rhetoric could ever be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when I was running around Alabama looking for a
place to live, and I would go to certain towns,
I would always stop off in certain businesses and ask,
you know, well, you know, Governor Ivy did did a
mask mandate for a while, what did you guys do
And more than one city was like, well, our sheriff
just told us to ignore it. They weren't going to
or it, told one restaurant how to get around it
and everything. So yeah, and why were they able to
do that? Because there's a culture there. Yeah, there's a
culture there. There's people, you know, I talk about all
the time. How I mean, I was just before we
started this interview. I was visiting a couple of friends
of mine whose families have been here for two hundred years.
I mean, that's culture they're not. If I would have
brought some new kind of you know, wanting to change
the culture, sure, some new kind of thinking here, I
wouldn't be accepted. If I came up with something that
was out of bounds, I wouldn't be accepted. But when
you go to but if you you know, but the
people with power, people who are willing to use power,
can actually come into a situation like I'm in right now,
and they can start moving things. They can start going
behind people's back, they can start manipulating people and start
changing things. I don't want to do that. I don't
want I understand the importance of culture. They don't, They
only understand the importance of manipulation. And the reason they're
allowed to do that is because there are people who
are not willing to use power to keep people like
that out and.
Speaker 3: Have Yeah, have you seen those like Twitter or TikTok
videos of like like the third world, like African Haiti
or whatever. There's they're basically squatters or they're just going
from place to place, just literally abusing the squatter's rights
laws and stuff like that, just to crash wherever they
want to and break in. Because I mean, that's the
meaning of anarcho tyranny. They can do whatever they want
the laws on their side, and they have the right
to do it, and it doesn't matter, Like how you
argue about property rights and the relationship that you have
with the meaning of ownership and all these concepts, the
fact of the matter is that you're inviting these individuals
in who couldn't care less about your rights. They couldn't
care less about your property, They couldn't care less about
like the meaning of ownership and the authority to dispense
with your property and the way you see fit like
all of these like libertarian concepts. The fact of the
matter is that these these barbarians who have no conception
of rights. They're the ones that are being fueled because
they allegedly have rights to undermine our own safety and liberty.
So it's like they're using rights rhetoric to get these
people into a situation where your own rights rhetoric has
no authority in the face of the managerial in our
corityranny model that's being foisted upon us.
Speaker 1: Well, you've already talked a little bit about it, so
let's get into it so we can end up talking
about this is Yeah, where do you specifically see rights
coming from and how do you recommend we go forward
in using it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think history is the most powerful argument that
we have. I think that when you conceive of rights,
like you know, I'm a Christian and people want to
source rights in something beyond the bureaucratic state, and I
do too. I conceive of rights is coming from God
as mediated through history. Like so that makes me a historicist.
Rights are something that are discovered and defined and implemented
within the historical process, so you can claim they come
from God. You know, other people don't claim that. You know,
they may not have that same ultimate conception that I do,
But I do believe in the mediation of history. I
do believe in the mediation of our forefathers. I do
believe that these rights are inherited. You can talk in
terms of transcendent principles, principles that exist beyond just legislation
or something like that, but the very fact of the
matter is they have to be They have to be
made concrete by human hands, by the hands of those
in power who have the authority to define what rights are.
I mean, you can talk about abstractions all day, but
until they're made concrete, until they're written into the political
legal apparatus of a society, they're actually just meaningless and
they have no bearing on whether or not they're applicable,
or whether or not you can grasp them, whether or
not you can claim them. So I think that rights
are something that we can use in time, but they
cannot never be universalized. We could use the rhetoric of rights,
like we can talk about the fact that we have
rights as Westerners, as inheritors of the of European traditions,
rights as Americans to protect our heritange, to protect our
royal of life. Like so, for instance, if if Abbott,
you know in Texas actually had any if he if
he was actually brave enough, he could cite actual nullification,
secessionary decentralized law that are on the books to protect
the rights as Texans against invaders like these. These are
rights that Texans have inherited from a dynamic political dynamics
that came place, that that came into place before. But
these these are much more powerful arguments than abstract rights.
I mean, that's what Texas should be doing. That's what
all border states should be doing. Obviously California is not
going to do it, but other other states should be
doing it. These are rights that are on the books.
These are rights that have precedent, and these are root
rights in our own experience as Americans. And so I
don't have a problem with using rights to our advantage sometimes,
but the minute they're absoluteized, they're going to be abused.
I have no I have no particular interest in defending
the rights of Indians from from Southeast Asia and there
they are, you know, alleged rights to come in here
and have a great life. That means nothing to me.
I talk about my rights as an American to continue
on in the in the things that I've been given
I think that's a much more powerful way to talk
about rights.
Speaker 1: Well, what about those people who would say, if you're
looking at your rights historically, that you know, at one time,
not very long ago, American, the American heritage rights heritage
was that you could own another person, and that it
only those that right was only taken away after a
war was fought. Doesn't specifically have to be because I know,
the war wasn't thought to free the slaves, Thank you
very much. You can save the emails. But someone will
say that, so, you know, why should we even take
those rights seriously if you're if the heritage that you're
you're talking about actually had people who owned people at
one point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because we don't base rights on perfection. We base
rights on who we are. And so like within those particular,
uh you know, dynamic political situations, they had to work
them out for themselves within their own context, and we
have to do this. We can do the same thing today.
Like if if someone wants to make the case for slavery,
that's a conversation we can have. I don't think anyone's
interested in that. But the fact of the matter is
that unless you root it in some in some something
more realistic, you know, like in the realist sense, you're
actually not going to gain any ground at all. So
those those things that are viewed from modernity as being
like particularly evil in the past, I don't think taint
your culture enough to unwind it. In fact, I think
that's actually more dangerous to think that way, just because
when you know a bad thing or bad situation as perceived,
you know, from our own vantage point, took place. I
don't think in that sense you can describe a culture
as like like in the Bible head that verse about
like a little leaven, like leavening the whole bread. Like.
I think that's a very abusive and subversive way to
talk about culture. And so it is it's kind of
meaningless to me because we live in twenty you know,
twenty four, and we're facing the liquidation of our culture
and the idea that I have to sit here and
like apologize and take into account how something completely distant
from our own situation took place before you know, I'm
no longer allowed to stand on the shoulders of my
father's and I just think that's a completely fallicious way
of arguing.
Speaker 1: And honestly, the only people that can make that argument
and make it work. Are people who've taken power and
control the narrative?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, this is another thing people will say, like
the you know who decide? You know, then who decides
what rice? Well, people in power decide. That's why it's
politics is important. You want your guys that are going
to defend your conception of your interests. You want them
to be setting the pace of things, and you want
them to be pushing away those who are actually fighting
for their interests. Like you had that clip of what's
her name, milan Omar. You know she was fighting for
their rights and identity as Somalians. Right, It's like every
culture is allowed to do that here in America except
for heritage Americans. And I think that the reason they
do that is because they can. It's a rallying point.
They see themselves as parting as a part of something
greater than themselves. That's what the whole like Black Power
movement was about. All cultures do this. It's just that
we've been so derastinated that we're not allowed to do this.
But I think that this is the only possible solution
is you know, thinking in terms of group interests. That's
what politics is. It's the clash of group interests.
Speaker 1: I think once one understands Schmidt's concept of friend, enemy
and politics, it's you realize just important how power, how
important power is because if you don't have power, your
enemy has it. And I think what you've said before,
I don't know if it's on this show or I've
heard you say it on someone else's show, is politics
never stops. Yeah, you just it is continual. And if
you if you're sitting there and you're saying I'm above
all of this, you're just you're you're ruled. Yeah, you're
your ruled. That that's it. Whoever's in power is ruling
over you. You can be the big you know, you could
be the biggest dum. You could be the biggest rebel
talking crap about it. You can do it. I moved.
I moved to where I moved because I wanted to.
I wanted to get away from this. But it's not
like I'm dropping out. It's not like I'm not still
seeking to If I'm not seeking power for myself, I'm
not seeking to try to get other people power who
agree with me, you know, my friend to get my friends.
You know what is what did Machiavelli say, you know,
politics is rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies. I
want my friends. I want my friends in power, because
one I want them to reward me leave me alone.
That'd be I'll be fine enough. But I also want
them to punish these people over here, because if you
don't punish these people over here, they're going to come back.
And people just don't get that. They think, oh, that's immoral. No,
it's politics. It is life, and that is why you
sit there and you're like, I'm dropping out. I'm not
playing this game anymore, and I'm just gonna talk. I'm
gonna talk. You know, it's you know, it's like getting
into It's like I think I heard John Doyle say
this recently. You know, if you walk out of a
bar and we men from uh from Jackass starts a
fight with you, you're just gonna slap him aside or
kick them, and if he keeps on, you'll beat crap
out of them. But if you walk out of a
bar and Shaquille O'Neal starts to fight with you, you're like,
hey man, hey man, I just want to be left alone.
Don't you just want to be left alone, you immediately
go into this rationale where you're the loser. You know
you're the loser, and now you're just playing the victim
instead of figuring out, Okay, do I have a gun
in my car? Do I have how do I fight
back against this?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Where are my friends?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Where are my people here to back
me up? And you're just waiting to be ruled? And
if you're if you're sitting there and you're like, this
is immoral. I mean, I would say the most immoral
thing on the planet is to believe that you have
all of the answers for making society more peaceful for
your people and not doing everything possible to implement them.
I think that's the most immoral thing you can do,
especially if you're just sitting there watching the world turns
of shit.
Speaker 2: No, for sure, I agree with that.
Speaker 3: And this is I think that you reference that the
politics is sort of eternal, not sort of eternal.
Speaker 2: It is the journal.
Speaker 3: It's constant, it's ever changing, and it's ever present. But
I talked about that and that essay that we talked
about last time, the triumph of the political, and there's
this idea that's sort of built into the American psyche
in the twentieth century that we're sort of above politics
and that we can deal politicize. We can basically neutralize
the public space and privatize all of those like the
clash of the friends and ends. We can just privatize
those decisions. We don't have to make them. Well, that's
sort of a denial of the human experience. The human
experience is a clash of peoples whose existence is mutually exclusive.
I think that's the essence of political life. And this
is the thing that Karl Schmidt talks about is is
you know, he defined liberalism as the attempt to depoliticize society,
the attempt to transcend politics and the attempt to look
for these absolute universal rules that could govern a peaceful society,
and that politics itself can be banished, that there is
no more politics because we can just come to the
table on mutually acceptable terms and we can debate our
way out of these things. So that so that liberalism
becomes this, you know, this magnificent debating society. And he
just thought this was incredibly dangerous because what would happen
is you would end up shoving politics in under the ground,
like into the water, like when you're trying to like
sink a big beach ball, Like you know, you're trying
to push it under the water, it would pop up
out of nowhere and it would surprise you. And the
other thing that's going to happen when you do that
is those who are not interested in depolitization are going
to have no confrontation. They're going to have no enemies
when they march through the institutions and seize power. So
liberalism is incredibly dangerous because it denies, you know, the
the just the reality of the human experience of human
you know, the human life is built on the context
of mutually exclusive warring groups. That there are friends who
you can ally with in order to protect your survival,
and there are enemies out there that want you destroyed
because they have their own priorities and objectives and they're
working on behalf of their own vision for the way
things should be and on behalf of their friends. And
if you don't confront that with power, you're basically just
walking into a battle and laying down your.
Speaker 1: Sword, yeah, and not being able to understand that there
are people out there who are smart enough to politicize
private society and you know they can look at people
I've heard you talk about this recently, Schmidt, And once
you get past a friend enemy and you realize, okay, well,
if you embrace Schmidt, you have a way to fight
the left. But then you have someone like Antonio Gramsci
who's like, well, we're just going to radicalize private, private business,
private institutions, churches, and well, then all the liberals they're
not going to have anything to say about that because
it's a private company, bro, they can do whatever they want.
Speaker 3: Exactly exactly this This is where rights rhetoric really begins
to break down, because when you have someone like Gramsci who's,
by the way, like you know, he's he's a nasty leftist,
but he's incredibly insightful because he's picking apart exactly the
way that culture, civil society is what he calls it
is structured, and its relation to the state. When you
have people that are marching through the private institutions and
your entire mentality is it's private, there's nothing I can
do about this because they have X, Y, and Z rights.
What you're doing is you're giving momentum, You're allowing for
those in society who seek your destruction to weaponize the
very thing that you're preaching. They're they're weaponizing it in
order to take power. They don't have an endgame where
everything is private and voluntary. They don't have this voluntarist
mindset at all. But what they're doing is they're leveraging
your own commitment to property rights against you. Like A
good example of this is like the the you know,
the expansion of like like pornography. You know, like these
these people, they they just they they get it into
the ads, into the social media, into you know, public
like billboards. You know, things are pornographic because they're trying
to humiliate and undermine and desensitize people on behalf of
their cultural revolution. Ian Michael Jones talks about this all
the time. These are private rights rights oriented mechanisms of
political transformation.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what they're doing.
Speaker 3: Or like or like you know, the creation of like
subversive uh like music, Like there's that book I Forget
Saunders or something about like the the the cultural Cold
War and how how much private money was expended into
the cultural institutions to radicalize them, de christianize them, and
basically become outposts for regime interests. And but there's nothing
a liberty. What can a libertarian say against that. It's
private money going into private institutions producing you know, private
goods and services for the market. There's like what the
state can't do anything about that, can it. It's like,
so they are weaponizing our own rhetoric and our own
commitments against us. That's another reason why it's so dangerous
to have this absolutist, universalist approach to to rights. It's
because they've politicized the private aspect of rights, and there's
nothing that a libertarian or or a liberal who you
know holds two to his own you know, starting point,
his own you know, fundamental axioms, can do about it.
So that's another as another key way that the left
has been able to neuter neutralize their own enemy and
march through the institutions in this way because the right
or not the right, but the conservatives basically refuse to
see this and they refuse to take political action against it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, let's end it right there and keep writing about rights.
Keep doing that paper, because you know, the more you write,
it's so much easier to work out ideas on paper
than it probably is anywhere else.
Speaker 2: For sure, yeah, no for sure.
Speaker 3: So yeah, cj Ingle got substack dot com and that
at Contramordar on Twitter you can find me.
Speaker 2: But I do.
Speaker 3: I have a we already talked about it. I have
a post, an article pending that I've mostly written and
haven't quite finished up yet. But I think that we
need to talk about rights, how to use it, and
how not to use it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, CJ. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thanks Pete