Jonah Goldberg On Why He Has Distaste for Gandhi and Trump: Jonah Goldberg Interview
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show. In this episode of the Babylon bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to Jonah Goldberg. Jonah Goldberg is the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute and a Fellow at the National Review Institute. In 2019, he left a role as Senior Editor of National Review magazine after a 21-year stint with the publication to start a new venture. He has been a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times since 2005 and a nationally syndicated columnist since 2000. He hosts the popular podcast The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg. His most recent book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy, was also a New York Times bestseller in 2018.
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Hard-hitting questions.
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Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
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I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
Hey everybody and welcome to a very lively episode of the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
Right.
Today we're talking to Jonah Goldberg.
Yeah, Jonah Goldberg.
Now, I don't know who knows who Jonah Goldberg is and who doesn't.
He's big on Twitter.
He's an author.
I found him through.
I think when I first got into politics, he wrote a book called Liberal Fascism, which was pretty, I mean, you know, it was, nobody'd really kind of like call out the left the way he did on a lot of the things that they do that align with fascism because the right was always being called that.
And I saw him on the Daily Show.
He'll talk about that in this interview.
But one thing I like about Jonah is he's a like he said that he almost became a humorist, but he kind of like dialed back and he's a political writer.
But he's very funny and witty and smart.
He owns us a lot in this interview and makes us look really dumb, which we are, but most people are the most condescending we've experienced.
Most people are polite enough.
One type of condescending.
Most people are polite enough not to point it out.
Yeah.
That we're not very smart.
Yeah.
He just likes.
But he was not.
He pounded on.
And there's some great stuff in the subscriber portion on this one.
Yeah.
So Jonah Goldberg, I knew of him from the National Review.
I think he wrote there for many years.
And I think he recently left and founded the Dispatch.
Right.
It's a kind of conservative-ish publication.
Right.
And he's known for being, which the National Review is kind of known for being also, I think, a lot of never Trump type people there, a lot of very critical at least of Trump.
He's never adopted the, we'll talk to him about it.
But so that's one area that he's, you know, you mentioned the name Jonah Goldberg to certain groups of people at conservatism and they start to just like spout pea soup.
Prediction right now, the comment section under the video.
Yeah, they are spouting pea soup.
Angry people whose heads are spinning around and they're crab walking around the walls.
Jonah Goldberg.
But it was a very fun conversation.
So here we go.
So Jonah, what's going on, man?
Got any cool stories for us?
It's great to be here.
We're Skype with Jonah Goldberg.
Yeah.
Writer of liberal fascism, which means you're a hardcore right-winger, but also a never-Trumper, which means that you're just a boot-licking leftist lover.
As Walt Whitman said, if I contradict myself, that's okay.
I contain multitudes.
So Never Trumper, do you?
I mean, do you adopt this label?
Do you have a Never Trump tattoo on yourself somewhere?
A Never Trump stamp.
Never Trump stamp on your lower back.
I actually, so I do not use the, I have not used the term never Trump, which for me was always just sort of a hashtag shorthand bumper sticker thing for Twitter and whatnot to say I wasn't going to endorse the guy and I wasn't going to vote for him, which is true.
And since then, it's become this thing.
But I actually wrote a piece right after he won Saying never Trump, never more, just on the grounds that you only have one president at a time.
And I don't know what never Trump is supposed to mean once the guy is actually president of the United States.
You know, there's this thing on the left where they can't accept the fact that he was actually elected.
And I'm like, well, then who's president if he wasn't elected?
You know, I mean, like, he's the Marines salute him when he gets on the helicopter.
Seems like he's president.
But I still, I'm not going to vote for him.
I don't think he's a person of good character.
I think he has had some real successes.
But as my friend Kevin Williamson puts it, most of his successes have to do with the areas where he has no interest in how to govern and so lets the establishment get things done, like appointing good judges and that kind of stuff.
And the places where he actually pays attention, he tends to muck things up.
So this is getting released on election day.
Yeah, I believe.
Yeah, this is like on election.
So right now, they are probably talking about poll results and the maps are coming out.
And what's your prediction?
Who's winning right now when this is released?
I hope that for the very strange, sweaty, weird person who waited till election day to decide who to vote for, that I haven't suppressed that person.
You know, this is one of my great peeves about elections, and I've written about this for 20 years.
Because of the nature of how a two-party system works and yada, yada, yada, we can get into political science.
Every election is basically decided at the end of the day.
The most crucial voters at the end are the undecided voters who tend to be either literally or figuratively morons.
Because if you can watch an election for like 18 months and not figure out who you're for and think like every four years we have a presidential debate and the CNN or someone will go to these focus groups and they'll ask them all of undecided.
And they'll be like, what'd you think?
I really wanted to hear more about education.
It's like, really?
It's like late October and your vote was hinging on who gave a wonkier answer on education when you could have looked up their positions as if their positions mattered on their website for like a year.
So anyway, I just, again, I don't want to discourage that one person who has an epiphany and decides who they want to vote for.
My prediction is Trump loses.
I am not, I shouldn't say my prediction.
It's more of a prophecy in the sense that, and not because my name is Jonah, but because prophecies biblically understood are, I'm trying to talk to you, your language here, guys, are not predictions.
They're warnings.
And if you do the right things, you can prevent the thing that's being warned about from happening, you know, like Nineveh and all that stuff that my namesake did.
So I think if you had to bet right now, it really looks like Donald Trump is going to lose.
But it's not impossible for him to win.
It's just it's becoming more and more like a five-game parlay than a straight up easy thing for him to do.
Gotcha.
So if it comes down to one vote decided the election and it was you and you didn't vote, we can blame you.
I think Washington, D.C., which shouldn't run for Biden by about 92%.
So my vote literally doesn't matter.
And that's one of the reasons why I feel perfectly free not to vote for him.
We're in California.
Yeah, we were in the same situation here.
I know I feel bad because I tell people I don't vote, but it's not this big moral stand because I'm like, it's easy for me.
I live in California.
My vote doesn't matter for president anyway.
I've never lived anywhere.
My vote wasn't eight to one.
So Voting has always been a statement of vanity or minor issues, you know, down ballots type stuff.
I mean, I grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan.
We were like Christians in ancient Rome because we were conservatives.
And the only other places I've lived have been Baltimore, Prague, and Washington, D.C.
So, like, my vote is meaningless.
So, what if you were a father on your deathbed and your daughter was harassing you to vote against to vote as a Democrat?
What would you see that girl on Twitter?
TikTok or Josh?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I did see that.
I think I would tell my daughter, you really don't want to have this as your last memory of your wonderful dad.
So, maybe you want to walk out of the room with some cold water on your face and bring me a drawing of something.
But no, I don't know who I would, you know.
Let's hope I'm not in that situation to have to figure it out.
It was a dumb question.
We ask a lot of those on this.
No dumb questions.
They're only dumb answers.
Dumb people.
There's some dumb questions.
That's true.
We aim for them.
So, speaking of dumb questions, would you vote for Trump if he provided a loving home to every orphan basset hound in the nation?
I would get much closer to saying yes.
But embedded in the premise of the question, which is why it makes it dumb, is contradicting what I said moments ago.
So there was no dumb question.
There's no such thing as a widespread orphan basset hound problem because basset hounds, basset hound puppies are scientifically proven to be irresistible.
And no one would let a basset hound puppy suffer or be alone on the street for more than a nanosecond before they took it in.
But once they get big, I mean, they take the worst smelling dumps.
They're big and slow.
They're stepping on their ears.
Then do people get rid of bass hounds once they're big?
I'm sure some do.
I am a former, I'm part of the international order of current or former basset hound owners.
And I think the basset is the noblest of beasts.
I do not recommend it as a dog for everybody because, I mean, let's face it, I mean, they were basically built like imagine you have a factory, like a garment factory where they make dogs and they had a lot of extra skin, but just had bad logistical inventory management and not enough leg.
And so they're just really weirdly constructed as if they're made from excess scraps of some stuff and a shortage of other things.
And they are the most stubborn of beasts.
But I love Bassett Hounds.
Am I doing this right?
I mean, I don't know.
This is your podcast.
I mean, good.
We're just going to give you a few things.
We're going to see if you, how, how never Trump are you?
So I thought that was the one.
We're trying to convert you into a somewhat about if he like what fought Bassett Hound cancer.
That's all right.
We'll get off basset hounds.
I'm steadfastly against basset hound cancer.
But again, I think fighting basset hound cancer is a bipartisan issue already and doesn't need Donald Trump.
But yes, let me skip ahead before you run through all of my favorite animals.
I am sure you could construct some scenario in which the alternative is I have to watch Jeffrey Toobin on a Zoom call for the rest of my life or vote for Donald Trump.
I will vote for Donald Trump.
Okay.
I mean, there are things you can conceive of that cause me to do it.
But short of these outlandish scenarios, these weird Kobiashi Marus that you're trying to come up with, I am not planning on voting for Donald Trump under any circumstance.
That was the content of our show, dude.
Yeah, like that was.
That's it.
That's all we had.
So I guess do you have any cool stories you want to tell us?
You've been on the Daily Show.
Have you ever gotten stories from being on The Daily Show?
Do you ever get harassed by like your wedgied by liberals or anything?
Yeah, so I was on in the 2004 cycle, and it went really, really, really well.
I've been on three times.
So it was on the 2004 cycle, and it went really well.
It was with, what's his name, the old Stewart, John Stewart.
John Stewart.
And good times are had by all.
Nothing really remarkable to talk about.
I remember unfurling my extended Johnny Bravo theory about Wesley Clark.
I guess I have to explain some of this to you people since you were fetuses at the time.
Johnny Bravo was the rock star that Greg Brady played in the Brady Bunch.
And it turned out that the record label didn't think he was talented at all.
He just fit the suit that they wanted him to wear.
And that was my view about Wesley Clark running, who's a former NATO commander, is that they just, the Democrats wanted to have a military guy run.
And so he was the Johnny Bravo candidate.
Anyway, that went well because Jon Stewart's about my age and we grew up watching things like the Brady Bunch.
The next time I went on was for liberal fascism.
That went less well.
Yeah, I saw that one.
He didn't like that book title, I don't think.
There was like The Inquisition, there was the Red Scare, and there was my appearance on Daily Show.
Basically, he thought that he could go into an interview with me after I'd spent like five years like reading up on fascism.
And he thought with an afternoon of Googling, he could like own me fascism.
And he couldn't.
And at the same time, I had this naive idea that I would walk into the studio of the Daily Show and actually have a conversation about what I had written.
And it would be go as swimmingly as my previous appearance.
And instead, we ended up hurling F-bombs at each other.
And I don't mean the word fascist quite a bit.
And normally that segment was like supposed to be four to six minutes.
And they rolled tape for like 28 minutes and then turned off the cameras and then we yelled at each other for another 10 minutes after.
And the only thing I'll say in Stewart's defense is that when they finally aired the portion of the interview that they wanted to air, they made no pretense at pretending that it was like a natural conversation.
They were just like, this was a mess.
Here a bunch of clips from it.
And that ended up helping me because they at least didn't make it look like they didn't try to edit it to make me look like a fool, though, of course, the left thought I looked foolish.
They just tried to stitch together this sort of Frankenstein's monster of a really bad conversation that went really bad.
Yeah, I remember seeing it and thinking, yeah, I did feel really disjointed.
And you could tell Stewart was really trying to like own you in front of his audience.
Because he had the audience.
It's kind of like Bill Maher's show.
They're there to cheer for whatever he says, it feels like, in those situations when they have someone from the other side on.
Yeah, I mean, I think an important difference between Bill Maher and Jon Stewart is that Jon Stewart's actually talented and funny.
And Bill Maher is like, you know, I think he has hooves.
I am not a big fan of Bill Maher.
It's the one show I've told my publicists I will never go on again.
Not a big of Bill Maher.
What about Babylon B podcast?
Would you come back on the Babylon B podcast?
I think you have to ask me at the end of the Babylon B podcast.
As it's going right now, I just feel like I should be hosting the Babylon B podcast.
But so far, it's a lovely experience.
I mean, I really appreciate the booze you sent ahead.
Yeah.
We do what we can.
Even though I wasn't planning on this being video, I wasn't thinking this morning because I was drunk.
I did, for Ethan's sake, wear my bear t-shirt with the bear being hugged on it or asking for a hug just because I wanted to bait you guys.
Can you leave the camera like that the rest of the time?
That's what got Tubin in trouble.
I just want to remind you, you're on video, so don't want to pull a tube in here.
So from your liberal fascism with five years of digging into that, how do you see all this Antifa craziness?
What's your is this, does this fit into that?
Did you prophesy this stuff?
You know, I got a lot of stuff right and I got a lot of stuff.
I honestly don't think I got a lot of stuff wrong in liberal fascism.
I didn't anticipate some stuff that has happened on the right since I wrote it.
And one of these days I'll write about that.
But yeah, look, I mean, the antifa stuff that is, I mean, I love these morons who say they can't be fascist because they say they're anti-fascist, which like you have to be too stupid to be a spell checker in an M ⁇ M factory to think that that's like a great argument.
I mean, it's like saying, you know, North Korea can't be undemocratic.
It's got Democratic in the title.
I mean, like, it's just so friggin dumb.
And I love the blue checkmark crowd that throws that around as if it's this super clever retort.
It's like when they show pictures from like D-Day, it's like the original anti-fascists, which is just an unbelievable slander to, you know, American troops, whatnot.
But look, one of the core things about original fascism, which is actually kind of different from Nazism, is just this glorification of street violence, the glorification of brute force in the streets, taking back the streets, owning the streets.
If you look at what the original fascisti were, it was a lot of that stuff.
The black shirts were all about sort of owning the streets.
The original fights in Germany between the brown shirts and the red shirts were all about who gets to own the streets.
And that kind of just sort of physical intimidation and sort of gang thuggery stuff is perfectly consistent with fascism.
And one way you can tell is that if they had been members of the NRA, everybody would say, well, obviously they're fascists, right?
If they've been right-wingers, they'd be fascist.
I'm sort of of the school that says, first of all, that we shouldn't be talking a lot about fascism anymore, but that's a different conversation.
But if you're going to identify fascistic behavior and define it as sort of moonish street mob violence, but only if it's done for my side of a political argument and not the other side, I mean, or the other, you know, or the other way around, then it's just sort of a meaningless term that people use.
I mean, it's, you know, Orwell had said in Politics in the English Language, fascism has just simply come to mean anything not desirable.
And I think that's the way 90% of the people who use it, they're blind to the sins of their own side and they see stuff that looks fascistic to them on the other side and say, see how terrible it is.
That makes them fascist, while condoning the crap that happens on their own side.
How fascist is Trump?
Well, that's part of the thing I got wrong and I didn't anticipate in liberal fascism.
I think Trump is naturally inclined to sort of strongman thinking, to authoritarian thinking.
I think he, like a lot of authoritarian types, defines right and wrong basically his personal loyalty to him, which is a very authoritarian way of doing things.
He actually likes, he doesn't mind street violence.
He just likes it when it's on his side of things.
The real issue isn't his sort of authoritarian personality or his tendencies or any of that kind of stuff.
The thing that keeps him from being an effective strongman or authoritarianism is his profound bassethound-like laziness.
The guy just, I mean, like real strongmen, real authoritarians, it takes a lot of work, right?
You got to figure out how to put, you know, this union leader's, you know, take the favorite horse of this union leader and put it in his bed.
You know, you got to figure out how to, whose car to blow up.
You got to figure out who to bribe, which military officers need to be purged and thrown on, thrown in jail for trumped up charges.
That's what real authoritarian strongmen do.
He doesn't want that.
He's never wanted to actually use the power or even familiarize himself with the powers of the job.
He just likes the adulation that Ugo Chavez or Fidel Castro gets, but he doesn't want to do any of the work to actually solidify that kind of power.
And, you know, this is something a lot of people on the left miss, is that he doesn't play four-dimensional chess or 10 moves ahead.
He is literally addicted to the news cycle of Twitter.
And he spends his days, you know, with his narcissistic ego running around like an escaped monkey from a cocaine study and really doesn't have any sort of strategic sense about how to orchestrate the consolidation of power or any of that kind of stuff.
And that's good news for America.
And if the alternative is, I mean, if he had Pat Buchanan's brain in there or, you know, even Mussolini's brain in there and still had his charisma, he could do real damage to America.
But I think literally he's just too lazy and too intellectually incurious to do anything that doesn't come easily to him, which is one of the reasons why he likes other people to do the heavy listing of bad things for him, because he just doesn't want the accountability of being responsible for it.
So it's like whether it's a story or whether it's like telling the crowds to rough up people, he doesn't want to do it.
He doesn't even like to fire people.
The guy made his name, you know, as a reality show star firing people.
And I don't think a single one of these people that he has fired from his administration actually was fired face to face because he likes controversy, but he hates personal confrontation, which is not what an effective strongman, you know, that's not how effective strongmen work.
So today he gets voted out of office.
Does he lock himself in there and not ever leave?
I think he leaves.
I mean, look, I mean, does he put up a stink if it's really close and you're waiting for absentee ballots to come in?
Maybe.
But I think a lot of this is just show.
And the one thing I can guarantee you is that there are very few people outside.
I mean, look, will Stephen Miller be like one of those kids in that movie Tapped?
Taps, you know, remember that movie with the military school kids who take over the military school?
I could see someone like Stephen Miller barricading the door and, you know, and agreeing to fight to the death to keep stay in there.
But for the most part, no one is going to follow a lot of crazy orders from this guy.
I don't think he would give them.
He wants to go back to Mar-a-Lago, which will be like his Napoleonic Elba.
And maybe he'll start a TV series, a TV network by, you know, OANN.
And maybe he'll call it, you know, OANNN the Libs, you know, own the Libs or something.
But I do not see him going, you know, like a, there's not going to be a downfall video of him refusing to leave power.
Sad.
Yeah.
Ethan really liked your book, Tyranny of Cliches.
I haven't read it.
Well, yeah.
To clarify, I think I like liberal fascism better, but I love one of my, I just love the first chapter of where you kind of just sum up the book.
I wasn't as into the minutiae, but I loved the first chapter to me.
It's just like, I recommend it to people all the time.
Well, thank you.
And you don't feel bad about not reading it.
The important thing is buying it.
Yeah, I bought it.
So I got that done.
Yeah, we should go through some of those cliches.
Yeah, I wanted to see if we could hit some of the cliches.
What are some of the that you would add from now?
Because you, you know, it's been a while.
Yeah, it has been a while.
I mean, I don't know.
I got to think about that a little bit.
Only one other person has ever asked me that question, and it kind of took me off guard.
You had one before, so yeah, I mean, I guess one would be, I mean, so look, just so you guys know and your listeners know where I'm coming from, I'm still very much conservative.
I haven't gone full Jen Rubin.
I haven't decided that because Donald Trump says two plus two is four, therefore it must be a duck.
You know, I haven't lost my mind about all that kind of stuff.
There are lots of things that Trump has done that I approve of, or there are a lot, and there are even more things that Trump has that have happened on Trump's watch that I approve of.
But I'm kind of done with a lot of the, I paid my dues.
I've drunk more liberal tears than could last most people a lifetime.
I've done my own the lib shtick.
I'm kind of done with it.
And so like one of the things I would very little of the substance of tyranny clichés that I would change or of liberal fascism, I would add some things to it because I think one of the things that being on the, you know, on the outs of Trump world for the last four years is it frees me up to see the shortcomings in my own side a little bit, which is sort of, you know, some of the stuff that you guys do as well.
And so if I were going to redo Tyranny clichés today, I probably would get rid of the subtitle.
I get rid of the title too because the title, this is a technical term from the publishing industry.
It sucks.
Donkey.
I cannot begin to tell you how, like, I would say 20% of right-wing talk radio hosts don't know how to pronounce the word cliché.
So like, it's a very awkward moment.
Kind of need a German word for it when someone says, and up next, we've got Jonah Goldberg, author of The Tyranny of the Clitches.
Do I correct them?
Do I like go?
But anyway, the whole book, the title, the top part of the title, I mean, I might keep the word, the words the and of and fill in the rest, but the problem is that it's, it sounds like a hyped up steroidal style guide.
And the problem with the subtitle is, yeah, I still think liberals cheat a lot in the war of ideas.
And I think in many ways they cheat more than conservatives do, but there's a lot of cheating going on among conservatives too.
And so, if I was going to add some today, you know, one I might add is this whole disruptor thing.
You know, like every time Donald Mike Pence goes out there and salutes his broad-shouldered leadership and talks about how, you know, he was voted, he was elected to be a disruptor, as if, first of all, that's entirely true, which is not entirely true, but it's partly true.
But second of all, there are different kinds of disruption.
It's sort of like people who take pride in calling themselves a contrarian.
And, you know, my long-established position is if you are a contrarian solely for contrarianism's sake, absent any other context, you are what people call a hacksaw.
Another one of those technical terms.
If you're having a meeting and you're saying, oh my God, you know, we got a huge problem.
This meteor is coming to Earth.
We've got it locked on radar.
We've got maybe 48 hours to save the planet.
And your immediate response is, well, I think we should really sleep on this, right?
You know, you just, if you automatically take a contrarian point of view, regardless of what the facts are, you're just a pain in the donkey.
And it's similar with this disruption stuff.
I don't mind good disruption, but it all is contextual.
It depends what you're disrupting and why.
And, you know, Donald Trump could take a giant deuce on the Lincoln Memorial, and Mike Pence would go out there and say, well, you know, he was elected to be a disruptor.
That's not what I'm looking for.
And it's not an excuse for things, particularly when people like Pence, the second the other side violates norms or does something disruptive, all of a sudden he's saddened and disappointed that the Democrats would so violate norms and traditions and yada yada yada.
You can't weaponize norms for the other side and exempt yourself from them for your side simply by saying like Shazam, he's a disruptor.
But anyway, I'd have to think about it more for other things that would go into local.
He almost left him speechless there for a second.
And the hard-hitting interviewer.
Yeah, tyranny of cliché, tyranny of clitches.
You said violence never solves anything, was one of your clitches.
It's not true.
Violence solves a lot of things, particularly in these situations called violent situations.
And, you know, if you saw someone getting, let's say you saw someone getting mugged or raped or brutalized by a gang, like you, you, you're a cop, right?
You take out your gun and you're going to run over to sort of break it up and save the person.
And then you look at your gun and you're like, oh, crap, throw it away because obviously gun is useless because violence can't solve anything, right?
I mean, violence is really useful to solve problems that require violence.
Like, I don't know, the Holocaust or slavery or like winning wars.
I mean, like these things, sometimes violence is actually required.
And the problem that you get with violence never solves anything is that it's usually part of this sort of Gandhian BS where they try to sneak in like a Trojan horse, these peacenick ideas.
Sort of like I was saying about what when Mike Pence weaponizes ideas, people, you know, say, you know, give peace a chance.
They never say give peace a chance to like Saddam Hussein or the Nazis or to Kim Jong-il.
It's always give peace a chance to Western democratic governments as if like it's their fault for pursuing violence and the violent people are bad.
And the best example of this, as I wrote about in there, is Gandhi himself.
Gandhi, look, there's a lot of things going for him.
He's a complicated historical figure.
But his advice to the Jews of Germany was to commit mass suicide.
And his advice to the people of England in the face of Nazi aggression was mass surrender.
He said, lay down your weapons, give up your island, but uphold this notion of your principles or whatever.
Now, first of all, as a guy named Goldberg, you might think that telling the Jews to all kill themselves is not my idea of the most efficacious public policy proposal.
But he never said to Adolf Hitler, who he wrote letters to and called him his friend, hey, maybe you don't want to invade Poland because violence doesn't solve anything.
It's this kind of argument that people, this peacenicky kind of argument that people only use on Westerners because they feel like they can arouse their conscience.
And if you just work from the assumption that the other side isn't prone to these kinds of arguments, they never make it.
And so it's basically a lack of confidence in the West that usually invokes this kind of stuff.
And they never use it on the actual guilty parties in violent situations.
Sounds like he's pro-riot, pro-violence.
That's what I'm hearing.
Yeah, Jonah Goldberg is Jonah Goldberg comes up.
He joined BLM.
That's what's happened.
He's anti-Trump.
Now he's a BLMer.
Yeah.
We're always looking for an angle.
Is there any, like, what is it?
I mean, if I had all the smart stuff in my brain, I would love to.
I had the smart things in my line to my daughter.
Have you seen these ads?
With a key ingredient that comes from jellyfish.
And they always say that as if, like, my immediate response is that jellyfish are super smart when, in fact, they don't even have freaking brains to begin with.
But anyway, go on.
Do the work running along the beach, sucking on jellyfish.
You just get in a capsule.
Okay.
So my daughter's 13.
She just turned 14.
Very swept up in Black Lives Matter and all this stuff.
She's always coming home with all the things she learned on Instagram.
I always wish I had like the big brainy way of saying like this kind of language is useful to get people to get into a very angry group and all one idea.
How would you say to your daughter if she came home with it?
Put some smart stuff in.
Can you be my jellyfish?
Be my jellyfish capsule.
My daughter's 17 and she's getting a lot of this stuff too.
And she shows me these Instagram things that make me want to cut myself.
Capitalism stuff and whatnot.
But look, it depends on what they're actually bringing home.
I mean, if your 14-year-old daughter is showing you her phone and it just says kill Whitey, I would like to think that you don't need some really highfalutin intellectual argument from me about why that's kind of unsuitable.
But like, you know, the basic, the good version of Black Lives Matter stuff, I can't get wildly worked up about.
It's just that it gets swamped by all the bad stuff.
And my basic view on identity politics, I write about this in my most recent and most Optimistically titled book, Suicide of the West.
I'm so glad the publisher talked me out of Take a Bath with a Toaster.
The problem with identity politics is that they are, in many respects, making the problem that they're aiming to fix work.
If you work on, I mean, this is a very common soul point.
If you think that all you need to know about someone to make a judgment about their character or their worth or their value is the color of their skin, then you're racist.
And if racist is too politically radioactive a term these days to be used accurately, fine.
You're bigoted.
And the problem with identity politics is that it's actually an incredibly old way of thinking.
It is the oldest form of identity politics was actually aristocracy, which was this idea that first, you know, aristocracy literally means from the Greek, the rule of the best, but it quickly meant, came to mean rule of the most noble, right?
People with the best blood.
And it was this idea that nobility was inheritable and that if you were simply, if you were a prince, then your kid will be a prince and then so on forever.
And borrowing from some bad use of, I think it's Aristotle, they started to say that some people are just born slaves by nature.
And that sort of thinking is identity politics.
It says that simply by the virtues of the circumstances of your birth, which you have no control over whatsoever, which is why I hate youth politics, you know, people bragging about how the fact that nine months before they were born, their parents got together as if like that's some huge accomplishment on their part.
But if you have this assumption that some people are simply better than other people or more deserving of sympathy or empathy or anger or rage or punishment or any of these things, simply by virtue of the circumstances of their birth or the color of their skin or who their parents were, that's not modern and hip and clever and progressive.
That is some ancient turnip there.
That is like old school tribal nonsense.
And part of my big epiphany over the last 20 years is that there are very few new ideas out there.
And one of the only great, really good new ideas of the last, you know, let's call it a couple thousand years is liberal democratic capitalism, which was a radical new idea in the history of humanity.
All of this identity politics stuff, all of this socialism stuff, all this fascism stuff, all this communism stuff, these are old, old, old ideas that ping the sweet tooths of our brain because they seem more natural because tribalism is more natural than democracy and freedom.
And so we keep coming up, having to have these same arguments over and over again, where people come up with all sorts of clever new names and arguments for the same old junk.
And that's my view about a lot of the BLM stuff, a lot of the nationalism stuff.
It all falls under one form of tribalism or another.
I'll tell her that.
What is she coming home and asking you?
I mean, like, what does BLM stand for?
Teller key, the Bureau of Land Management, and you're for it.
There's no asking or discussion.
It's like, this is true.
I read this on Instagram.
If you don't agree with this, you're a fascist.
So she just found out her grandmother went to a Trump rally and she is like, so now she wants to disown her.
It's like that hard.
She's just learned if you say or believe this, you are evil.
Yeah, you should disabuse her of that, right?
I mean, like, the whole idea that politics of any kind, I shouldn't say of any kind.
I mean, if you're like, if you're straight up Himmler or something like that, okay, I'm going to judge you.
But like within the 40 yard lines of American politics, the idea that you can tell everything that you need to know about somebody because who they vote for or that you have a window into their soul, I think is a real problem.
And it's a problem that infects both sides, but I think the left has been practicing it for far longer.
And, you know, look, again, last name Goldberg.
I'm more of an Old Testament kind of guy, but it also strikes me as profoundly unchristian to think in those terms.
And one of the reasons I've always called myself a conservative and one of the reasons I like conservatism is that I believe that conservatism, properly understood, is only a partial philosophy of life.
And the political realm, it doesn't tell you what clothes to eat or what food to drink or the other way around or vice versa because I'm just rambling now.
What is it Willy Wonka says?
Scratch that, reverse it.
But it just tells you who you think you should vote for and what policies you should prefer compared to other politicians and other policies.
Yes, sometimes I see that kind of thinking as very like it's very myopic in the sense that it doesn't see the scope of human history that we've gone of everything that we fought against to get where we are.
It's a Chestertonian idea.
GK Chesterton.
That we climb the ladder and then kick the ladder that we climbed up on.
We declare war on these ideas that got us to where we are.
I mean, I do think it leads us to this place of gratitude that life really does have a lot of suffering in it.
And the whole human history is a very dark thing a lot of the times.
And to actually have some goodness and some light now is like, it makes me extremely grateful.
I don't know if you touch on that in Suicide of the West, the very optimistically titled book, but.
I do.
In fact, the whole book ends with a note about gratitude.
And I'm, look, if every time I wrote about Chesterton's fence, I got a dollar, I'd be able to buy a pretty nice meal.
And I'm very much a Chestertonian when it comes to dogma.
I want more dogma, not less.
I think that human civilization progresses when we put to bed certain questions.
And when people say, you know, oh, don't be dogmatic.
I'm like, okay, so you're not dogmatically opposed to murder.
You're not dogmatically opposed to pedophilia.
You're not dogmatically opposed to torturing Bazethoun puppies.
These are questions that do not get to be revisited because they've been settled.
And a society that thinks that every question, that all questions are valid, that all issues need to be revisited is a society that wants to consider barbarism to still be a live option.
And I don't want barbarism to be a live option.
And the big theme of the book is that we should be grateful and that we should understand that for 250,000 years since we split off from the Neanderthals, the average human being everywhere in the world, their life was nasty, brutal, and short, that you lived your life of backbreaking poverty punctuated by some bow-stewing disease and an early death.
And that only changed once in all of human history, and it changed because of liberal democratic capitalism.
And the idea that we shouldn't be grateful for that and therefore make the arguments in the effort to sustain it is insane to me.
And that's the suicidal choice that is in the title of the book.
Well, yeah.
Are we going to do a subscriber portion?
Yeah, we should get into that.
Do a quick subscriber portion with you.
We got our 10 questions we'd like to ask.
We get into the juicier stuff because this part won't be on YouTube.
So you can really just go on.
Tell us what you really think about Trump.
Here we go.
All right.
Is it like a lightning round?
I got to give quick answers or we'll do our 10 questions in a second here.
In a second, yeah.
We'll do a couple of other things first here.
Ideas for you got any other cool stories?
But is there anything else you wanted to promote on the to the to the freeloaders?
Suicide of the West.
Is that the main?
Yeah, you know, Suicide West.
You can subscribe.
You can check out the Dispatch where I founded with Steve Hayes, this new media platform called The Dispatch.
You can check out my podcast, The Remnant, which I had this bear guy on.
Or you can just send me cash, which you cut out the middleman for all of this stuff.
I won't publicize your name.
And the more cash, the better.
I mean, that's just blunt about it.
We'll put your address on the screen.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
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