While Americans were transforming esoteric strains of yoga into a commodifiable industry in 1980, a young naval officer named Steve Bannon was picking up theosophical texts in metaphysical bookstores and practicing Zen meditation in secret while stationed in Hong Kong. He was wary of his countrymates liberal explorations of Eastern philosophies, aware of the nationalistic roots upon which these “mystical” systems were founded. Then he stumbled into Traditionalism, a perennial philosophy that consumed all world religions, as popularized by the likes of French metaphysicist René Guénon and Italian antisemitic conspiracy theorist Julius Evola.This week we welcome Benjamin Teitelbaum, an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and International Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and author of the book, War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right. Teitelbaum gained access to leading right-wing figures around the world, including Steve Bannon. He’s got their number and brings receipts. Get ready for a long, strange trip.Show NotesThe rise of the traditionalists: how a mystical doctrine is reshaping the rightCovid-19 Is the Crisis Radical ‘Traditionalists’ Have Been Waiting ForThe People Who Pray for the Apocalypse | Benjamin Teitelbaum | The Glenn Beck Podcast
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Conspiratuality 82, Steve Bannon, Mystic, with Benjamin Teitelbaum.
While Americans were transforming esoteric strains of yoga into a commodifiable industry in 1980, a young naval officer named Steve Bannon was picking up theosophical texts in metaphysical bookstores and practicing Zen meditation in secret while stationed in Hong Kong.
He was wary of his countrymates' liberal explorations of Eastern philosophies, aware of the nationalistic roots upon which these mystical systems were founded.
Then, he stumbled into traditionalism, a perennial philosophy that consumed all world religions, as popularized by the likes of French metaphysicist René Gounod and Italian anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Julius Evola.
This week, we welcome Benjamin Teitelbaum, an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and International Affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder, and author of the book War for Eternity, The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right.
Teitelbaum gained access to leading right-wing figures around the world, including Steve Bannon.
He's got their number and brings receipts, so get ready for a long, strange trip.
As I mentioned on the top, Benjamin, we have so many thoughts about this book.
In fact, I had to cut a lot of questions in our last edit last night.
But let's step back and look at the scope of this enormous project that you were involved in and accomplished.
How does an ethnomusicologist undertake what is one of the most interesting investigations on the rise of far-right populism, as well as get access to elusive figures like Steve Bannon?
Both those questions actually have, I think, a common answer, or at least similar answers.
Music, to me, is interesting.
Of course, I'm a musician myself.
I like listening to music.
But as a social scientist, it's interesting because it, in certain ways, can encapsulate and express wider worlds and universes of ideas.
So that's part of this, is that we see in music sometimes an embryonic form, a wider ideological world, and it makes music a really profitable, let me use that term, object of analysis for a scholar.
Music, people will say things in music that they won't say otherwise.
The second related reason is that people also tend to think that music is good.
Uses of music may be bad, the words we put to music may be bad, but the sound itself is good.
And one of the connotations of that is that people who study music might also seem harmless.
let's say trafficking in meaningless leisure, recreation activities, compared to scholars of economics or history, political history, serious social behavior, right?
So when I have gone out into the world, and this was not my first, this is not my first full-length book that I've written, and tell people that I'm a music scholar, that opens doors.
And it opens doors because people think that I'm not trafficking in anything sensitive or serious.
When One of the consequences of that is that I end up getting a lot of exposure and access to people.
So that began before I wrote this most recent book, War for Eternity.
Lions of the North, that was based on years of ethnographic research in Scandinavia, on the far right there.
And I was interested in music primarily.
I was a more proper ethnomusicologist in that case.
I was following the way that music showed how that political scene had transformed itself from a skinhead, hooliganistic youth subculture into what it is today, which is One of the most profound, quickest changes to mainstream Swedish politics in modern history.
But while I was doing that, the access that I gained, it showed that, wow, there's this incredible breadth of ideas and identities and visions and agendas within the far right.
The one that was the most interesting, but also seemed the most politically inconsequential, Was this identitarian, traditionalist, brackish water out on the edges.
Where you would be, you know, at a gathering, a festival, and there would, you would have your skinheads, you'd have your party politicians, and then there'd be some oddballs in the center.
And you might hear a rumor that maybe one of them's a Muslim, which was, you know, which was just like, what?
And, you know, they're a Muslim convert.
Yes, they're anti-immigrant.
They're far right.
But by the way, they're Sufis.
Um, and, and so it was just this, it was just a curiosity to me.
I just thought, oh, this is kind of fun.
It'll be a little card I can pull out with my academic friends if they think that they know what the far right is and they have their stereotypes, I can just watch them deal with this and it'll be fun.
But I never thought, I never thought it would be.
Influential, as I say.
This was 2010, 2012, 2013, those years.
And it was a real shock when we hit 2016, 2017, and we hear that Trump, as an advisor who just merely knows, at least has knowledge of that world, that strange sector of the far right.
That was my introduction.
I also knew I knew something about it, and I liked face-to-face work and thought I would give it a shot to study it.
That music response reminds me of narco corridos in Mexico who can sing and actually criticize the drug traffickers but also be championed because the drug smugglers are thinking that they're being celebrated.
So that was a really good response.
In fact, we're all involved in music in some capacity here and we could definitely go down that rabbit hole.
Your poets as well, right?
Yes, the Archiquitos, absolutely.
I want to focus more on conspirituality material.
Maybe we'll have you on for another music episode.
But you write that what sets traditionalism apart is the full-scale nature of its opposition.
It strives to destroy all of modernity's values and rally behind their opposite.
And a lot of the appeal to this mode of thinking is Due to general discontent of your society, something that some of our media here in America is certainly stoking.
But to give a big picture overview of this before we get granular with these figures, can you give a brief historical overview of what traditionalism is?
No, but I'll try.
I'm asked to do that always and I always fail, but I'll do my best.
So this is, we're talking about something, we're going to be speaking about it as though it's a political ideology and agenda, but initially it is a sort of comparative religion or religious or spiritual practice.
It comes out of Orientalist.
I have no trouble in saying that.
Orientalist circles in Paris in the late 1800s, early 1900s.
The original founders would not like me saying that.
I don't care.
That's where it comes out of.
That's the intellectual milieu that it is born into.
And it looks for commonalities among a select group of world religions and posits that the common The common material among them all, all belong to a more archaic, true, authentic religion that is the truth, and that as time has gone on has become bastardized, forgotten, splintered in various directions.
And it is the goal of the traditionalist to find out what that original tradition was, capital T tradition.
And the chosen religions are first and foremost, it's Hinduism.
And religious practices that can be tied in some way to Hinduism.
Traditionalists, some of them, disagree as to whether pre-monotheistic paganism in Europe actually counts by virtue of its connection with Hinduism.
The problem with that is that it's a dead tradition in the eyes of some traditionalists.
So there is nonetheless room there for European paganism and some kind of Nordish Teutonic, uh, romanticism to find its place in there, but it's, but Hinduism is considered by virtue of its antiquity, uh, to have preserved most of this ancient, uh, ancient tradition.
Uh, secondary to that, you would have, uh, branches of other monotheistic religions that, that are seemed to, uh, thought to be more archaic, uh, and that actually gain their, their endorsement by traditionalists by virtue of being preserving pre monotheistic beliefs. their endorsement by traditionalists by virtue of being preserving pre So we're talking about Catholicism.
And we're speaking specifically about the ostensible paganism of Catholicism and the continued practice of paganism through Catholicism.
We're talking about Sufism.
We could also be speaking about Zoroastrianism.
Um, depending on who, who you're referring to.
So that's, that's kind of the source material.
Buddhism can come in for some people.
Um, there are traditionalists who looked at Native American spiritualities.
Sometimes Kabbalah, um, is, is considered kosher, so to say.
Um, but, uh, what did they pull out of this?
Well, I would highlight two lessons that they derive from this practice of comparative religion that end up being relevant to politics.
We could talk a lot about all these, but here are the two that I think are most important.
One of them is cyclic time, the basic idea of the yugas from Hinduism, the belief that we are passing through a cycle of four eras, a golden age proceeding to a silver, proceeding to a bronze, proceeding to a dark, followed by a cataclysmic event that starts the cycle over again at golden and decline begins again.
The relevance politically for that conception of time and that conception of cyclic time is they include pessimism, the belief that almost always every second that passes, things get worse.
To speak in blunt terms.
There's really no reason to believe in progress.
The only good that can happen is when destruction gets so extreme that you find yourself pushed from a dark age into a golden age, into an age of rebirth, and you can re-experience the glory that once was.
And that concept is another idea that has political import, and that is that our past is never really something that we escape.
Past, present, and future are all folded together.
What you were is what you are and what you shall become.
So, emancipatory social movements, let's say.
Migrations, the adoption of new identities, breaking away from what you were born into.
These are not treated as possibilities in this conception of time, at least not in any grand scale.
They're rather mirages, deceptions that are there to keep you from understanding that you actually, your destiny is actually returned to what once was.
So, that's all contained in the concept of cyclic time.
The other concept that I would bring into this, it interacts with cyclicality, is the notion of caste hierarchy.
I think a lot of your listeners might be familiar with this, thanks to Hinduism, but if you think of a Hindu caste hierarchy with the Brahmins on top and the Shudras, At the bottom, you will have given yourself a bit of an introduction to the way traditionalists think about this.
They will speak in very generic terms about a hierarchy opposing priests.
At the very top, a small elite of priests at the top of a pyramid hierarchy, followed beneath it by a cast of warriors.
They are on top of a cast of merchants who are themselves on top of the largest level, largest layer of slaves.
That particular ordering is very important because it opposes, in their mind, the mass versus the elite.
It opposes spirituality versus materialism.
At the top of the pyramid, you have the priests who deal in immaterial values, spirituality, whose gazes look Beyond the earth up into the heavens.
At the opposite end with the slaves, you have a mass of people who traffic in the material, the most material, their bodies.
Above them, the merchants are also material, but at least they have escaped the primary immediate materiality of the body and they are dealing with goods and money.
Right.
Warriors are better yet than merchants because they aspire to values of honor.
They can be secular worldly values, but at least they are material.
They're beyond the basest needs of humanity, but they're not quite as advanced as the priests.
So, you have that opposition.
Also, I can speak briefly about how this interacts with the time cycle.
They believe that as you proceed through the Golden Age to the Dark Age, you proceed through ages that are aligned with those castes.
So, the Golden Age is the Age of Priests, the Silver Age is an Age of Warriors, Bronze Age, an Age of Merchants, and finally the Dark Age is the Age of Slaves.
And when I say that an age belongs to someone, that essentially means that they are at the top of the hierarchy.
Another way of saying that is when you move from a golden age to a silver age, priests disappear functionally in society.
And when you find yourself all the way down to the age, to a dark age, they don't actually think that there is any hierarchy.
One of the signatures of that dark age is the complete disappearance of hierarchy or boundaries or structure.
And instead we have a mass homogeneous society.
So, another value is buried in all of this, and that is that a golden age is an age of stratification, of social boundaries that mean things.
And a dark age is an age of complete fluidity and meaninglessness.
Now, if this sounds kind of creepy, the interesting thing with traditionalists, with political traditionalists in particular, is what else they put into that hierarchy.
We've talked about social structure versus no social structure.
We've talked about spirituality versus materialism.
But for someone like Julius Evola, he said, well, guess what?
There are other associations built into this.
The priests are Aryans.
And the slaves are non-Aryans, or Semites.
And you can speak in those terms, the terms Aryan, non-Aryan, I'm sure you and your listeners know those can have a lot of different connotations.
But Evola was also interested in the most material of them, let's say, which included skin color.
So that being a genuine Brahmin, being a genuine priest, is to have lighter skin color, and having darker skin color is to be more slave-like.
There are gender connotations.
The values of the priests are more masculine, and the values of the slaves are going to be more feminine.
There are geographic connotations.
The priests are more northerly in their disposition, and the slaves are more southerly.
If you wrap all of this together, you get a narrative of human history that says that yes, as the time cycle is moving forward, things are getting worse.
What is taking place when they're getting worse?
Hierarchy breaks down.
Differences between people break down.
Our society, our politics, our culture become more materialistic.
If there was a distinct racial class at the top, it has now been darkened, especially as centers of global activity are moving further, further south or people from the south are moving to the north and co-contaminating each other, let's say.
I'm using scare quotes as I'm saying that.
That is the history and the way to resolve it, of course, in the return of the golden age would be a return of social stratification, boundaries, spirituality, and let's say, I think we would also throw into this, an understanding of the cyclicality of time and a skepticism an understanding of the cyclicality of time and a skepticism to the notion of progress. - Yes.
So you asked for me to explain.
I've been talking a lot now, but I'm going to take a break because hopefully this is good.
Ben, I think it's a great introduction and there's so many paradoxes to pull on there and so many threads.
I think I want to start with this tension between this obsession with orderliness that you're describing and traditionalism But also how it simultaneously appeals to some deep and forgotten primal truth that you can have access to, especially if, you know, you follow Steve Bannon's path, you do a lot of study, and you, you know, meditate and so on.
There's something both incredibly ordered and structured, but also very watery and intuitive and impassioned about things.
Now, I haven't read your book, Lions of the North, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine that doing ethnomusicology amongst skinheads is going to put you into a kind of nonverbal communication with the idea of the folk or the soul of the people that's inseparable but I imagine that doing ethnomusicology amongst skinheads is going to put you into a kind of nonverbal communication with the idea Now, has that helped you understand some of the mystique of all of this stuff?
Oh, boy, Matthew.
I have.
This is such a, this is, I don't want to go off on so many tangents, but what you're referring to right now, let me kind of summarize this.
We don't know, there's so much that's left unspoken about what this true tradition is.
Is there, what do we make about all of the ideology, all of the communication that takes place in these circles that is extra linguistic?
Or that is unspoken, to use your words.
Yes, there is a certain anti-modernism that attends anyone seeking to go beyond language, seeking to exceed the bounds of language.
I don't want to go off into the weeds too far here, but some of the way that this works in people's minds is to say that Well, we got national languages, we have books, we have publics, we have publicities, we have media and everything so that we can build political consensus for each other collectively.
We can also surveil one another, we can make a more rationalized, a more mathematized society.
But what is lost in that case is passion and intuition.
Right, and emotion.
Those have all been, and this is not just their opinion, I think intellectual historians would say this to you as well, that as society has modernized, we see less and less space for the emotional and for the passion based in our public dealings.
And so there is a sort of inherent rebelliousness to rejecting language and rejecting semantically transparent ways of speaking to each other.
I don't think that it is an accident that Some of the music cultures that are most closely aligned to identitarianism and traditionalism in the far right don't use a lot of transparent language in their music, for example.
I know we didn't want to talk about music much, but a lot of them do la-la-la, do-do-do, vocable singing.
Not words and nonsense syllables singing.
And this is a way to say, well, guess what?
Words actually aren't that important.
Proselytizing is not that important because we don't have anyone to convince.
There's a time cycle.
There's a greater current.
And even if they're not traditionalists, if they simply believe that, well, liberalism has its own lifetime, its own lifespan, and if we just wait long enough, It's going to crush itself under its own weight.
There's no need to implicate ourselves in any resistance movement.
There's no need to convince anyone of anything.
Modern society is doomed to fail and we can try and access the eternal, the unspoken.
Um, I, so yes, that's there.
Music is part of this.
Um, the, the, uh, let's say in romantic nationalism, the, the emphasis on, on images, um, and, and suggestion over literal description, all of that, I think plays into this and there's an inherent skepticism to, to modernity that's manifest in it.
So I could speak a lot more about that too, but I'll let, let that be there.
Well, we don't mind music coming up.
Let me be clear on that.
And especially if it's analogous to what you're talking about.
So definitely feel free to go that route.
Well, especially, I wanted to say, especially given that everything that you've just so eloquently elucidated seems to have come from your beginnings being interested in the asymmetrical rhythm of Swedish folk dance.
What an amazing story.
As a podcast that covers the intersection of wellness and right-wing conspiracy theories, this moment in your book jumped out very early.
Quote, I encountered white Aryan nationalists who make pilgrimages to Hare Krishna ashrams in India, frequenters of metaphysical bookstores who claim that multiculturalism can be stopped with mysticism.
And you also write that Bannon stopped in one such bookstore while in Hong Kong and was turned on to theosophy as well as stumbling across René Guénon for the first time.
And you write that Steve knew these ancient writings were steeped in conservative thought practices.
Now, a large part of our listenership, and I saw this today in a Twitter DM from someone, in fact, thinking that yoga is more of a left-wing, unifying force in the world, and that's what it's always been, and anyone not doing that.
I mean, it's literally a conversation I had this morning, and it's constant.
But that really has never been the case, has it?
No, no.
And it's part of the reason when I learned of your podcast, I was like, oh my, I've got to talk to these guys.
The connotations are always that this is this great left-wing progressive bastion.
I'm in Boulder, Colorado right now.
I'm near Naropa University.
There are metaphysical bookstores downtown near to me, and it always is a shock to people When, when I said that, yeah, well, you know, you could, you might be able to find Julius Evola in there.
That's, that's, you know, he's kind of like a super racist.
Like, you know, he would, he would make the other races you think of just seem kind of dull and inspired in their racism.
And yet he's down in the bookstore right now there.
And, and it, and it makes sense.
There, of course there's, there's an, there's a criticism of modernity in there that, but to say that is not to say that much.
I think, I think more specifically, there's an anti-progressivism.
There's also a primordialism and an ethnic essentialism to be found in a lot of that culture, and I'm sure the three of you can speak to that more at length than I can.
But all of these concepts of returning to what you are and returning to the circumstances of your birth, Almost.
And of your ancestry, it's not a big jump from there to explicit race ideology.
They make quite comfortable bedfellows with one another.
You know, what I couldn't get over in reading that incredible early chapter on Bannon and that bookstore is that I recognized his story as the inverse of my own.
I grew up with a number of dropout seekers, and that is my sort of heritage from the history of modern yoga and wellness.
And he's like this upside down boomer hippie, digging into Orientalist and syncretist mysticism, but not because he's interested in peace.
He's out to understand the world of power.
And I said to Derek on Slack after reading that passage, like the people we know who were seekers in the 1970s, who came home and wanted to do things, they started the neoliberal wellness industry But Bannon came home and fucked shit up.
He came home and he did the art of war.
And you focus on these amazing characters, but because there's such an archetypal feeling to this story, I'm just wondering, how many Bannons do you think are out there?
Or how unique is he?
That's a question I would rather pose to the three of you.
I'm not coming at this from the wellness, yoga practicing, apolitical, esoteric world.
I'm coming at it from the world of right-wing extremism.
And from my perspective, we're talking about Relatively few people in the scene.
If I were to just take, let's say, a festival in Europe that I sometimes go to observe as a sample size, we would say, I don't know, three or four out of a hundred.
What is remarkable about them is they've ended up being some of the most prolific, culturally prolific, and to my utter bewilderment, some of the most politically influential, but behind the scenes, not as actors at the front.
So, we're talking about a numerically insignificant size, but a politically and socially profound subsection of the far right.
But, you know, I'd be interested to hear your perspectives looking at it from the other side.
I don't know of anybody who is as studied who actually I mean, we typically come across people who, because they've been depoliticized through 30-40 years of a wellness culture that forgets its history and wants to believe in this kind of anodyne universalism running the whole show, that
There's more of a vulnerability towards being magnetized towards right-wing populism that doesn't come from any kind of like conscious choice or fascination.
Although there was always like a couple of guys who showed up in the YTT class and they wanted to, you know, the yoga teacher training course, and they wanted to talk about the art of war.
Or they wanted to talk about what the Bhagavad Gita was really about.
But I don't know what happened to those guys.
I guess I never became friends with them.
I don't know.
They were there for different reasons.
I think that a lot of the people that we're seeing getting radicalized who have a kind of charismatic followership and appeal, they don't tend to be intellectuals.
So they've bought into kind of complicated sounding conspiracy theories that they think are like a smart level of analysis, but there isn't this kind of, you know, even though you could question whether or not Steve Bannon's an intellectual, he does at least, you know, do a certain amount of reading and talk to a lot of these folks.
Yes.
Yeah.
And I have no problem calling him an intellectual.
We think of that as just always being, being a compliment or meaning that someone is necessarily smart.
It just means they're curious, right?
It means that they're interested in ideas, right?
They want to participate in the creation and review of ideas.
Yeah.
So I know we're going to talk about him more later, but I just have to bring up Alexander Dugin because he emerges in your incredible book as a kind of heir to René Guénon and Julius Evola.
And I'm hoping our listeners can get kind of a quick orientation here because I found him so fascinating.
I went and listened to a bunch of his talks.
He seems to have been making his case in different countries since at least 2012 for a kind of fourth political ideology.
Right?
And it seems that he's saying, okay, there's liberalism, which values the individual, and there's the class identity of communism, and then in fascism you have racial kind of identities and the idea of the state as being somewhat supreme.
And he frames all of these in an interesting kind of postmodern move as being false social constructs, right?
envisioning instead what he calls a multipolar world that'll go beyond the imposition of these human rights and democratic norms in favor of sovereign nation states.
And they're each expressing, this is the part that I think I want some help with, they're each expressing different forms of Heidegger's concept of Dasein, right?
Some sense of essential being.
So they're separate and different, but then there's this appeal to a shared traditionalist cosmology with these cycles of time.
What am I getting right and what do you want to add to that?
That was a wonderful presentation.
I think if we go back to... So yes, we have this traditionalist figure.
There are plenty of traditionalists who would be upset at me calling Alexander Dugan a traditionalist.
We can talk about that later if you want to.
Always the way.
Not all traditionalists.
Hashtag.
But, yes, he envisions a fourth political theory, one that diverges from the other modernist political theories of liberalism, fascism, and communism.
If we think about the subjects, again, because that, I think, is one of the best ways to unpack this a bit, Julian.
Yes, in liberalism, you have a sovereign individual.
In communism, you have the class.
In fascism, you have the state aligned with the race.
As I look at all those, the design concept, what he wants to see as the subject of his fourth political theory is almost a spinoff of the fascism one.
That's not to say that they're the same.
I don't want to give easy candy to anyone thinking about this, but it's almost as if you could start by saying, okay, well, we know that the state and race are kind of phony, artificial, abstract entity constructs of modernity.
But maybe let's let's pretend for a moment that they were, you know, mistaken, failed attempts to capture something else.
What is that other else?
Oh, man, that's so creepy to hear you say that.
Fascism was almost right.
It almost got to the heart of reality.
It didn't go far enough.
Well, it was just a little bit fake.
It was too modern.
It was too modern, right.
Okay, too technologized, probably.
Too materialistic.
Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
You're right on target.
Oh, wow.
So just Nazis liked too much stuff.
They liked too much stuff.
They were too scientific.
They were too massified.
They were too rationalized.
They were too institutionalized.
They took too many drugs.
I, you know, Julius Evola was all into drugs.
Oh, so funny.
Actually, that's a whole not, that could be another show, right?
Yeah, yeah.
A lot of these people are really into hallucinogenics.
But the idea is that you took almost the notion of an organic community that actually did share history and might actually really have had some, you know, some genetic commonalities.
And you, you know, fascism spread that out to the concept of race, which was so tied into science and science is bad.
Yeah.
And, um, and you invested it in modern institutionalism.
So you have a state and borders trying to police all this stuff and you have mass homogenization within the nation state.
Even if we want to say that nations are distinctly different from each other, at least within the nation, suddenly there's this, there's this pseudo egalitarianism that comes in, you know, you move the people who are not part of the nation, but living there out and you're all good on that front.
But it's, it's that problem.
If you think about what, That other thing could have been that organic community.
That ethnos, which is the other word that Dugan has occasionally applied to this notion of a community-based design or way of being.
Or if you like, ethnos.
That's the other term he's used for it.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, it's very interesting because in other parts of Europe right now, as soon as you move, like, the way that moderate, so-called moderate far-right actors distinguish themselves from extremists is to say that, well, they are cultural nationalists, and you start to talk about ethnicity, then you're talking about biologically inherited traits, and you're talking about a closed community that they are fighting for that no one can assimilate into.
So, ethnicity is a dirty word, but for Dugan's early work, when he speaks about the ethnos, it is... someone could say that it's more closed than a race, even though its distinguishing features are not biological.
Yeah, you have this great chapter titled The Race of the Spirit, which really, I think, sort of gets at some of these complexities, right?
It's sort of this metaphysical notion of race that is racist nonetheless.
In those instances, I'm referring to Julius Avila, but I think if we were to stick with Dugan, we could see that, yes, when we talk about a group of people sharing a common history, there are obviously going to be racial connotations to that.
But that's almost a foundation, and then on top of that, you talk about shared cultural values, norms, religious practices.
And so you're talking about almost a narrowed and a more closed community than the race.
So that's what Dugan sees as being fundamentally under threat from liberalism and from a globalized world and what he wants to see a new geopolitics and local politics prioritize in the alliance building and statecraft.
Yeah, and you're actually going, especially in the first part of your answer to what I wanted to ask you next, is because it seems Seems like, you know, he's sometimes referred to as Putin's brain, right?
And he certainly seems to have the ear of Putin and Putin seems to be using some of his language and repeating some of his concepts.
There's an extent to which when I listen to him, I just feel like, oh, so much of this is justification for assertion of power.
So much of this is essentially like saying about Ukraine, well, Ukraine historically is part of Russian, you know, identity and a sort of glory.
And so we have a right to go in there and do whatever the fuck we want.
How much do you think he's actually converting people to the beliefs, and how much is it like a convenient mythology that they're like, oh hell yeah, this gives me permission to be a proto-fascist?
I'm afraid I think both are active, and happened at different times in his past.
There are people who've said, of all traditionalists, that, you know, not specifically that they're Russian imperialists, but let's say that they're just racist, but they want to be fancy about it.
And they don't like the idea of themselves being racist for the more quotidian, you know, reasons of just fear of the other.
And so it's necessary to have this context.
In Dugin's case, someone could allege that, well, yes, this is just Russian imperialism, but you don't like the sound of that.
And therefore we get this other.
What speaks in favor of that interpretation has been the flexibility of the philosophy, when geopolitics seem poised to reward flexibility.
I believe I wrote about this in the book, but he altered the introductions to some of his philosophical texts.
When it seemed that Turkey was more receptive to geopolitical alignment with Russia, and then suddenly Turkey starts to be framed as having some essential core aligned to Eurasia, as opposed to, let's say, a Levantine or European essence.
So, that certainly makes us think that yes, this is all about political strategy.
Pushing against it, this is more theoretical.
I don't have a good example, but I'm sure that we could come up with a more convenient way of justifying Russian political expansion than the one that he came up with.
So I like the idea of flexible boundaries, but boundaries nonetheless around his philosophical thought.
He is trying to work within some parameters, but he is happy to stretch them when need be.
Race is something we discuss a lot here in varying capacities on the podcast.
And you write that Evola believed that race was beyond skin color and declared that it was a particular way of relating to the supernatural, of wondering about existence, and of understanding the metaphysical dimensions of time in the universe.
So in his view, race is actually a race of the spirit that must be inherited from your ancestors.
And he first encountered the Nazis when he was young, and you write that he thought it was nothing more than a promising start.
And he also thought that biological thinking on race was unformed.
So, I don't want to say brief, because I know what that unleashes here, but what is race in the traditionalist view?
I think if we're going to speak in these terms, we need to say also in the Evolian view, because he has one of the most elaborated conceptions of race in any form.
You know, offensive and otherwise among traditionalists.
So, the Evolian concept of race treats true race as being spiritual as well.
This is a little confusing because he'll also say that having race is almost the prerogative of people with good race.
And that people lacking race are also racially poor.
So excuse me if that gets a little complicated, but being racially Aryan means having a sort of unity between body and spirit and soul, actually.
And that if you live up to your material racial essence, that will entail an opening up of spiritual potentiality.
And also that being authentically ritually Aryan means that you are engaged in spiritual matters and not devoted to the material.
Part of the history behind that is Evola borrows the Hyperborean myth from Blavatsky, I think is where he gets this from.
But saying that, well, in the Golden Age, the true, the utmost priests, the true Aryans were so spiritual, so distinct that they actually transcended materiality and they were not actually embodied beings.
They were actual spirits.
This is not so distinguishable from race in Rudolf Steiner and Theosophy and Anthroposophy, right?
Does it just sort of escalate and radicalize with Evola?
Yes, I think you would have to look at that very tradition which you just mentioned and put it into this cyclic time, this other set of parallel hierarchies that are soon to be playing out as the time cycle moves forward.
Another quote from your book, if you succeed in altering a society's culture, then you will have created a political opportunity for yourself.
Fail to do this and you'll have no chance.
And you note that Bannon early on figured out how to display an inherent hypocrisy within the left by coaxing white Democrats into affirming anti-black views.
So you just explained a moment ago, Evola's views on race.
What are, for me to understanding and spending time with him, what are Bannon's view on it?
And is it purely a political wedge or is it as supernatural as those he studied?
I think this is my answer to this is very much going to parallel what I said about Dugan earlier, whether we see A genuine beliefs versus political strategy because in Bannon with race, I think we see both.
He was always, it was one of the first things he said to me as soon as we started talking about Julius Evola is I don't like the race or the gender stuff with Evola.
And it was almost as if he spoke to me on condition of me showing that I received that message.
Um, and indeed, I never heard him slip on those, on those points.
I never heard him using the word Aryan or anything like that.
Um, and, and he's, he's otherwise really a loose cannon.
So that, that, you know, I take that as, as, as significant where I noticed, uh, A sort of implicit race ideology with Bannon was when he was speaking about America and Americanism.
And we start to talk about, okay, well, what is the American core?
What is the perennial American tradition?
What is the essential, unchanging eternity?
That that we can come back to and that you are fighting for.
What is it?
What is it consistent?
And he would always start to refer to the working class that in some way they were incubators in the United States of of this of this core of this essence.
And then quite often in in passing and in interviews outside of interviews, it was the white working class.
And he never stopped to define that, of course.
And, you know, once I asked him about it, and he said, well, you know, maybe it's not all just white, maybe it's black also.
But he would still then, when he went back to his more informal speech, always refer to that working class as white.
And that, when you hear him talking about the United States, he'll describe it as being a revolutionary society, a religious society, a Christian society, Judeo-Christian society.
It would make sense to me, just through that history and through that genealogy, that he would look to the white working class as being the ambassadors of that spirit or that essence.
So, that's there and I think that's real.
I think when he thinks about who is truly American, who is going to live beyond the fads of today when the bi-coastal elites fade and crumble away, when globalism is defeated, where are we going to find America?
Again, I think he has in his mind implicitly a white working class.
I think there is some genuine theorizing going on there.
Where things can be strategic for him is that he has shown himself willing to work with instrumentalized racial resentment for political gain, and that is as a campaign manager and as an advisor to various political campaigns.
Messaging, testing, signaling, talking about demotivating voters in certain areas, talking about motivating voters in certain areas.
We see that also in his editoring at Breitbart.
There were various accusations that Breitbart had a black crime section.
It didn't have a proper section, but it had a sort of implicit subject, a sort of leitmotif that it did go back to quite often during those years that he was editor.
The flip side is all of a sudden when he has noticed that there seems to be a large percentage of the black and Latino vote in the United States that is conservative and that was not receptive to the anti-Trump message, he's also been very interested in trying to push people to capitalize on that.
I don't write about that much in the book, but those have come from some of our subsequent conversations and also following what's going on in his World War Room podcast, that he certainly sees dividends to be gained by making more direct appeals to minorities in the United that he certainly sees dividends to be gained by making more So, sorry, again, a big answer, but all of that is floating around in his activity.
Bear in mind, this is a guy who does so much.
He's He's a hurricane of activity.
There are one of the few consistent things in his biography in his life is his interest in esotericism.
Everything else is just changing all the time.
All of these projects are coming and failing and some succeeding.
While you were just talking about Bannon's sort of willingness to It seems to me, change his messaging based on whatever will get him into the kind of positions of power that he wants to be in and influence especially.
When he appears at CPAC in 2017 after masterminding first Brexit and then the Trump victory using strategies based on his Cambridge Analytica project.
You know, which relied on all of the sort of Facebook data mining that we since have become appalled by as it's come out.
He famously refers from that stage in a very kind of naked moment to the deconstruction of the administrative state as being central to the Trump presidency.
And you talk about how in the first weeks of Trump's presidency, he's just putting people into offices where they will dismantle and destroy whatever the mandate of those offices has been in the past.
He also at times has referred to Trump as being a quote unquote man in time.
And this was for me one of the more ominous religious overtones from traditionalism.
And how through Dugan, but perhaps even more so through Ovala de Carvalho, we see Bannon acting in the world to explicitly create chaos and destruction in service of traditionalist metaphysics.
Can you say more about this?
I know you touched on it briefly before, but I think for our listeners, there's so much here.
So let's think back briefly when I was talking about time cycles and hierarchies.
The dark age, the age of the slave, is an age of mass homogenization.
It's an age of materialism, and so for these thinkers, they thought, okay, this is going to be an age of democracy, you know, liberalism or communism, just fighting over goods, individual rights or collective rights, and in terms of economics, most often.
But we're also going to see globalization.
We're going to see the growth of huge entities.
A way to see that, to visualize that in the world of politics, is to look at large states, or let's say multilateral organizations, agreements, and so forth.
That could be the European Union.
That could be the U.S.
federal government, and suddenly we find ourselves in a very typical libertarian criticism of the federal state.
It could be, you know, the one world order vision of an entirely globalized world.
Those are the hallmarks of darkness in their minds.
They co-occur with a loss of spirituality, with a rejection of history, and a sort of chauvinistic plan to escape the past and become something brand new.
And the way that they are going to come undone is when that big mass, that big mass entity, whatever it is, that mass homogenization is split apart, is shattered.
It's easy to visualize in the case of the European Union.
You think of, okay, what was once this kaleidoscope of states and principalities has become this huge, managerial bureaucratic state and and the way to fix that is to smash it apart and that kaleidoscope will return in The u.s.
Context we're talking about the US federal government and and and the loss of local local distinctiveness local sovereignty seeing that Mass entity that large states smashed apart and broken.
Viewed through this traditionalist lens, what you're seeing there is the transition from darkness into gold again.
You're seeing stratification and borders come back from the dead and reassert themselves and remind you that the mass entity and the homogenization, the egalitarianism, the equality that was put in place there was a mirage.
It was just a passing fad.
So, that's the ideological context for this.
It's difficult to... Well, why don't I stop there?
I don't want to go too far away.
There's a lot to say about that.
I want to surely speak to what you're interested in, but that's the context.
You also write about British historian and political theorist Roger Griffin's idea of palingenesis, which is a moment of unspecified greatness lost in the past and thereby proclaims ours as a time of decline.
We see this all the time in wellness.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
It's a constant theme as well as a throwback to a better era.
It's not just right-wing politics.
It very much exists in our domain.
And this concept was even mainstreamed by Joe Rogan with the Kali Yuga.
You brought the Yugas before.
Obviously, they don't have an understanding of the actual length of those time cycles.
They feel like in two years in Austin, it's all going to be back to the first one.
There's a course in that, actually.
That's a special master's degree.
Actually, it's an MBA in the golden age.
You know that for men like Bannon, this time cycle concept recognizes no real past, present, or future.
We've talked about time a little bit, but this particular one just jumps out at me so much because time, especially during a pandemic where everything seems off, It can take advantage of people in so many ways.
So how do traditionals confront the paradox of time?
And more specifically to someone like Ben, how does their understanding of time influence their theories of control?
You could say that they don't believe in time.
Not really.
I mean, not in matters that actually are of consequence.
In the sense of time that most of us Moderns think of it.
We think that time passes and we think that what is past is in the past.
What I'm saying right now is in the past and I can't ever access it again.
I can access it in some mediated form, some throwback, some tribute band, some nostalgic recollection.
But the traditionalist doesn't think that what is meaningful ever actually ever leaves us.
It is always there.
It will present itself and exert dominion over our lives, more so at certain moments, but it's never gone.
Um, and if you think about so, so, so that's just a, just an abstract concept.
And yes, that can be taken, but there's so many different people can do a lot of different things with that.
Um, I, I recognize this, this idea of paleogenesis, the belief that the past can be reborn again, um, that you can find that with the explicit far right.
And then you can find it.
Yes.
And these, these spiritualists, um, The way that it can be instrumentalized, because you asked about the question of power and control, it can be leveraged to deny someone's claim to transcendence, actually.
I shouldn't use that word in this context.
Sorry.
Deny their claim to having transformed themselves or to mobility.
Someone says that, well, I was this, you thought of me as this.
Well, guess what?
I'm going to become something new.
I'm going to claim a new identity for myself, claim a new role for myself in this world.
And a traditionalist voice can come in and say, no, there is no new.
Newness is an ideology.
It's a lie that you have sold yourself as part and it belongs to this age of darkness where you believe that everything is fluid and everything is changing and what is changing is good and that you can meaningfully escape and create something that is genuinely new in this world.
That is all nonsense.
The traditionalist comes in in that setting and reasserts the primacy and the inescapability of the past.
That's the roots of control here that I see.
It seems to me to express an incredible toxic cocktail of emotional avoidance and material brutality.
Because they know that the cycle of ages is ironclad.
The outcome is assured.
You don't try to improve your lot or anything like that.
The story is known.
There's a lot of QAnon language that groks with us as well.
Past or future proves past and, you know, it's all a show and the outcome is assured and so on.
But at the same time, we also have, with Bannon's actions in office, this yearning to accelerate things.
And so, it feels like a sociopath's playground.
That you don't have to care about the carnage that you create because the arc of history bends towards the golden age.
Is that fair?
Except they wouldn't grant you, there are no arcs, there is no history.
Right.
Yes, absolutely, and when we talk about what took place in office, when we talk about the messaging, if we talk about palingenesis, this notion of rebirth, a lot of scholars have remarked on the fact that really, in history, is there a more succinct presentation of the paleogenetic vision than those four words on the red hats.
Right.
Make America Great Again.
The again part is that that word does everything, but the belief that American greatness transcends time is something outside of time that can be fully, not in a qualified, not in some piecemeal fashion, but fully experienced again because it never really died.
It hasn't gone anywhere.
And I can see that this is really difficult to mesh with Christianity and why traditionalists have to hold their noses around it, because Christianity preaches not only egalitarianism, but also this narrative of the humble inheriting the earth, that the possibility of direct divine contact is going to be open for everybody, and that holds the seeds of modern individualism.
And so, you know, Christianity itself moves towards a horizon of improvement and communion that I think would be unacceptable to them.
But do they think or talk about things like love and compassion?
Not that much.
That's not to say, you know, if I asked, I have no doubt if I asked any of them, if the figures or the historical figures, is love a good thing?
Yes.
I think so.
Maybe, maybe, maybe Julius Evola might not.
He might think that it was a sort of Semitic feminist or feminine rather.
Sentimental.
Yeah, sentimental sentimentality.
But in general, yeah, but that's not the emotional center.
That's not what they're most interested in speaking about.
What Matthew was just asking you a moment ago made me want to loop back around to this idea of a man in time, right?
That to see Trump as a figure who can play a role on the stage that is somehow about creating the sort of chaos that will lead back to the golden age, even while not being aware of it.
Is that correct?
Yes.
Yes.
One thing we haven't talked about is traditionalism with the whole time cycle stuff, that can all sound very fatalistic.
The only thing, and for a lot of traditionals, they think this way.
The only thing to do is just keep yourself safe and wait.
After I just said time doesn't exist, I can also at the same breath say, well, time is their salvation.
They just need to wait.
Time is what's going to set them free.
Meanwhile, there is another branch of traditionalism that sees a role for actors to play in this time cycle, and it is one that views time not just as tantamount to decline, but also tantamount to violence.
And thus that the way you advance a time cycle is by perpetuating destruction or violence.
It's a very sinister branch of this world of thinking.
It's tied to a Hindu convert named Savitri Devi.
who was an esoteric Hitlerist.
Just rolls off the tongue, I know.
She worshipped Hitler because she thought that Hitler was one of these figures who might have come into history not just able to spread violence on such a level that it actually had an eschatological impact, but that Hitler might even have known what he was doing.
So she speaks about three figures, she speaks about men above time, Who realize, who are attuned to the existence of time of cyclicality and know not to get too involved in notions of progress and development because they know that we're always returning to a golden age.
Those are men above time.
She speaks about men in time as being men who need not actually have any understanding of cyclicality, of eschatology, but they simply push time forward by their destruction.
By destroying on such a distinguished level that they move the time cycle forward.
And then there are men who are against time, this third category that possess the qualities of the previous two, who understand the truth of cyclicality, realize that destruction must take place in order to return to a golden age, and act for that explicit purpose.
Anyways, it's all very dark stuff, but it perhaps won't come as a surprise, given what we've been talking about, that Bannon, in passing, referred to Trump once as a man in time, as a figure who destroys, who can destroy at such a level that it is productive.
I'm struck by something in all of this too, and the first place it comes up for me is thinking about traditionalism as a kind of
Perennialism as a kind of almost like a religious interfaith or syncretistic sort of project, and then thinking about Aldous Huxley's book, The Perennial Philosophy, and thinking about how so much of the journey within a kind of New Age circles is about seeking some transcendent truth that Underlies all of the traditions, right?
And that is very common in New Age circles to say that religion has distorted the truth or that religion, they're all just some different fragments of one shattered mirror.
And so then related, and then you see this parallel path that's like so much darker, really, and how do they overlap?
And then the other related theme in all of that is thinking about Obama.
And how, as a kid myself, growing up in South Africa under apartheid, when Obama was elected, I was swept up in that wave of a sense of inevitable history, of spiritual righteousness, of the arc of history tending towards justice, right?
That there is the sense of like, yes, we are the ones we've been waiting for and here we are now.
And it had to eventually end up here because the liberal democratic humanistic worldview is the correct one.
It is the spiritually sort of anointed one.
And then I'm like, well, fuck, to what extent did Bannon flip that sort of wave of enthusiasm that we felt to Trump through his own tactics?
Right, right.
There's pessimistic and optimistic inevitability that we each are toying with here.
Yeah, it's...
Christopher Latch, a famous historian, controversial in some circles, he once described progressivism as replicating the flaw of nostalgia, which is that if nostalgia is treacherous and deadly because it makes no use of the past, Progressivism is deadly because it makes no use of the future.
The inevitability that progressives can feel can also lead to passivity, and it can make them impotent actors, that they're not actually wanting to do anything and feel any responsibility to change things because they think that Really, it's just a matter of time, right?
We just have to wait.
We're going to have moments of regression.
We're going to have the reactionaries who are going to have their little moment in the sun, but the tidal wave is still going to push everyone forward.
There's a hidden laziness to all of that, right?
That may be more than simply unfortunate or benign.
Yeah, and perhaps also a lack of realism about how bad things can get and how fragile and precious liberal democracy actually is.
I want to point out, because this has been a high level conversation, as is deserved, given your area of expertise, but your book is so readable.
I mean, I read it in three days.
It's just because I couldn't put it down.
Like, it's just I wanted to know you.
It's such a good way of transitioning the chapters and the stories in there.
Something as simple as Carvalho's penchant for eating ice cream before pancakes.
It gives such a good character.
You paint the characters so well, and Bannon's little pantomimes that are happening.
So I want to make that clear.
There's one moment where, just to go back to Dugan for a minute, where he asked about a supposed meeting, you asked about a supposed meeting with Steve Bannon, and Dugan said, For me, real and imagined, by the way, is just the same because the world is our imagination.
Now, we talk a lot on this podcast about spiritual bypassing.
It's Julian's, one of his fields of expertise, for example, and that's something that is endemic in the modern North American wellness community and kind of goes to the passivity which you just talked about.
With these characters, and maybe we'll focus on Bannon because we are talking more to the America, but you can extrapolate from that, how much of Dugan's statement is metaphysical, and how much is just diversion?
In that moment, when I asked him, did you meet with Steve Bannon in Rome?
Did you have the pasta?
Did you have the pasta?
This is at the Rousseau Hotel by the Pope.
And the answer was... I'm not gonna answer because there are no facts.
The world is a world.
I will finally have a straightforward answer for you, Derek.
No, I think that was strategy.
I don't see a depth of ideology there.
I mean, there's...
Say what one will about the social construction of the universe.
There's, you know, a lot of truth to that.
There's also a cliff after that that should fall off of.
You also, I mean, there's moments of abandon where you feel like you may have actually gone a little too far into the philosophy for him, and you feel like he might have been punting.
So extrapolating from that one moment, How much of this do you feel like in this right-wing world of their spiritual talk is true-held belief and they are metaphysical practitioners who are trying to espouse upon a doctrine?
And how much is just like, I'm just fucking with you and you can see it how you want?
I lean in the direction of the former.
Here are the qualifiers to it.
Ben Shapiro thinks that Bannon is just a complete phony and reads his biography as just the story of a dilettante bouncing between this and that.
That, as I mentioned earlier, I see that with almost every aspect of his life except for this stuff.
It doesn't have to be capital T traditionalism always.
Sometimes it's Gurdjieff or Gurdjieff's followers, but he has been interested in alternative spirituality, spiritualism, traditionalism, whatever you want to call it, the whole time.
That's been consistent.
So that speaks to some staying power for the interest.
The fact that there is some consistency to the way that he speaks and thinks about all this, the fact that I certainly see intelligibility to the worldview, to the understanding of society and of humanity and his anthropology and his historiography, that all fits, makes sense.
He is not a professional philosopher though.
He is not interested in writing a book on traditionalism.
He has not prepared a manifesto.
He wants to act.
And he uses this stuff and refers to it To the extent that it is useful to him and not beyond.
So there's going to be a lack of consistency there that I don't make that much of it.
I think someone like my intellectual historian academic colleagues are really out to jump in and say, Oh, look, look, well, he just, you know, he's picking and choosing what he wants from traditionalism.
Yeah, me and other academics care about that.
It doesn't matter.
That's what actual actors do.
He's not doing this in order to pay tribute to René Gounon or Julius Evola.
So those inconsistencies, the fact that this might be traditionalism lite or traditionalism dash hyphen something, I see that as an artifact of political action as opposed to formal intellectualism.
So yeah, to answer your question, I think that there is more strategy, more deliberate Ben, we're going to bring it home, we're going to invite last comments, but I do have one question about your own position as an academic who is also doing a little bit of political positioning.
We were astonished to see your interview on Glenn Beck's show, and it was fascinating to see that You're actually saying to his constituency, hey, you know, you might want to look into these people a little bit more closely because they do not believe what you think they believe.
And he, of course, is very taken by that.
But in that interview, you said that you said something that stood out to me, but also to my dad.
I want to reference him.
He's a Russian historian, so he's fascinated with all of your work on Dugin.
But also his historian friend, you said at the end that traditionalists have struck a chord because in Western, current Western liberal democracies, there's really no room for or encouragement of any sort of collective spirituality.
And you suggest that unless this need is addressed, the way for traditionalists to move in and proselytize will be clear.
And so, my question for you is, What would your remedy be?
And how would your remedy not itself be a more tasteful or less dangerous form of traditionalism?
I don't know.
If I knew, I think I'd be doing something very different right now.
It's much easier to criticize and to see faults than to come up with solutions.
What I know is I don't believe in a world that cannot allow for progress or for change.
I think, hopefully, and I assume I'm in communion with most of your listeners and knowing all the downsides of that, so I won't rehearse that.
That's less interesting.
I also think that...
So I'm living in, I grew up in Colorado, for example, I grew up partially in suburban Denver, in a, in a community where no one knew each other, where we certainly did not have any, any sort of shared history, you know, forgetting all kind of Dugan's shared ethnic history and stuff like that.
We knew nothing about the land, no one knows anything about the land that we're standing on, know nothing about the history of it, know nothing about the plants, know nothing about the Native Americans that are displaced from there.
Something about that, That social world feels not bad to me.
And it may not be much more than an aesthetic distaste for it.
And I do want there to be some place to say that.
To say that I don't like being in that sort of world.
And I think perhaps feeling that is enough to get me in conversation with some of these people.
It's easy to empathize on those grounds.
How you do that without limiting the movements of people, both in the material sense in terms of migration, people being able to live in this world where they want to live, how you do that in the immaterial sense of people being able to invent themselves and their identities and find roles for themselves that they want to in society.
How you can do all those things while also giving us a context and giving us a footing and allowing us to view ourselves as part of a community in a situation.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But I'm as And it's not an equal divide for me.
It's not as though I say, yeah, the traditionalists got it wrong.
But yes, the progressives got it wrong.
And there's there's streams on both sides.
I don't think that things are as neatly balanced in that way.
But I'm not quite willing to just say, I want the exact opposite of everything that would ever be uttered in the minds of some one of these, one of these figures, it'd be impossible for them, impossible for anybody to come up with a worldview of any substance or depth that is 100% wrong about everything all the time.
Yeah.
And it sounds like you're, you like many other people yearn for mystery without mystification.
You learn, you yearn for a sense of place without needing to wall it off from other people.
And you yearn for a sense of history without being seduced by myth. - Or bound to it, especially, either.
Yes.
I want to be part of something and I want to be free.
This is the challenge of many moderns, right?
Such difficult and layered questions.
I want to second what Derek said before, Ben.
This is an incredibly easy book to read.
It's a beautifully written book and it takes us down such a complex and layered kind of set of topics.
It's really fantastic.
And at the end of preparing for this, I felt like I wanted to ask you, have you turned us into conspiracy theorists now?
Because this is a very elaborate, hidden cabal that exerts influence over the world and has tried to move us in a particular direction.
It doesn't, superficially at least, it doesn't sound that different than something, you know, someone like Alex Jones might talk about in terms of the secret history of the world.
The way that we know that this story is reality and not a movie or a conspiracy theory is that, you know, I think the conspiracy theory is you have a surface of complexity, but underneath them is just a brutal, dull simplicity.
And that's usually aggrandizing of the person telling the conspiracy.
In this case, we have a hidden network, we have compelling ideas, and underneath that is just more chaos.
Though, did that network that I studied, Bannon, Dugan, Olavo, their various offshoots, have they been able to mass orchestrate things?
No.
On the other hand, they haven't failed either.
I think Brazil is a wonderful case study where you really saw these actors get more formally in positions of power, and they didn't realize their goals, but in the process of trying, they changed Brazil forever.
No doubt.
And you throw the coronavirus, the pandemic, into that mix and you have potentially a different outcome than you would have had otherwise without these figures in place.
So that's where you can tell that this is not a movie.
And what, you know, I've had people say to me, well, you should turn this book into a movie.
And if they were fictional characters, it'd be great because I can make it all work.
I can make their plans.
Here, none of the plans, they kind of work out in weird ways.
And it's still kind of an open question.
What is Bannon?
What's he going to do?
Where are we going in the United States with our politics?
Where's the Republican Party going?
Where is its core?
Is it centered?
Is this still an ongoing fight?
Or has this chapter, this very bizarre You don't have the answer?
That's why we had you on this week to tell us what's ahead.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I wish I wish I should be a better conspiracy theorist.
