Sept. 3, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
47:38
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
| Because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| You're going to not get a free shot on all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| MAGA media. | ||
| I wish, in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | ||
| Good evening. | ||
| I'm Joe Allen, sitting in for Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Here at the War Room, we discuss politics a lot. | ||
| You won't hear me weighing in very often, but this is a political show. | ||
| One of the things that sets the War Room apart from many of our colleagues in the media is a very heterodox approach to politics. | ||
| So you won't hear a whole lot of Normicon, rah, rah, rah, cheering for capitalism, at least not in its rawest form, nor will you hear anyone besmirching the working class as being impediments to the accumulation of capital. | ||
| I think that that heterodox approach, the ability to hold multiple and sometimes contradictory ideas in tension and try to arrive at truth by way of that process is essential for anything like a valid political movement in the 21st century. | ||
| Here to talk to me about politics from a very learned and heterodox position is Arin McIntyre. | ||
| Many of you are already familiar with him. | ||
| He's the author of The Total State, How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies. | ||
| He's the host of the Arin McIntyre Show, a frequent contributor at The Blaze, fantastic writer, amazing thinker, and a pretty good guy. | ||
| Arin, welcome. | ||
| Thank you very much for being here. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| So I would like to begin by talking about. | ||
| the total state. | ||
| Fantastic book. | ||
| A lot of different ideas and different thinkers woven into a single piece to charge into the problems we have now in the 21st century with the managerial state and various other sorts of impediments to freedom. | ||
| Can you tell the audience a bit about the thesis of the total state and how you arrived at it? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I think like a lot of people, I was just a very normal conservative listening to guys like Dennis Prager or Sean Hannity or these kind of guys on the radio. | ||
| I knew that the constitution and the government in check. | ||
| We had the branches of government, all the things that we expect to hear from your average civic lesson. | ||
| And then COVID hit and everything went insane. | ||
| You know, the churches were closed, strip clubs were open. | ||
| You couldn't go see a family member, you know, go to their funeral or see them in the hospital, but you could go riot in the streets if you were a Democrat. | ||
| And it just became very clear as I looked around at all these conservatives who had told me my whole life, well, this is what the Second Amendment is for and this is how we're going to protect our rights. | ||
| And of course, the government will never overreach this stuff. | ||
| And just nobody was doing anything. | ||
| And that just sent me down this rout hole. | ||
| Because I had to understand what was going on. | ||
| I had gone to school for politics. | ||
| I've always been interested in political theory. | ||
| I'd even taught high school history and civics and these kinds of things. | ||
| I'd reported on politics as a local reporter. | ||
| I thought I understood this. | ||
| I understood how this worked. | ||
| And actually, I didn't understand anything about it. | ||
| And so that's really what the book is. | ||
| It's my journey to kind of understand why the Constitution didn't stop what happened during COVID. | ||
| Did we fail the Constitution? | ||
| Did it fail us? | ||
| Is there another explanation? | ||
| And as I went down this road, reading a lot of thinkers that I had never heard of when I was studying political theory in college, I started to discover that there was actually a very robust right wing understanding of political theory that explained a managerial revolution that had taken over our politics, that had taken away the type of democratic republic that we thought we operated under, and had created an entirely new political system that was operating right under the surface of what we were supposed to be doing. | ||
| And so my hope is that ultimately the book helped people understand why that happened and how ultimately we could fix it. | ||
| I'd like to get into the philosophy and writings of James Burnham first, then move on maybe to Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. | ||
| But before we do that, your time as a teacher. | ||
| How did that inform what you're doing now? | ||
| Because I think your style on your show and your presentation in writing is both very complicated but also very accessible. | ||
| You're a very good teacher. | ||
| And I'm just curious, do you see what you're doing now as a continuation of that process? | ||
| Yeah, in a lot of ways, it's kind of getting to teach the classes I always wanted to and talk about the things I always wanted to. | ||
| But that is, you're right, that's the through line. | ||
| Whether I was writing as a local journalist, whether I was a teacher or what I'm doing now, it's always been about kind of trying to understand something more complex and explain it in a way that people can ultimately understand. | ||
| And so I hope that's what comes through when I'm doing it in the show, because, yeah, I am still using many of the methods that I would have used to try to pull in all this information, condense it down into something that is usable, and then give practical examples that people can take into their lives, hopefully. | ||
| James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, there's probably a number of people in the audience who aren't familiar with that work, probably a lot who are. | ||
| My first introduction was through the late Christopher Zeman, the Z Man, God rest his soul, and your work has fleshed that out a lot. | ||
| Can you explain to the posse? | ||
| So, let's go back to the posse. | ||
| What was James Burnham's central thesis in the managerial revolution and how that informed your way of thinking about politics in America? | ||
| So, James Burnham is a really interesting figure because he's a former Trotskyite. | ||
| He's a passionate communist. | ||
| He's trying to understand the different ins and outs of politics and how they work. | ||
| He falls out of love with communism and famously becomes a very arch conservative. | ||
| He joins guys like William F. Buckley and starts the National Review. | ||
| Somehow his work has fallen out of favor with much of the conservative movement, even though he was really there in the founding of the new generation. | ||
| But in his transition between his prior communist leanings and his conservative politics, one thing he kept an eye on was the way power worked. | ||
| Specifically, he drew on a set of political theorists known as the Italian Elite Theorists. | ||
| And really what he focused on was the interest, the separation of interests between the managerial elite and politics as we understand it. | ||
| He recognized that whether it was under fascism or communism or liberal democracy, all major countries had to post-industrial revolution centralize control of power. | ||
| FDR is doing in some ways the same thing as Stalin is doing. | ||
| And sometimes they actually admire each other in the way they're doing it. | ||
| And so the American way, I think, is ultimately better. | ||
| I'd certainly rather live under it. | ||
| But he recognized that they were creating an entire class of people who had a new skill set, which was operating these large bureaucratic institutions. | ||
| And because more and more of our society was scaling up, we were moving more and more of our investment in social structures into large bureaucratic institutions. | ||
| And today, we can't really think of much that is not run by large bureaucratic institutions. | ||
| Of course, government and business, but we can think of things like churches that traditionally would have nothing to do with this structure. | ||
| Now we hear, Oh, well, we want to run this more like a business. | ||
| Our pastors sound more like TED tal talk CEOs than they do people preaching God's word. | ||
| And we just see this across every domain of society. | ||
| And so because this has become our major organizing principle, the way that the managing elite think, the way that they organize our society, the beliefs that they have about humanity, their anthropology, they all carry over into our daily lives and the way that we do things. | ||
| They also handle the way that we, you know, they manage the way that we understand our government and the way that it operates. | ||
| And so by better understanding what the managers are and what their incentives are and how they work through these bureaucratic institutions, it helps us to understand what they has happened to our politics because Republican democracy cannot work the same way that large bureaucratic institutions have to operate. | ||
| These are two systems that are completely incompatible with each other. | ||
| And so as long as we're ordering our society along this managerial axis, there's no way that we can follow the constitution. | ||
| So what we've done is create an entirely alternative way of operating our government whilst pretending that we're operating under the auspices of the original United States Constitution. | ||
| When you say that they're incompatible, democracy or republic, constitutional republic perhaps, republican democracy and the managerial organization of society, do you mean then that the managerial organization is always going to be be top down, kind of technocratic experts at the top dictating and not responsive to the grassroots? | ||
| Or do you mean something else? | ||
| That's what I take from it, but. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the key with the managers is they need everything to basically fit in place, right? | ||
| The efficiency, think of something like an assembly line, right? | ||
| The efficiency you generate from the assembly line comes from the fact that people are not making decisions, that they don't have agency. | ||
| The efficiency of the assembly line is that you turn the humans into machines. | ||
| They each perform a very specific task the right way every time. | ||
| There's no outlier. | ||
| They're they're they don't get to make, you know, they don't have any agency on that. | ||
| It's all about following managero procedures. | ||
| That's a very mechanical way of thinking about human organization. | ||
| And what they did is they took that assembly line understanding and they applied it to everything. | ||
| This is why when you call into a service center, you get a bunch of people who are technically humans, but they're all reading off scripts, they're all running down specific answers. | ||
| You can't get anyone who can actually go and fix a particular problem because no one has authority. | ||
| They're all relying on this managero apparatus because that's what you have to do to scale up the operation. | ||
| If you're just answering ten questions, you can get really good questions answered. | ||
| But when you have to answer thousands and millions of questions, you can't get anyone to answer. | ||
| Well, actually, it turns out you can't. | ||
| You know, you have to standardize these things. | ||
| Our Republican government system was built on the idea that every citizen would have their own virtuous input into the system. | ||
| They all had their own responsibilities. | ||
| They had to prove themselves of a certain level of virtue practicing in a particular way in order to participate. | ||
| But you cannot cultivate virtue at scale. | ||
| You can't do that when you need massive organizations to operate. | ||
| And so what our elites have done is trained people to think more like machines to operate more in the way that they would if they were sitting on an assembly line to now the point where people don't actually make decisions decisions on who they're voting for, how the system will change. | ||
| They simply participate in a process that gives legitimacy to the change the managers have already decided on. | ||
| Many people call this the deep state, and I think that's a good understanding of some of it. | ||
| That explains the permanent bureaucracy that we've seen that Donald Trump and others are trying to dig out of the system right now. | ||
| JD Vance will go on, Vivek Raswamy will talk about the need to dismantle these systems. | ||
| But of course, it reaches well beyond the bureaucracies. | ||
| It also goes into our media, into our education system, our universities, our banks. | ||
| Everything is run in this way. | ||
| And so that's why I think the total state is more helpful because it's what begins in the deep state but spreads to our entire society. | ||
| Without lingering too long on the managerial approach to governance scaling, it seems that it's maybe not a necessary way to organize a society that has scaled up to the degree that our now modern society has. | ||
| But I'm curious then, it is obviously a useful way. | ||
| to organize very large-scale institutions, nations, empires. | ||
| What are some alternatives that you see to the managerial approach to scaling? | ||
| Is it another alternative approach? | ||
| to scaling or is it an abandonment of scale entirely? | ||
| I think it actually has to be an abandonment of scale. | ||
| So to be clear, Byrne was not cried the managero revolution. | ||
| He saw this ultimately as the technocratic solution that was necessary to move things forward. | ||
| Other thinkers like Sam Francis may have lamented what the managero revolution had done to Americans. | ||
| But once it had been done, he said, basically, this is now the only way we can organize at this point. | ||
| We have what the very difficult decision, this is why this is the hardest thing right now, and this is what most people miss about this. | ||
| We have to make a real decision about whether we want to operate as a republic republic, as an organic political entity, or if we think the scale is worth dehumanizing ourselves. | ||
| And it has to be one or the other. | ||
| I don't think there is an effective way to organize at this level without dehumanizing ourselves, without giving in to the managerial impulse. | ||
| And this is far from the only, you know, I'm far from the only person to assert this. | ||
| Even some of the elite theorists like Gaetana Mosca talked about how civilization is always moving between the bureaucratic and the feudal. | ||
| And there's always, you're always somewhere on this continuum. | ||
| We're never staying in one state or the other. | ||
| And so we're always moving towards one of these poles and then moving back. | ||
| So there's a very natural give and take as we decide as humans, oh, well, we want to centralize things., we want to build things up, we want to scale, we want to gain efficiency out of them. | ||
| Then we recognize, oh, these systems are breaking down. | ||
| They're not working anymore. | ||
| They're dehumanizing. | ||
| They're making people miserable. | ||
| And they either come apart on their own or we make a choice to scale them back down. | ||
| But either way, we can't keep existing in that state. | ||
| But then once we head back towards the decentralized, we tend to naturally pull back in. | ||
| So it is this pendulum swing back and forth constantly that we can't necessarily avoid. | ||
| So you're not an extremist, really. | ||
| You're just pushing the dial towards independent communities, perhaps churches, schools, local governments as sources of meaning and order? | ||
| Or would you like to see a radical deconstruction of the entire machine, which, you know, at least on my most fantastic days, I would actually like to see that? | ||
| Well, I think one thing we can share in common is that we're both prohuman. | ||
| What we're looking for is the human wins over the system. | ||
| We don't want to be run by algorithms. | ||
| We don't want to recognize AI as just the way the managers escape this problem, right? | ||
| It's there. | ||
| They don't want the Tower of Babel to Ball to fall. | ||
| You might say that AI is an embodiment or a kind of distillation of the managerial state. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It is the ultimate solution to the managerial problem. | ||
| And so that's kind of what they're hoping is that this saves them. | ||
| But I think both of us recognize that there lies all kinds of demons. | ||
| And so ultimately, I'm pro-human. | ||
| Now, do we need to Ted Kaczynski this situation? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| But I do think we should be, like you said, making very real and deliberate movements towards the human, to making those choices that are local, that put the choices in the hands of real people in organic communities. | ||
| That's not going to be easy and there will be some sacrifices. | ||
| But I think the people who do that are going to be much better off in the long run. | ||
| that completely embrace this system and ultimately become dehumanized by it. | ||
| You have written and talked quite a bit about Curtis Yarvin's ideas. | ||
| You've never been a Yarvin acolyte, as far as I can tell. | ||
| You've always weighed his ideas against others and have been actually quite critical of his ideas at times. | ||
| But in your book, you do weave his work into the ideas behind the total state. | ||
| Can you tell me a little bit about his influence on your thinking, what you've drawn, what value you have drawn from his work? | ||
| Yeah, the real value of Curtis is he was really the only guy in the modern day who was working and in dialogue with this tradition, this James Burnham, Sam Francis, and more importantly, then the Italian elite theorists that they were building on. | ||
| He was one of the few people who was really looking into that. | ||
| And so I don't agree with every assumption he draws from them, but the fact simply that he was analyzing power in this way, understanding the mechanisms that were underlying our system, throwing away the kind of hopeful assumptions we had about holding on to exactly the same government we had back in the 1790s. | ||
| He was very good opening these things up. | ||
| And so I think he's very valuable because. | ||
| he's ultimately a systems analyst, and that means that he's very good at tracing the contours of power and laying them out. | ||
| Now, his prescriptions often, I think, leave something to be desired because he's ultimately a materialist. | ||
| And so his solutions often don't factor in the human soul and the spirituality that I think has to be part of these solutions. | ||
| But when it comes to really diagnosing the problem, he's very, very good at that. | ||
| And he's so widely read and brings in so many thinkers that have been largely excluded from the right, even though they should have been predominantly in our mind when we're thinking through this problem. | ||
| I don't see how you can exclude his work. | ||
| Someone says to recognize that the way they're ordering the thought and the way they're allowing you to explore other thinkers is very valuable. | ||
| What do you think of his ideas on monarchy? | ||
| And clearly he doesn't necessarily mean a king with all the royal decoration and ornamentation, although that's what it brings to my mind whenever he talks about the monarch. | ||
| But he seems to mean more an abstract concept of an executive, a strong executive who cuts through the bureaucracy, who cuts through the complaints of the masses, we'll say. | ||
| What do you think of that idea? | ||
| Is it elitist? | ||
| Is it useful? | ||
| Well, it's all elitist, but to be clear, I'm fine with elitism in the sense that sense that I would like to do what is best for the people, ultimately. | ||
| But we have to recognize that the people will, for better or worse, always be led by a minority of the actual country. | ||
| The organized minority will always lead the disorganized majority. | ||
| And so that means what we want is not the elimination of elites, but a better kind of elite. | ||
| And Curtis's idea is basically that what we have is a systems problem. | ||
| And if we can just kind of organize everything under a single monarch, we'll have a much more effective way of operating the system. | ||
| Now there are a lot of arguments that are compelling around this, right? | ||
| The fact that, as you say, it can cut through all the bureaucracy, it can cut through all the red bureaucracy. | ||
| It can cut through the Gordian knot that seems to be our immovable system at the moment. | ||
| Very appealing for a lot of people. | ||
| And there's a reason that at the end of these kind of complex, sclerotic oligarchies, we tend to get a strong man. | ||
| You know, Oswald Spengel called this Caesarism, where you would have a Caesar figure that would arise when the money power, the oligarchy had kind of tied up the entire society and made it impossible for it to move. | ||
| You would have this decisive figure who came in and cut through that. | ||
| And so just historically, Curtis is probably right that something like that could be down the line. | ||
| Whether we like it or not, whether we think that's great or not, this is the solution that people would tend to fall back on when they end up in this scenario? | ||
| Now, ultimately, is that the way that we want to order our society? | ||
| Is that what really fits in the American tradition? | ||
| Well, you know, a constitutional monarchy is what we had in England before we came over, and that's certainly a very different monarchy than say a god emperor. | ||
| Many people think of the king having all kinds of power, but of course in England that wasn't the case. | ||
| The king was actually rather constrained compared to other monarchs in the way that he could wield power. | ||
| So would that in some ways be in line with that tradition? | ||
| A little bit, but of course America is also defined by throwing off that king, and so perhaps returning to a republic scaled down to the level where it can actually operate. | ||
| And so, reaching a level where it can actually operate again could be an option. | ||
| But the reason Curtis doesn't like that option is it requires virtue. | ||
| It requires us not to look at the mechanics of the system, but also look at the spiritual health of the people. | ||
| And he just doesn't think that we're in a place where we can rehabilitate the spiritual health of the people. | ||
| I think that, unfortunately, might be true, but I'm hoping it's not. | ||
| And I'm not giving up on the human. | ||
| I'm not giving up on that possibility. | ||
| And so I respect his arguments. | ||
| I think they're strong. | ||
| I think that there is a possibility we might end up in that scenario. | ||
| But we also could be in a scenario where these bureaucracies break apart with the we have more of a. | ||
| I think we're seeing more of a, not so much a Balkanization, but simply a perhaps a return to a far more robust federalism that exists in the United States, in which we could create communities that no longer require these massive scales and therefore allow us to cultivate the virtue that is required for Republican government. | ||
| But either way, drastic change on the level of what would seem like a revolution would basically be necessary at this point. | ||
| We only have a few moments left before we go to break, but in the time we do have, just to drill down on that idea, your experience of America and perhaps abroad, do you see that diversification that some deride it as Balkankanization, but a kind of individuation collectively on the part of different areas of the country. | ||
| It's always been kind of the case, but it seems like the Great Sort has really brought it into focus so that Florida, your current abode, is quite different from California culturally. | ||
| Do you see that happening right now and do you see that as a good thing, both politically and culturally? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a really important thing. | ||
| As you said, the Great Sort is happening no matter what. | ||
| That's already occurred, especially post COVID, as we saw in Florida. | ||
| It went from being a purple straight state trending blue to becoming a deep red state. | ||
| The fact that people simply didn't want to live with the woke madness, didn't want to live with the COVID madness, They knew that Florida was different and they knew by physically locating themselves into a geographic area next to people who shared their values, they could live the kind of lives they want to live. | ||
| And this is really the lie that technology has told us that we could just live where we wanted and it didn't matter who our neighbor was and we didn't have to share anything because this kind of over identity of America would just solve those problems. | ||
| But what we're doing is going back to a place where we live in real robust organic communities. | ||
| It's still far away, but I see people building religious communities. | ||
| I still see people building intentional communities with people who share their values. | ||
| And I think that's ultimately the future of the United States. | ||
| Yeah, that tension between nationalism, which is very, very important, and localism, regionalism. | ||
| It's going to be a very difficult problem that we will have the rest of our lives, but I really appreciate your approach to this as far as putting turning that dial back to the local as opposed to the kind of blob like homogeneous one state. | ||
| We'll be back after the break to talk more with Arin McIntyre. | ||
| We will return with some more esoteric topics, perhaps Alexander Dugan, Nick Land, and even a bit of transhumanism, posthumanism, and posthuman politics. | ||
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| Welcome back, War Room Posse. | ||
| I am here with Arin McIntyre, author of The Total State, How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies. | ||
| A fantastic book. | ||
| I recommend picking it up anywhere books are sold. | ||
| Signed copies available? | ||
| No, only if you meet up with me. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, you'll have to track him down. | ||
| He is right now at the National Conservatism Convention, NATCON. | ||
| Maybe you can find him there if you have your ticket. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Arne, I would like to return to an idea that we left off on. | ||
| Curtis Yarvin and I would say the majority of people in politics, whether they be philosophers or politicians or lobbyists, hold to a material Maybe not always philosophically, but in practice, their behavior in the world is based on material conditions, material analysis, and material responses. | ||
| Now, you have argued quite often and quite strenuously that the spiritual supersedes the material. | ||
| The spiritual is more important. | ||
| How do you see the spiritual, the human soul, and its relationship to God as a point of resistance and a way to understand really the total state? | ||
| Well, when we are living in accordance with God's purpose, when we are following our telos, we can feel it. | ||
| We can feel that we're acting in a way that makes us more human, but also connects us to the divine. | ||
| We know that there is a transcendent property to what we're doing and an ultimate value that gives us true worth. | ||
| When we're in a materialistic frame, we're just going through the motions. | ||
| We're just looking to reach particular goals that have been laid out for us but are ultimately arbitrary. | ||
| Oftentimes it feels like we're not even in control of the process as we turn over our desires to mechanisms that otherwise are simply preying on the them in order to derive what a direct material benefit we gain. | ||
| And so when our politics are oriented around what is good for people in their real lives, as opposed to what is good for spreadsheets and maximization of economic units, we can feel a real difference. | ||
| Thomas Carlisle used to call this the condition of England question. | ||
| We can go around and gather data. | ||
| We can become statisticians and look at different polls and different ways to measure whether people are doing well. | ||
| But that doesn't actually tell us how people's lives are being improved or being destroyed. | ||
| To do that, we actually have to understand see what they value and see what their interactions between spouses and children and families and business owners and communities are. | ||
| And that's really what helps us to gauge whether or not we are successful as a society. | ||
| So I think reintroducing the spiritual is critical because if we don't do that, we just live in this spreadsheet materialistic world that turns us all into interchangeable widgets and that doesn't make anyone happy. | ||
| I couldn't agree more on both points. | ||
| The points about the dehumanization process of becoming a cog or a data point and also the transcendent spirit, the true value that lies within ourselves and the true value that lies beyond material phenomena we see God. | ||
| But we run into a real problem in America and really across the modern world. | ||
| Perhaps this is a perennial problem that goes back to the caves. | ||
| There are a lot of different systems of value. | ||
| Some of them are radically different. | ||
| We've just highlighted two, right? | ||
| spiritual perspective versus the material. | ||
| And in the spiritual perspective, you get a wide range of viewpoints and value systems. | ||
| And in the material perspective, the same. | ||
| How do we approach American society in a way that can uphold those transcendent spiritual values without trampling on or oversaturing, homogenizing the rest of the culture? | ||
| Or is it possible? | ||
| Is it desirable? | ||
| So if you look back, if anyone has ever had the opportunity to read Albion Seed, it's a David Hackett Fisher book about the founding folk ways of the United States, and he identifies that there are four main groups that are initially settling the United States, and each one of them is, while we think of them as uniquely American, and we can identify a lot of the traits of the Quakers or the Hillfolk or the Puritans, we can see their legacy in the United States. | ||
| And they were radically different from each other. | ||
| Often they had difficulty interacting with each other's way of life. | ||
| And we recognize that throughout American history, the kind of just vast country of the United States and its federalization has allowed for us to have this different regional texture to our communities that was still American, but had its own distinct flavor. | ||
| Now, after World War two, especially when we had mass communication, we have the train, we have the automobile, we have the airplane, all of a sudden our world became much smaller. | ||
| And all of a sudden the desire to impose a homogeneous culture came across America. | ||
| Again, not that Americans didn't have many similarities. | ||
| But now it became essential to crush out those regional differences to the point where we started sending the 82nd Airborne down to the South to make sure that they behave the same way the North did. | ||
| Now, a lot of people may say, well, that was worth it at the time, but recognize that ultimately this was a forced way to make people interact how you would like them to, not the way their community had done previously. | ||
| And so that's ultimately, I think, the answer is we could return to a system in which we trust our localities. | ||
| We actually pretend like the Tenth Amendment is in the Constitution and we allow states to operate the way they were originally supposed to, not as some subsidiary of the central government, but as a reg real living community, making decisions based on the ways that the people there operate. | ||
| That way, you're responding to the communities that are much smaller than this 50 state conglomerate we currently have. | ||
| Before we go into the more esoteric, just a quick note on that. | ||
| Do you think that, for instance, striking down Roe v Wade and allowing states to decide their own policies on reproduction, the current rise of localized and state level AI politics and even drug laws, do you think that this is an expression at the political level of that diversification and maybe even a way to amplify it? | ||
| It's certainly a beginning, but of course there's a lot lot, a lot, a lot more to do. | ||
| We don't recognize unless you've really got into the nitty gritty of a lot of local and state politics, how deeply dependent these different municipalities and states are on federal funding and how much that determines all of this. | ||
| This audience definitely is. | ||
| This audience knows more about local politics, they've forgotten more than I've ever known. | ||
| So it's definitely a scenario where those are kind of the very beginnings of taking some of those chains off the states and the localities and allowing to make those decisions, but it's barely even a toe into the water of where we need to be. | ||
|
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All right. | |
| So liberal democracy is right there in the subtitle of your book. | ||
| And it's there's a subtle threat that liberal democracy leans towards tyranny, perhaps not always. | ||
| But you've written and spoken a lot about Alexander Dugan and Curtis Yarvin, both critics of liberal democracy as being the end all be all of human social development. | ||
| Talk a little bit about that. | ||
| How did you arrive here? | ||
| at your critique of liberal democracy and how do these thinkers really flesh out your response to the problems of liberal democracy Well, a lot of people were taught that democracy just means freedom. | ||
| They're the same thing, right? | ||
| It's just a synonym for each other because democracy protects the people, the will of the people from the tyrant. | ||
| But if you look back, obviously, or actually, if you just look at where we are right now, it's very clear that, well, democracy didn't stop the COVID lockdowns. | ||
| It didn't stop stolen elections. | ||
| It didn't stop many of these things. | ||
| And so perhaps the mechanism could have some restrictive effect on government, but it clearly is not some kind of universal answer. | ||
| It can obviously fail. | ||
| And we want to ask, well, why is it failing?? | ||
| And what you recognize is that if you make popular sovereignty, if you make the will of the people the justification for rulers' power, they don't just turn over power to the people. | ||
| That's not actually how it works. | ||
| They want to retain power like any elite does. | ||
| So what do they do? | ||
| They get really good at controlling popular sovereignty, manipulating public opinion. | ||
| And one of the reasons that they lean on mass liberal democracy as opposed to very small scale Republican democracy is that Republican democracy was based on the idea that virtuous people who are very active in the community who have already proven themselves to be the head of households capable of operating, you know, their own property and, you know, caring for families. | ||
| and these kinds of things were willing to act in defense of the state. | ||
| These were the only people who got to make decisions because they were very much bought in. | ||
| They had to pay the cost for making the country run. | ||
| But when you spread the franchise out to anyone and everyone, I mean, to the point where now Gavin Newsom's complaining that we're going to be checking for citizenship because, well, we need to get those illegals in there and make sure they vote, right? | ||
| That's where we're at. | ||
| And when you have that scale of democracy, what happens is it becomes very easy to manipulate the average voter. | ||
| Because, well, it's not a group of people who are dedicated to defending the country and proving their virtue. | ||
| It's just anyone. | ||
| Anyone with a phone or a television can suddenly become a voter. | ||
| And they get all their news and information through the media, through education, through entertainment, the very forces that the managero elite control. | ||
| And so suddenly they control the liberal democracy and they are able to manipulate it however they choose. | ||
| But it's even more powerful than that because now they're speaking with the voice of the people. | ||
| A king was always strong, right? | ||
| Don't get me wrong, kings had power. | ||
| But they were still only one man. | ||
| They still had to get the barons, they had to get the lords, they had to get the other factions of society, the church, on their side. | ||
| I mean, literally, a large amount of Western history is just kings trying to figure out how they could possibly defy the Pope. | ||
| And that's where so much of our history comes from. | ||
| But when you're an organization ruling in the name of the people, well, all of a sudden, who can deny the whole people? | ||
| Who are you, one man, to deny the entire collective will of society? | ||
| And we see actually that the rise of liberal democracies coincide with expansions of government. | ||
| Actually, the more liberal democracy we've had, the bigger and more powerful governments have become. | ||
| So very paradoxically from what we've been taught, democracy seems to actually grow and justify large government total states rather than impede them in any way. | ||
| And when you recognize this feature of democracy, this completely turns your understanding of why and how we should operate as a society. | ||
| And when you say democracy, liberal democracy, I think it's important to make the distinction between that and the constitutional republic that was the American ideal in the beginning, as you say, something that was based on more local value systems, more on virtue than just mass appeal. | ||
| And this is something, again, that all, even the ancient philosophers, you don't need to read these new edgy philosophers Curtis Yarvin or Duggan to figure this out. | ||
| We know that, you know, Aristotle told us that ultimately the democracy could become the most tyrannical of all governments. | ||
| This was recognized. | ||
| And the solution for him was a mixed government, a government, much like our own, that tried to bring in a little bit of monarchy with the executive, a little bit of the will of the people, ultimately with the Congress, and then something like the judiciary to mediate between. | ||
| The idea that we would have these different classes in society, and they would be represented in different forms of government, mixing that constitution together, this is what was actually supposed to restrict our government. | ||
| But the problem is that because in America we don't really have these defined classes that existed in the old world. | ||
| We kind of leveled all these different branches of government that were supposed to push against each other and represent real interests and spheres in society. | ||
| We kind of melt them all down into one popular sovereignty force. | ||
| And so now popular sovereignty runs basically all of our branches of government. | ||
| There's nothing differentiating against them, and so this mass democracy has no real checks and balances in the way that our founders intended because we melt down the distinctions within our society that were supposed to fuel those branches, their checks and balances in the first place. | ||
| Alexander Dugan, the Russian philosopher and perhaps chaos magician, he argued that the we're beyond liberal democracy, Just as we've been beyond fascism and ultimately are beyond communism, even if you do have states such as China or Venezuela that are ostensibly Marxist or communist, but really not really. | ||
| They're just state capitalism or however you want to describe it. | ||
| But his argument... | ||
| Because he made it quite clear, it's open. | ||
| There is no distinct theory. | ||
| Do you see yourself as in line with that kind of project? | ||
| You know, it's difficult because obviously Dugan is rightly a controversial figure. | ||
| You know, he's very much tied to Putin and, you know, is in many ways providing the philosophical backing for many of the actions he's taking. | ||
| And in that way, you have to be careful when you're reading his philosophy because I think he is motivated politically. | ||
| I don't think it's just an objective look at these things. | ||
| All of his answers just happen to fall into the kind of the Russian Empire and, you know, the Russian Federation. | ||
| And, you know, ultimately justifying the decisions they're making. | ||
| So I don't want people to look at this and say, well, I'm on board with Dugan's political project, because that is just absolutely not the case. | ||
| However, I do think he does have some important insights into the moment we're in, many of which you're addressing there, that we really are already in a post-liberal world. | ||
| This has already occurred. | ||
| And so if we're going to figure out how to bring a political philosophy together that can work in the modern day for the situation we find ourselves in, we do have to look outside of this kind of end of history, globalist liberal project, and we have to say, what are some of the things from. | ||
| from older political theories that we might be able to take into the future, but maybe leave behind the things that were baggage that made them fail that we no longer want to be involved with and How do we bring them into the modern day, into our own tradition, into our own way of thinking, so they can be more successful? | ||
| So we're not looking backwards. | ||
| We're not just trying to return to a former time we cannot return to. | ||
| But what we're trying to do is carry traditions that were lost, that were discarded by large scale globalist liberalism intentionally in order to erode the self reliance and particularity of different peoples. | ||
| How do we bring that into our current day and marry it with kind of where we are at so that we can move forward into something that hopefully can overcome our technological problems, overcome some of the problems of modernity that we find ourselves in, but can do so by bringing forward many of these traditions that we left behind? | ||
| Unlike many people on the right, you have not neglected the issue of technology, particularly artificial intelligence. | ||
| In our final remaining minutes, I would like for you to just give me a sense of what you're working on right now. | ||
| When we last spoke, you were gracious enough to interview me and let me air my grievances against the I'm very curious what you mean by posthuman politics. | ||
| Where do you see political strategy and political life in the near or distant future in that regard? | ||
| Well, as we already know, our ruling elites are very good at manipulating us through media and all these things. | ||
| In a way, they're already kind of an algorithm. | ||
| They're losing their human agency. | ||
| They're building this machine. | ||
| We've all heard the term machine politics, right? | ||
| You had the different Democrats who would run these towns and they would be able to turn people out. | ||
| And you didn't have to think about who you were voting for because the political machine had already made the AI at Tammany Hall, right? | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And that feels like where we're heading next. | ||
| It's no longer necessary for even humans to manipulate us in the way that they have been doing through advertisement, history and propaganda. | ||
| Instead, the AI can do it for us. | ||
| It can, you know, we're already seeing this AI when it's deciding how to adjust different prices, different rents to squeeze people to the last little drop. | ||
| That's already horrible and dehumanizing, but it's going to do it with your political beliefs. | ||
| It's going to learn how to manipulate, manipulate you. | ||
| It will let you show you exactly what it wants you to see, drive you to particular actions. | ||
| One of the visions that Alexander Dugan uses, one of the illustrations he uses, is the idea that a man used to send a text message. | ||
| Now the text message will send the man. | ||
| Imagine an Oh wow. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Imagine an army of political partisans who are operating because an algorithm tells them to activate in a given time. | ||
| And which we see already, right? | ||
| And we have for arguably two decades. | ||
| It's just become more and more sophisticated. | ||
| Social media made it that much easier to kind of get a sense, take the temperature of political sentiment, and also to disseminate the propaganda. | ||
| Would you say that this is a continuation of previous generations? | ||
| Do you think it's a continuation of previous processes or do you think that AI and the advanced neural networks represent a kind of a quantum leap in how posthuman politics are conducted? | ||
| I think it's a continuation, but it is accelerating rather quickly. | ||
| We've removed human feedback almost from the process at this point. | ||
| The AI feeds you with your ideology, it perfects the ideology, it takes that immediately, runs it back to you. | ||
| There's very little interaction you're having with the machine at this point. | ||
| It's more or less driving the whole thing. | ||
| And that is the concern technologically on the posthuman political side that AIs will become the major drivers, nonhuman forces that will be determining a large amount of our politics. | ||
| But the other end of this is the Dugan end when he talks about the spiritual forces. | ||
| That ultimately we're seeing a culmination of post-rational spiritual forces that are re entering into politics. | ||
| R. Areno calls this the return of the strong gods, if you want a more American explanation of the same phenomenon. | ||
| And so more and more we're seeing choices that are being made, I think, on a spiritual level that perhaps were not manifesting previously. | ||
| And so I think both in the technological and spiritual realm, we're starting to see that nonhuman forces are on the move. | ||
| Arn, I could continue this conversation for hours, but we are out of time. | ||
| If you would, please let our audience know where they can find your work, where they can find your book, and what they can expect in the future. | ||
| Of course, I got the book pretty much everywhere you would expect, Barnes Noble Books, A Million, Amazon. | ||
| The show is on the Blaze TV, and also, of course, it's on YouTube and anywhere you catch podcasts, it's the Orin McIntyre Show. | ||
| So if you want to catch me there, I'm also on Twitter and Gab and Substack and all the places you would expect under Orin McIntyre. | ||
| I really appreciate it, bro. | ||
| Absolutely, man. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Yeah, an honor. | ||
| All right, War Room Posse. | ||
| We will be back tomorrow morning with more action-packed news and commentary with Steve Bannon back in the pilot seat. | ||
| So tune in tomorrow morning. | ||
| Thank you very much. |
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