Michael O"Fallon: The Jacobins are Back..... To Reset..... Everything.... Dun Dun Daah!
Just as the Terror was used by Robespierre and the Jacobins during the French Revolution two centuries ago, fear and draconian control is being used today to usher in... The Great Reset.Or so Michael O'Fallon would have you believe. O'Fallon is the founder of Sovereign Nations, a Christian nationalist organisation that aims to "prepare warriors for the battleground of ideas". He's recently been collaborating with James Lindsay, renowned culture warrior and online troll, to teach us all how critical theory and social justice are hell bent on destroying Our (or at least Western) Civilisation.Chris and Matt are joined by Aaron Rabinowtiz, host of Embrace the Void (@ETVPod) and Philosophers in Space podcasts, PhD student and lecturer at Rutgers University. Aaron has Done the Work, he has the Documents, he's been privy to the secret conversations, and he's here to help the boys decode just WTF is going on here.So, what's the deal with O'Fallon? Is he a sorely-needed, breathy and bombastic prophet bearing a critical message of our impending doom? Why does he take such long pauses? Where did he get such a laughably inaccurate understanding of the French Revolution? We can't promise all the answers in this episode, but we're going to give it a shot. The Future of our Civilisation.... Depends Upon It.........Dun Dun Daaaaah!LinksSovereign Nations' The Causes of Things Podcast Episode 25: The Great ResetEmbrace The Void Episode 150: Sovereign Nations and the Grievance HoaxersPhilosophers in Space Facebook GroupSovereign Nations Website
It's the podcast with an Australian psychologist, me, Matthew Brown, and an Irish anthropologist, him, Chris Kavanagh.
We take a look at the contemporary crop of secular gurus, iconoclasts, and other exiles from the mainstream, and we delve in to their unique insights and their galaxy brain takes.
Don't we, Chris?
We do.
We ruthlessly, analytically devour our...
Gurus, week in and week out.
We apply our view from nowhere.
Our thousand-yard-high view.
I feel you might be teeing up an unfair response to a criticism we've received.
Is that right?
A little bit, a little bit.
We have received a little bit of criticism regarding the degree of bias in our show.
Shall we cover a bit of that stuff in our intro before getting into the meat of the topic today?
Well, yeah, so I think the nice thing to mention is that we didn't get very much critical pushback in regards like Gwyneth Paltrow and what we failed to mention.
In general, most people were pretty satisfied with the depth of the coverage and, you know, the points that we raised.
So that was nice.
You know, it's nice to get an episode where you mostly get positive reinforcement.
But as we were looking around to try and find negative...
Feedback.
We did come across a thread in the Reddit called, Is It Worth Listening To?
This podcast seems kind of biased by a user called CannotIntoGender.
And there's various discussions that people have, but I think I could summarize the points as, one, that we do not adequately acknowledge our particular...
Political and social viewpoint and how that influences our coverage.
And two, that because of that, we extend charity towards people like ContraPoints and Kendi, whereas we're ruthlessly critical to people like Harris or Douglas Murray.
So yeah, what's your response to that accusation, Matt?
That's so unfair, low-quality criticism.
Fuck them all.
Yeah, look, I think we have mentioned a few times that we're noctose progressive liberals.
We actually got told off for mentioning it too much in the early episodes.
Look at that.
You can't win, can you?
You can't win.
It's either too little or too much.
You can't please these people.
Stop flagging up your political position every 10 minutes and get on with the gurus.
But other opinions are available.
True, true.
I think we were appropriately critical of ContraPoints.
We had some bones to pick with her, but the fact is there's just a really big difference between the kinds of errors that we thought ContraPoints was making and the kinds of batshit crazy stuff you'll hear from some of our other gurus.
So it's a relative, Chris.
We're proportionate.
I think that's a crucial point that the ContraPoints episode that we covered wasn't really that...
Objectionable.
And we still did cover some of the techniques and that kind of thing.
And I think a point could be raised, well, why didn't we then focus on her most controversial episodes?
And I think we will probably dip back into ContraPoints at some point, especially if she releases Justice Part 2. But I think the content that we looked at was representative.
Of her general output.
Whereas if we focused exclusively on the worst or the most controversial episode, it might give an unfair impression about what her output is.
Saying that out loud, I kind of realized that with Goop, for example, we did look for an episode that was illustrated of certain negative tendencies.
So yeah, I don't know.
I'm just like thinking that out loud.
I don't know if I...
We do apply that fairly.
Yeah, you know, you're probably right.
I mean, we do just select some content based on what we think is going to be interesting to talk about.
And sometimes it's interesting in a good way, sometimes interesting in a bad way.
When it comes to someone like Kendi, I think we admitted to a certain degree of hesitation into leaping into American racial politics with both feet.
You know, I think that's because we're human.
I mean, who really wants to?
Get into super controversial stuff with all kinds of hot takes.
So we did take a very analytic approach to what Kendi was saying in that particular episode.
And yeah, I stand by it.
I think we dealt with it fairly.
We pointed out where we thought he was wrong or was making some logical mistakes, but at other times it sounded perfectly reasonable.
Yeah, look, I'm going to push back on this as well, because I went into it expecting Kendi to be a nightmare because of the online dialogue and various Twitter threads and stuff.
And I was relatively pleasantly surprised.
I didn't agree with the way that he frames racist versus anti-racist.
But like I said at the time, it struck me as mostly an academic argument.
And then on top of that...
People contacted us before the episode came out saying, you know, make sure you mention about the Institute of Anti-Racism or whatever, which we included and covered.
And then we followed up in the Grometer episode and in the following weeks, addressing the points about, like, Kendi used to believe that white people are aliens or his issues with genetics were perhaps worse than we had presented.
So, like, I don't know.
I kind of feel like...
You're not going to get a broadside against Kendi just because that's what is the norm in the culture world.
We were critical where it was deserved and where he deserves praise relative to other gurus.
I think we gave that as well.
This notion that because we didn't slam Kendi to pieces, that that means we're completely on board.
It's because we really like his worldview.
And that's our political agenda in play.
Like, that's not true.
I'm sorry to rant on, Matt.
But this also speaks to the point that, like, we haven't flagged up where we stand politically.
And as I mentioned at the start of that segment, that's not true.
I've repeatedly said that I'm a moderate.
I like Keir Starmer more than I like Jeremy Corbyn.
I like Biden more than I like Bernie Sanders.
That's not popular opinions amongst progressives.
I'm in favor of, you know, gradual improvements and, to a certain extent, neoliberal policies in the kind of European welfare state position of that.
These are all things that are not...
It's not particularly popular amongst the progressive wing and certainly not amongst the extreme woke set.
So yes, it makes me more sympathetic towards liberal left-leaning politics, but I don't think that we've done any effort to disguise that particular leaning, right?
So I just don't get how people could have got the impression if they listened to the back catalogue that we haven't flagged up our Particular political leanings, clearly enough.
Yeah, look, I agree with all that.
But that being said, I will say that what I endeavour to do, because I don't think my political opinions are particularly interesting.
And, you know, they're like assholes.
Everyone's got them, but I don't need to show it to everybody.
So even though I know that it's inevitable, it's going to colour my takes.
What we're trying to do is to be dispassionate and analytical in evaluating the arguments and the degree to which people are being guru-ish.
And we will fall short of that often.
I do genuinely like reading the pushback on Reddit and in other places where people do feel that we're being biased or giving somebody a soft ride because, yeah, it's good that people keep us on our toes.
Yeah, that I'm fine with, you know.
Point denied where we missed something or Or give too soft of coverage to something because of political bias.
Actually, I kind of welcome that and people can argue.
So I think people were right to point out that Kendi has these extreme hot tics online that if we were paying attention to, that we would colour things.
And to raise that as an issue, right?
But I think that's different than saying, oh, you didn't slam contrapoints for...
Her left-leaning political bias, but you do for Douglas Murray.
But there's tons of reasons for that.
And it isn't just that the political content is different.
It's in the presentation.
It's in the arguments.
And it's in, for example, when Murray presents arguments as if they aren't a right-wing trope.
It's the lack of acknowledgement.
Whereas in the case of ContraPoints, I think she does quite clearly flag up.
Where her political views lie.
So I don't think it's just a case that to be fair and balanced, we have to be equally mean and annoyed about everyone because not everyone's doing the same level of sophistry.
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, we'll continue to seek out, I think, left-wing sophistry just as an exercise, I guess, because I think if we're true to our mission, then we ought to be able to detect it.
And criticize it on that end of the spectrum as well.
It's just, I guess in terms of the gurus, we've said this before, there's less bona fide left-wing gurus for some reason.
Maybe.
Or we've discussed it before that there probably is in some of the corners that we don't lurk.
But the last thing about this, Matt, is one of the responses said, I thought this was quite funny.
That we have archetypical gurus and filler gurus.
And that there's five deadly sins which, if a guru engages in, they get harsh criticism.
And these are: 1. Libertarianism individualism 2. Claims the epistemic privilege 3. Disagreement with a mainstream scientific institution 4. Concern with woke philosophy 5. Challenge to stories as presented by mainstream news.
And I just think a lot of those are wrong because, for example, Stuart Ritchie would ding three of those.
Disagreement with mainstream scientific institution, concern with woke philosophy, challenge to stories as presented by mainstream news.
But I'd be largely on board with him in most of his views.
Yeah, I think that's reading us wrong, but it's still interesting to hear the view is if someone's promoting woke philosophy or critical of woke philosophy, that's the thing that really gets us riled up.
Yeah, interesting.
Yeah, I think it could be mistaking a correlation for causation there because those features do tend to crop up amongst our gurus, but that's because that's what...
Yeah, that's what they do tend to do, but that's not the reason why we're covering them.
Yeah, I think it's legitimate to assume that disagreement with a mainstream scientific institution, that's not the issue.
It's the reason that you're disagreeing and the level of certainty you place into your fringe theory or whatever.
That's the issue.
But anyway, I thought it wasn't an interesting list.
So yeah, people can draw their own conclusions, Matt.
They can draw their own conclusions.
Yes, indeed, indeed.
Okay, what next?
Well, so this episode is a bit of a weird one.
It is a full-length episode, and we are decoding a specific guru, Michael O 'Fallon of Sovereign Nations fame.
Sovereign Nations fame kind of presents itself as a conservative intellectual organization About promoting intellectual discourse across barriers and so on.
But in reality, it comes across as pretty conspiracy theory-heavy, Christian-leaning, right-wing website.
To me, it's like Infowars Light would be a harsh way to put it.
But, you know, lots of concern about George Soros, lots of concern about trying to take over society with the Great Recep.
So we're going to look at this character.
And he has a pretty...
A strong connection with James Lindsay.
They're producing content together.
So initially, we're going to look at that shared content, but it would be...
Better to do so after we've introduced the character of O 'Fallon for people who aren't familiar.
So we're going to have our first guest host, Aaron Rabinowitz, from the Embrace the Void podcast and other things where we've both guest hosted.
He's a philosopher, as you will find out, but he's also something of a scholar of sovereign nations and Michael O 'Fallon, the only one in existence.
And probably also worth mentioning on the back of that discussion that Aaron would be in the region of what people might describe as woke, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So he's not a milquetoast liberal like us, but we certainly do share a fair bit in common as well.
Yeah, so if you are upset about our crypto-woke-ism...
I think you're about to have it dolloped on you.
We engage with Aaron in a polite deconstruction of a reactionary right-wing figure.
But I think it's worth saying, Chris, that any differences of degree in terms of where people are politically...
It really doesn't matter when it comes to talking about this kind of content.
So I don't want to spoil the surprise.
No, no, no.
I'm only flagging it.
I'm just doing what people requested, Matt.
I am letting them know that they may anticipate biases leaning towards moderate left from you and me and from Aaron towards the progressive left.
And we may at times be a little bit harsh towards the...
Conservative, reactionary, conspiratorial right.
And I'm very sorry about that.
It is a great tragedy.
Yes.
Please don't criticize Chris on Decoding the Guru's Reddit.
It makes him cry.
Otherwise, you'll get this sulky reaction from me.
And do you want this at every episode?
No.
So be careful what you wish for.
Yeah.
So there's the disclaimers.
Okay.
Okay.
We got that right.
Happy now?
Okay.
Let's go.
I'm sure that's going to endear me to everyone.
All right.
All right.
That'll annoy people.
So there we go.
And I think that actually does a good job of, you know, it is a version of the magic spell because now we've said that we're going to be kind to somebody who's woke.
So it's okay.
It becomes okay then.
And we've just given ourselves permission.
It's a wonderful spell.
Sadly, it doesn't work with us, but it does seem to work with other people.
So this will be a new experience, having free toast.
Are you excited, Matt?
Are you rearing to go?
Yes, I am ready to get to it.
Let's do it.
Yeah.
By the...
Miracles of modern technology.
We've actually already done this, so this is all a lie, and we know how it went.
But, yeah, you're going to hear it.
Plus, I can't even remember what we said.
Let's find out.
Yeah, let's find out.
Here we go.
Yeah, so as we mentioned, joining us as a special co-host this episode is Aaron Rabinowitz.
Aaron is a PhD student at Rutgers, and he also teaches ethics in the philosophy department there.
Aaron is the host of Embrace the Void podcast, which Chris and I like a lot and you should definitely subscribe to.
And we've both been on.
We've both been on, yes, that's right.
And also Philosophers in Space, which I like quite a bit because it's all about science fiction and the connections to philosophy.
So that's a lot of fun.
Welcome.
But you haven't been there, Matt.
You were never invited.
I was never invited.
I don't have guests.
Welcome, Aaron.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you, Matt.
Thank you, Chris, for having me on your Civilization Preserving podcast.
I know that you two in particular, because of your colonial heritage, it makes it impossible for you to give yourselves the kind of credit that I think you deserve.
But as an American, I lack that congenital defect.
So I can confidently say this will be the most important four-hour conversation any human being has ever had.
In the history of human beings and conversations.
So thank you.
Thank you for letting me be here.
Four hours is after editing, Aaron.
This will be 16 hours.
This is going to be like the Iceman Cometh if it was entirely about Jewish conspiracy theories.
Yeah.
So we've already mentioned that Michael O 'Fallon is the topic for this week.
But...
I would say, Aaron, that you are the closest thing to a sovereign nation scholar that I've encountered.
That dubious honor you might not be willing to accept, but I'm going to extend it to you.
Well, yeah, it is unfortunately true that I am a world-recognized expert in Jamesiology.
I have made some choices over the course of my life, and here we are.
Yeah.
So the reference to James, right?
It's because there is a James-Lindsey connection.
Oh, sorry.
I don't distinguish between those entities because they are part of the same corporation as far as I can tell.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the intention here was that we would cover a couple of episodes as we normally do.
But as it turns out, the material is too rich.
To do that and do the content justice.
So instead, we're going to focus on Michael O 'Fallon's Great Reset episode in particular, episode 25 of the Sovereign Nations podcast.
And then in a Marvel Universe way, this will build up our cast of characters.
We already have a James Lindsay episode.
And then we'll look at the most ambitious crossover in Guru.
Reactionary history with James Lindsay and Michael O 'Fallon's recent series.
They have a multiple part conversation beside a beach, which builds on these foundations, I think, it's fair to say.
Directly references them, I think it's fair to say.
They literally quote back to the episode that we're going to be talking about today.
So yes, I think it's fair to say that there is a through line in the material.
And I think it's smart to break these things up because I don't think anybody wants an eight-hour Kavanaugh cut of all the things that we would want to talk about.
So I think we'll put it together piece by piece, yeah.
Yeah, and also O 'Fallon, as we'll get into, I think he's...
He's actually interesting as a guru figure on his own because the dynamics are different than James and, like, we'll get into it.
But I think the obvious analogy is he's the emperor, the dark shadow behind it all, manipulating his moronic puppet running about with his lightsaber.
But I think that gives them too much credit because the Emperor and Darth Vader, for all their flaws, they're kind of cool characters.
So maybe Rocky and Bullwinkle or their nemesis, or I don't know Rocky and Bullwinkle lore, but yeah, something like that.
Right, they had Boris and Natasha, right, of course.
But I think your equation in the chat where it's more like...
Krang and Baxter from Teen Ninja Turtles is, I think, probably the most apt comparison I've ever seen.
Yeah, that's deep turtle lore with Baxter the Fly.
Google Baxter the Fly and tell me it doesn't look like James Lindsay's Avatar picture.
Yeah, that's true.
Okay, so maybe a good way to start for people who are not familiar with Michael O 'Fallon.
Who is this man, and why would we be talking about him at all?
Yeah, so best as I can tell, right, Michael O 'Fallon is a mild-mannered, anti-globalist, conspiracy theorist, Christian nationalist businessman who...
I guess made some money.
He had a business prior to this website Sovereign Nations, which was the Sovereign Cruises, where as far as I can tell, he would provide luxury cruises for people's events, I think often for like Christian events.
So he's like an event organizer kind of guy.
And you hear a little bit of that in this episode where he talks about one of the events that he organized.
And so that's his background.
He also references frequently that he is of a Cuban background and so therefore could not possibly be in any way connected to any kind of white identity politics.
essentially.
The Great Awokening, I think, was probably what it was called or something like that.
And this was an event with all three of the grievance hoaxers, Pluckrose and Boghossian, as well as Lindsay, where they were attempting, I think, to try to bring their material to British shores.
And so they had this event, which is where y'all got the talk when you did your James Lindsay episode.
That was an event hosted by this guy, Michael O'Fallon of Sovereign Nations.
So that got me curious.
Why would a couple of very well-known atheists be palling around with Christian nationalists
So he is James Lindsay's business partner.
He's listed as the owner on New Discourses LLC, though James Lindsay claims that O 'Fallon simply set the website up for him and maybe runs part of the business somehow and is not very clear on their particular business arrangement.
But I would say at least one key thing that...
O 'Fallon seems to be doing for James Lindsay is pipelining him into Christian conservative arenas where they will soak up his culture war agenda, essentially.
So Lindsay has been to several more, as far as I can tell, O 'Fallon events, including maskless events during COVID and things like that, where he's taking pictures, hugging people and stuff.
So there's, I would say, a very close connection between them that I initially talked about back on Embrace the Void 150, where I pointed to what I thought were the beginnings of this slide into conspiracy theory land.
And it has obviously since gotten much, much more explicit in both of their cases.
And I think the reason that James Lindsay has spiraled so much worse than folks like Pluckrose is because of his association with this conspiracy theorist individual that we will be talking about.
Yeah, that was great.
And I think we recommended back when we did the Lindsay episode that people should check out the Embrace the Void on Sovereign Nations, which was a great deep dive.
But just in case, people haven't done that or joined afterwards, they should do that.
And I would mention as well, Aaron, that like...
I had a similar reaction when I did some research into sovereign nations.
And when I went to the website, I quickly discovered anti-immigrant George Soros conspiracies.
Hitler was actually a progressive article.
And I made a friend saying, this seems like a bad thing for people who are pro-science and liberal to be associated with.
And back then, I thought of that as simply...
I don't think I fully appreciated at that time that it seems likely that O 'Fallon was already exerting,
you know, his emperor influences on James.
Like when we look at our talk, you can definitely see The influence, I would have framed that as more ignorance or lack of awareness, but I think it would be fair to see that as there actually was influence,
at least on James.
And with Helen, it may be more along the lines of, you know, she regards it as guilt by association or whatever.
And to be fair, as far as I can tell, Helen has had the least of any of them to do with sovereign nations, right?
She continues to work with Lindsay and such, but she didn't take part in the Trojan horse videos that they did a year ago or whatever it was.
Again, it's so conspiratorial sounding, right?
And they hammer on those things again in the new videos as well.
So she hasn't been as involved and like Boghossian was involved with those videos, but not with these.
So it may be the case that they have felt more inclined to distance themselves from
I think we can fairly say that Helen has expressed a dislike for the conspiratorial turn that Lindsay has taken.
I would prefer that she express that more effectively and remove his Michael O 'Fallon-supported new discourse materials from the Counterweight website.
Baby steps, I suppose.
So with Helen, it's understandable that she has a personal relationship with James and that this turn has been difficult for her.
I see people raise that point, but if Matt was to become a COVID denialist or pumping out misinformation, of course it would create a personal conflict.
But I like to think that...
I could still say, you know, I respect Matt.
I like him as a person.
However, he's gone batshit crazy and is promoting the global depopulation and coronavirus conspiracy.
So, like, that's a problem.
It's not just something that, you know, we have differences of opinions on this.
And I kind of think she does often take the thing about it.
Well, I disagree with James, but I'm not going to dwell on that.
And as we'll see when we get back to James, he's really going quite extreme.
So I don't know if that cuts it, but...
Yeah, look, I don't think my opinion is significantly different from either of yours on that.
I think I was perhaps more willing to extend the benefit of the doubt earlier on.
But as James became increasingly insane, then the approach of simply avoiding talking about it and not distancing oneself became a bit harder to defend.
I think there's a general thing where I'm not making excuses, but just making a more general comment that all of us tend to avoid criticising stuff or people that generally have the same agenda as us because we see that it would undermine the greater good of opposing the thing we don't like.
So, rightly or wrongly, Helen believes that Opposing critical theory and so on is the great admission.
And I guess she would see that James's regrettable insanity is a shame, but to spend a lot of time criticizing it would undermine what she sees as the big admission.
So that's a very common thing.
I don't excuse it, though.
I think, Chris, you're right.
If, you know, any one of us here...
Were to be as batshit crazy as Chris, then you...
Sorry.
Jim.
Not as Chris.
Yeah.
Freudian slip.
Sorry.
Yeah, then it's important to say something about it.
It doesn't seem hard to condemn, you know, saying that the elites are planning to wipe out billions of people in the next 10 years.
That's not like a mild claim, you know, that you might disagree on some details.
Right.
And I get that she's between a rock and a hard place.
I would...
Venture to guess that it's more of a personal relationship thing in this case than a, like, she's concerned about the cause or something like that, I think.
And I, like, I get it.
I understand.
At the same time, eventually, at some point...
As a friend, you're becoming an enabler, right?
That's not good for anybody.
And you're right.
I think it becomes bad for the cause.
There's a tipping point, right, where it's like Trump and the GOP.
They're shackled together and Trumpism is pulling them down.
And I think even before, as I predicted, Lindsay ended up openly endorsing Trump, which was something I predicted.
I'll do a Michael O 'Fallon here.
I knew this months before everyone else, right?
I was way out.
I was the hipster.
Of knowing that James Lindsay was going to be an open Republican before the election.
He's made jokes about how he loves to take insults and put them on his title.
And he said, I'm the Donald Trump of intellectuals.
100% true.
He absolutely is the Donald Trump of intellectuals.
He's paper thin.
He's a narcissist.
He's, you know, can't have a serious conversation with anyone who disagrees with him.
So like, yeah, that's what the anti-woker shackled to right now.
And I think...
If they want to get their criticism out there and make it effective, they need to put distance between them and what we're going to talk about here today.
So on that point, let's switch to the man of the R, not Baxter the Fly, but the Krang, Michael O 'Fallon.
Aaron, I think this is just a general point, a clip from the very, very start.
This is how the podcast opens.
Enjoy this.
It has a musical interlude.
This is The Causes of Things.
And I'm your host, Michael O'Fallon.
Music.
It goes on.
I stopped that there because...
The timbre of the voice is very deep and authoritative.
And then you have this classical music playing in with very dramatic backing.
And this echoes when we heard Lindsay's talk at the Sovereign Nations event.
At the end, they played this ground-sweeping sound.
This is the truth about critical theory, and we cannot let this happen.
So I'm here today to warn you.
We are late to this fight.
This is already well underway.
Thank you.
And given the theme of this talk, which ends up being about saving Western civilization from dissolving influences, I just wanted to notice that, like, it's really on the nose, the framing.
As a guru technique, it's kind of chef's kiss, but really...
Classical music, he couldn't have been more transparent.
Yeah, this was clearly taken from the Charles Murray musical collection, right?
This is obviously the height of American achievement being selected for here, for like no specific cultural reason.
You shouldn't infer anything from this.
I mean, I personally love my Christian nationalism in an ASMR variety.
I feel like it soothes me into accepting that we should pass laws that will pull back people's rights 20, 50 years or something.
Y 'all talked, I think, in previous episodes about the guru.
And I think he's got a quality guru voice, the level of breathlessness that he achieves.
I feel like there are points in this where someone please give him oxygen.
He is clearly about to pass out.
Indeed.
It's all about instilling a sense of gravitas, isn't it?
It's very gravitas.
I didn't realize how long the music played because, of course, I immediately set this to 1.75 speed because I need to preserve my sanity, generally speaking.
But yeah, I did notice for a minute just the level of pauses that he likes to take in every part of his conversation.
We'll get to the dramatic pause.
It's kind of useful for clipping because he meets these endpoints.
And he also does this effect, which, again, we'll get to where I don't know if it's faux.
I read it as quite faux, but he displays emotional Affect in some clips.
It's so painful.
This attack on civilization is so painful that he might break down, but he just holds it together to get the message out.
It's very Alex Jones.
Ish.
Yeah.
And while we're also playing Classics Bingo, this podcast that's calling The Cause of Things or something, which may, I think, also be like a Cicero reference or something like that, has as its backdrop Roman clip art or something.
Like it's every single piece of the, let's say, Anglo-Saxon cultural kattaché.
I don't know whether you guys noticed this, but he...
At times sounds quite a bit like Dan Cullen of hardcore history fame.
Certainly tries to.
Yeah, like with 90% less insight.
Yes.
So if you stripped away all of the content in the insight and you just looked at an approximation of style, I suspect he's listened to that podcast and has deliberately attempted to emulate.
Yeah.
Speaking of styles, he sounds a lot like Bill Cooper, who I think is to blame for a lot of what we're having to deal with in this situation.
Bill Cooper, unlike Jones, you know, sometimes he would get angry, but like a lot of the times he had that kind of glow-intensive kind of sound to him.
And if I could interview Michael O 'Fallon, and I know that y 'all leave open invitations to all of your gurus, so if you do get him back on, I'll send you some questions.
You know, I really want to know...
Does he know who Bill Cooper is?
Did he listen to Bill Cooper growing up?
And has he read Behold a Pale Horse?
Because I kind of think the answers to at least one of those questions is yes.
Yeah, there's a lot of DNA there.
We will get into the obvious comparison with Alex Jones, but Alex Jones comes from Bill Cooper, so the DNA is there.
But there, Matt, in a great segue.
Speaking of historical origins, so the way this podcast starts is it's about the Great Reset, which is a contemporary issue.
this is a thing which a lot of the right have got upset with because of the world economic forum having this document and this policy discussion about recovery from covid which they stupidly named the great reset just plain
This is a contemporary issue, but he wants to link it to the historical Great Reset of a whole bunch of things, but in particular, the French Revolution.
So let me play two clips to tee us up on that.
The Jacobins and what their view about public slaughter was.
Pol Pot and Mao.
And the Jacobins, the first in the line of supposedly modest men with access to a higher truth.
Men who loved humanity so much they felt entitled to exterminate the human beings that stood in its way.
It was the birth of a system of loathsome paranoia, which was responsible for the butchering of tens of thousands of human beings.
Wow. So, it's pretty fun.
He spends a fair bit of time talking about the French Revolution and how that is an excellent analogy for the woke Marxist revolution that is purportedly going on today.
In a way, his position sounds like it's from the 18th century, because the conservatives in England and other places were horrified, certainly, at the excesses of the French Revolution.
And they believed at the time that they could be directly attributed to the secular and godless modern philosophy that was guiding it.
Yeah, we probably have some more clips to illustrate this, Chris, but I think he's drawing a pretty long bow in trying to relate that to contemporary politics.
Yeah, well, I'll play one more clip and then hear your thoughts about the connections he's drawing.
And somehow, through this elitist group, it became reasonable that the idea that it's Okay, of thousands and thousands of people with wrong ideas should be slaughtered as long as the bourgeois idea of individual rights are overthrown.
But you see, this was for their good.
It was for your good.
Okay, that's that.
I just want to say, I haven't listened to this at times one speed, and I didn't realize how dramatic.
How hard it is to sit through that 1x speed.
Yeah, it's really hard.
It's so grinding.
Yeah, so let's talk about why he might think that the French Revolution was really run by elites.
Because, you know, Matt hears this as a conservative kind of talking point, and it is in a sense, but it actually, in my world, ties to a very specific...
Lineage of conspiracy theories.
So folks might not realize that the modern anti-globalist conspiracy theory really comes into its own during the French Revolution, that the conservative people that Matt was referring to didn't think that this could have happened organically.
They didn't think that it was just because they were absolutely grinding their peasants into the dirt that that was the reason that they all got murdered.
No, it must be the elites.
And of course, the elites here have echoes.
Around their name, because they are, of course, the Jews.
So, a little bit of background.
Folks have probably heard of the very famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, like probably the most famous hoax conspiracy theory document of all time.
Its precursor, its inspiration in essence, is the memoirs illustrating the history of the Jacobinism by French priest Barul, who essentially claimed that the revolution was led by messianic...
He doesn't initially say Jews, but then he later circulates further forgeries that give the impression that the Jews were running all of this.
This then leads to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which of course we all know goes so well in the 1940s, but it also leads directly to, as you heard there, What he's going to lay out in this episode, and he's not going to say it explicitly, but implicitly what he's going to say here is,
the modern woke are like the Jacobins, and the Jacobins were all about murdering a bunch of people for their beliefs, essentially.
And so that's what's going to happen now.
And while he doesn't say it explicitly, his clown boy, James Lindsay, who doesn't know how to keep the quiet part even a little bit quiet, in his Twitter account at one point...
The elites are going to kill off three-fourths of the population in the next 10 years, which is this kind of depopulation conspiracy myth that, again, traces back to people like Bill Cooper, who is also, by the way, in his book, Behold a Pale Horse, responsible for...
the re-mainstreaming of the protocols of the elders of Zion.
So to say that these guys are 100% swimming in the world of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is accurate whether they're aware of it or not.
And I find it almost impossible to imagine that they could be so willfully ignorant as to be unaware of it at this point.
It's important to note, too, that the description of the French Revolution...
It's just wildly inaccurate and wrong in very simple ways as well.
For instance, he describes it as a revolution of the elites against bourgeois values when nothing could be further from the truth.
The bourgeois felt excluded.
From power and opportunities for advancement.
And even though it was a pretty broad-scale revolution, which involved peasants and things like that, the bourgeois were certainly very much on the side of the revolutionaries.
The leaders of the revolution were drawn from the bourgeois.
The people that got their heads cut off were aristocrats, monarchists and their supporters.
So his attempt to draw that connection and make out that it was a revolution against...
Bourgeois enlightenment values is he's got it completely backwards in a very fundamental way.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, if anything, right, this was the personification of...
A large part of Enlightenment values, and that was what was so terrifying to conservatives, was that they were worried that the expansion of the moral community by Enlightenment values was going to upset their delicate colonial order, and then it did.
Exactly.
Weird that.
Exactly.
And so, it's such a weird choice of analogy, because actually, that event, it represents a split between religious conservatives like a Fallon and secular Atheists like James.
So it just makes no sense on any level.
Yeah, and you can hear in the part where he's talking about the Jacobins, he hammers real hard that they were attacking the church and undermining the control of the church, which is, of course, going to be important because he wants to say literally everything they did back then,
they're now doing again, including suppressing the church so that they can control Western society and collapse it just the right way.
Exactly, but it was Enlightenment values that led them to be so hostile to the church.
Anyway.
So, another aspect where he's describing this French Revolution and Jacobins is that he really wants to tie this to the current moment, and we can see that in this clip.
And the primary force that was in control of the reign of terror, that prohibited medium and large gatherings of people, because, you know, if you have more than 20 people together, it could be the start of a mob or a counter-revolution, so no crowds.
No crowds for your safety.
And the organization within the French Revolution that was used to enforce the will of the now non-constitutional French Republic was the Committee of Public Safety.
PAM PAM PAM
He really tries to make safety sound so terrible.
It's super funny.
Nobody tell him, by the way, that Foucault's book Discipline has a whole section on quarantines during plagues and how that was the beginning of statist biopower.
That would be not helpful.
Isn't it really obviously stupid?
Like, I mean, I might be...
Just getting this wrong.
But he is here inferring that the lockdown, the response to an actual pandemic situation where we should avoid crowds so that we don't spread an actual virus, that that's analogous to a revolutionary society trying to prevent gatherings to stop counter-revolutionary activities.
That is the parallel, right?
Yeah, and this actually brings in another important reason that I think he is tying back here.
There's a common theme that you see with conspiracy theorists.
The conspiracy has to go back a long ways.
It can't just be some people right now are doing some woke stuff and that's bad.
It has to be they're carrying out this legacy of a philosophical tradition that goes back to these messianic temples or something.
You see this.
In like a variety of these kinds of conspiracy theories.
And so, yeah, I think he's trying to just give it this mythic resonance the same way that Alex Jones will take things all the way back to prehistoric times or something.
Yeah, that's my feeling of what's going on here.
So on that point, Aaron, there's a clip that speaks exactly to that point you're raising.
So let's see what echoes O 'Fallon hears.
And of course, all of this is for your safety.
It's for your health.
Does this sound familiar?
I think you can hear echoes of Robespierre and the Jacobins once again.
As you were saying, Aaron, these modus operandi of conspiracy theorists are pretty common, and one of them is to relate it back to a Manichean struggle of evil things versus good things.
But another one of the tricks of conspiracy theories is to place tremendous import on a very superficial So, in this case, simply because the Committee of Public Safety, which was a real committee that existed during the reign of terror in the French Revolution,
and it did a lot of bad things, it is true.
The fact that it had the word safety in the title is related to the idea of preventing large public gatherings in an epidemic.
To keep people safe from getting infected is, yes, as Chris said, it's really quite silly.
It's just demonstrably obviously.
Yeah, I mean, it would be as silly as if I were, for example, to say that Michael, I have a website with a whole section specifically devoted to George Soros O 'Fallon, was repeatedly using the word echoes over and over again to subtly reference,
again, the parenthetical echoes that are used to bell Jews by white nationalists.
But that would be ridiculous to imagine that he's engaged in that kind of...
Weird subliminal messaging.
But it is something that you see often in the conspiracy theory world.
You see it with Alex Jones, too, where he has this thing where, in his mind, the evil globalists have some rules that they have to follow, where they have to make their stuff, like, semi-transparent.
They have to like put it out there in front of you because that's part of the cosmic order of things.
And I think you see a little bit of that here with O'Fallon as well, where he's like, you
The other thing worth mentioning is just the obvious problem with his argument, such that it is an argument, is that, yes, the Committee of Public Safety and the Revolution during the Reign of Terror was a repressive regime,
and it did I have laws to prevent large public gatherings because they were afraid of being overthrown by other revolutionaries generally.
But that is a feature of all repressive regimes all through history.
They have always looked to prevent large public gatherings because of the danger they present.
So the attempt to connect it specifically to the French Revolution or even to left-wing regimes generally just doesn't work.
We're going to see how the conspiracy theory builds up into a grander narrative from these specific connections that he's drawing.
So there's quite a large conspiracy to get through.
So I'm going to now move us to the issue with public health.
We've seen it teased in these clips.
But what is this problem with public health that we need to be concerned with in the modern environment?
So where is all this coming from?
What school or organization would be pushing out what is obvious nonsense?
Well, the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard.
This is a school that, as opposed to using the scientific method, is involved in reflexivity and alchemy.
Let me quickly give you a reminder on the definition of alchemy.
Quote, Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, while alchemy seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs.
To put it another way, the primary objective of science is truth.
That of alchemy, operational success.
Harvard.
He should actually audition for the, like, voiceover guy.
He could do the, like, in a world where the woke control everything.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Like, the thing that gets me about this, right, is so he's tying this global conspiracy that he's going to outline, or at least American-focused one, to a specific public health institute at a specific institution.
Harvard.
Yeah, yeah.
In a world where Harvard is overrun.
Yeah, and the level of gravitas attached to it is clearly hard to oversteer.
But also, the level of parochialism, because we're going to see that the reason that this institute gets brought up is, amongst other things, that Kareem Kaur...
Is there, right?
So Kareem Karb, the PhD student or grad student that was at the center of the 2 plus 2 equals 5 controversy, such as it has existed on the Twitter sphere.
But that's going to be a central plank related to this place because apparently he goes to that institute.
So he's not just a grad student who has an opinion that O 'Fallon disagrees with.
He's just a cog in this grand...
Which is recapitulating the Jacobins' plan to destroy the bourgeois society.
So, okay, before either of you respond, I'm just going to play the clip of him talking about Kareem Carr specifically and how he's involved with this.
He might be surprised to be name-checked.
Oh, no, he's aware of this, actually.
Someone might have mentioned it to him with a timestamp.
Yeah, well, here's how he features the nefarious villain.
And in the article, PhD student at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Kareem Carr states, quote, hope is that you understand the flexible relationship between our mathematical systems, our perceptions of the world, and the symbolic manipulations we use to reason about reality.
We are not passive observers, end quote.
And thus, rejects the scientific method in favor of standpoint epistemology.
This is alchemy.
And sadly, this is just the tip of the iceberg in what the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard is doing.
What are they doing, Aaron?
What are you doing, Dave?
Yeah, so a couple of things here, right?
So first and foremost, I think it's important to caveat because we're going to make fun of O 'Fallon a lot here, I think, for his yellow peril, China is coming for you, they're going to turn us into a satellite of China, kind of classic communist conspiracy mongering,
right?
That is not to say that any of us, I think, are fans of the Chinese government or think that they are not an oppressive regime or that they They are not engaged in a variety of problematic kinds of behaviors.
It's simply to say that we do not believe that the tip of their spear is Kareem Carr and the Harvard School of Public Health.
This is not the mechanism by which they are bringing about the kind of social change that some people would be suggesting.
And the second thing I want to mention here, you pick up in these clips a key theme within the anti-woke IDW sort of narrative, which is this oversimplification of, and I thought you were talking about this over on ETV, actually, this oversimplification
of narratives around epistemology down to two options.
Either you are a staunch objectivist who believes that truth,
It's like saluting the flag of reality, like truth corresponds to reality and you can get access.
To it through the pure science of doing a study and yielding data and that data tells you about the world and stuff.
Or you are an anti-realist, subjectivist, relativist, post-modernist who believes that truth is whatever you want it or feel like it is or something like that.
Those are the only two options, which is just, it's very, very silly.
And that's why these guys are constantly getting dragged on philosophy Twitter by epistemologists.
Who listen to this stuff and are like, no one actually believes any of the things.
I think at one point one of y 'all mentioned, every time you're listening to these guys, it's like they're having a debate in their head with people who just don't really exist.
There are some people on Twitter or in the woke spheres who will make claims about the subjectivity of knowledge or problematize the objectivity of knowledge.
But to suggest that even I think like the majority of woke people believe that there is not objective truth is just to ignore like vast amounts of literature, which is pretty much the MO of what these guys are.
Yeah, and the other thing about that is that it's not even just the woke sphere, right?
Because they're not restricting this.
To a specific ideology.
They're arguing that the entire academic edifice...
It's rotten to the core with this ideology.
So even if it was true that all of the woke scholars, let's grant that they...
My entire education department, yeah.
And they're like an organized collective who see eye to eye on things.
If they were all lost to this complete vacuum of subjectivism and relativism, that's not the majority of academia.
I know that they posit that they've got their tendrils into the administrations and they're like puppeting everything, but it just seems so untellered from reality, the extent to which they're positing that critical scholars have control over everything.
Like, even if their ideology is what they said, they're just a part of academia.
There's plenty of people in academia that have no interest or relationship to these kind of debates.
But here they're presented as that the academic system has been infiltrated and taken over by critical spheres or...
I do some work in public health, and bending over backwards, I can concede that there is some researchers in public health who do take something of an activist approach.
Just public health by its very nature because it has a very clear goal to improve public health.
It sort of lends itself to, I guess, a mode which is about changing the world for the better.
But to elaborate on what you were saying, there is no absolution.
There is no black and white in terms of there is not a camp of academics out there who are just complete subjectivists and another camp that are these naive reductionist positivists.
I can say from my own work that...
Even though we try very hard to be as objective as possible in how we actually undertake the empirical research that we do, we are very much aware that the questions that we ask are not random.
The topics we investigate are investigated for a reason.
Either we think personally they're important or, more usually, they are funded by governments or by institutions of some kind because they feel that those questions are important.
And then furthermore, once we write up that research and it gets out there and hopefully has some sort of impact on policy, then what gets done with it is an interaction of people's values and what the...
Empirical research that we've tried to make as objective as possible.
Yeah.
I think at least two things are true.
I think we just have to acknowledge that a vast amount of woke criticism about the kind of naive objectivism that I think these guys glorify in a lot of ways has just been straight up onboarded, as far as I can tell, by modern scientists.
Stuff like, hey, maybe when we do our studies, we should do studies on women and not just men, for example, right?
Like classic kind of woke criticism of blind spots of a system that was being run.
In many ways, it's still often being run overwhelmingly by white men.
I think it's hard to deny the value of those kinds of criticisms.
But I also think the point that you raised that's really valuable is I'm not going to say there aren't standpoint epistemologists out there.
There are absolutely people doing that kind of work.
But to suggest that that is all there is to the woke is not accurate.
There's a bunch of people doing hard data studies.
Trying to verify that inequalities are the result of this factor and not these other factors, where they're doing all the science-y things of trying to control for a bunch of different variables.
So just to pretend that none of that exists and it's everybody just like...
Feeling their feels about glaciers is just so strawman-y.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah, and it's especially ridiculous given the amount of people that are in that sphere that then went on to endorse voter fraud conspiracies.
Very true science that you're now out here denying vaccines are good.
Yeah, and I mean, we'll get to that, but O 'Fallon and James Lindsay are both people who...
Are very sceptical of the science around the virus and the public health measures that deal with it.
So you can't have it both ways.
You can't be this person arguing that we need to respect science and it's about objective research.
And then when it suits your political purposes.
Off you go on a rant about how you can't trust anything in public health or about viruses because that's all corrupt.
I don't see how they are not guilty of the thing that they're accusing all of their villains, their enemies of doing.
It's hypocritical.
Yeah, and I think this gets back to what Matt was saying about how there's a fundamental disconnect between the fact that O 'Fallon is blaming Enlightenment Jacobins For being the beginning of wokeness because of his Christian leanings,
I think you can see that these guys are at cross purposes in a variety of ways, and yet they are trying to reconcile it.
So, for example, we'll eventually talk about his thing with James Lindsay on climate.
And in that one, there's this really breakneck back and forth switch between we hate technocratic elitists for trying to control us with their technocracies, and America is the greatest technocracy in human history,
and it's going to technocracy its way out of climate change.
And like, there's no concern about that because they are trying to meld together these anti-globalist conspiracy theories with like, you know, if you were to be generous and try to give James Lindsay any sort of viewpoint beyond paleo conspiracy.
I think you're completely right about that, Aaron.
A rift between these two, which, if you pay attention, you can see that their worldviews don't mesh very well, really, when you look at the fundamentals.
But James Lindsay seems particularly flexible in adopting and accommodating the Christian nationalist worldview of O 'Fallon.
This was all predicted, by the way, by Peter Boghossian.
And I think it's fair to say probably like it was influenced by them already maybe interacting with Michael O 'Fallon.
But Peter Boghossian wrote an article about not the Great Reset, but the Great Realignment where the new culture war was not going to be divided between the secular and the religious.
It was going to be divided between the woke and the anti-woke.
And in that world, they would be breaking bread with fundamentalist Christians if it meant that they were pushing back on.
So, I mean, like, they very clearly signaled that they were willing to capitulate, put a lot of their stuff on the side just for the sake of getting to make these kind of connections to fight wokeness.
In this particular episode, when he gets into his like, I learned about all of this stuff in the past, it's going to be him listening to woke Christians.
And he is obsessed with the invasion of wokeness into the Baptist congregations that he is connected to in various ways.
And it's funny because you can notice James Lindsay also now being obsessed with the invasion of wokeness into Christianity.
And he says things like, Christians, if you let them in, they're going to I honestly do believe.
I put this marker down.
You can quote me on this.
Before this is all over, James Lindsay is going to be a cultural Christian.
He's going to pull a full Dave Rubin and be like, Christianity is the only shield against wokeness.
He's so close to that.
I can taste it.
Bigger issues when it comes to the conspiratorial and general ideological worldview that they're positing.
I will adopt the role of being a, I don't know, an organizational person who forces you to listen to clips.
But what about Ronnie Chan?
Who is that?
And what's his specific...
So we've already seen that the public health school associated with him is an issue.
But let's hear a little bit about who he is and then how he ties into this bigger conspiratorial worldview.
And Ronnie has many investments in China and Hong Kong, is the President Emeritus of the Aegis Society, has been a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum.
To remove myself from the issue, personally, and to supply an unbiased report of Ronnie Chan, Let me read from the Harvard Crimson, which accompanies the article for this podcast.
And I quote, Who is Ronnie Chan?
Jimmy Lai, the recently arrested Hong Kong pro-democracy news mogul, dubbed him a, quote, pawn of the CCP, end quote, on Twitter.
Perhaps rightly so.
Okay, so that's a little bit of an introduction to Ronnie Chan, the guy who funded...
This health institute that Michael is concerned with.
But let's go a bit deeper into what the actual conspiracy involved with him is and see what you guys think about it.
So once again, Ronnie Chan is possibly influencing the public health policy of the United States through the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and is stating...
That there's a better system, a more efficient system than the Western system, and that many here in the United States are starting to understand that maybe we should transition into that new system.
Rami is stating that what has happened is that there are those in the United States that are all of a sudden realizing that China has a system, a collective, communist, technocratic, oligarchal, algocratic system.
In other words, rule by algorithms.
That is more efficient.
Than our current system in the United States.
Ronnie Chan then also states that the influential think tanks believe that the system needs to be changed.
But it means that the United States and the West will have to go through a great reset to become the Chinese system.
This is called Social Credit Measurement and Complete Control of Your Life.
Sorry, I blew my load too early.
He had one more thing to say.
It's still funny.
I feel like I can add that to the end of every clip and it applies.
Yeah.
This is an interview where Ronnie Chan was interviewed and asked about, I think it was in the context of China's response to the coronavirus or something.
Ronnie states the following in this dialogue.
First, Ronnie Chan states, quote, That didn't happen.
And now they are realizing that there is a system that, in certain circumstances, can be more efficient than the Western system.
End quote.
The journalist who was interviewing him then said, You mean the autocratic system?
Ronnie Chen responds, and I quote, Yes, and America cannot accept that.
I don't think that has much to do with Trump.
He may not even be able to think all that clearly.
But the influential think tanks have that kind of thinking.
End quote.
And he essentially said that they were able to be But there was no implication that those measures should be exported and adopted in the US.
The actual point was, they wouldn't be acceptable in the US, even if they were...
If you can lock down all the population and prevent anybody from going outside, sure, you can do a better job at containing a virus, but as he highlighted in that, that wouldn't be acceptable in the Western democracy.
So, yeah, it feels like he's really riffing on that interview, reading what he wants into what was said.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here as sort of a meaty conspiracy theory kind of experience.
So like the first thing...
I think we want to point to is that this is a common move that conspiracy theorists will make where they just straight up misrepresent what the person was actually saying, right?
He was saying that it was an efficient system, not as a like all things considered, it's therefore a better system claim, but just like in the same way that people will say because China is an authoritarian capitalist system, it can put a bunch of resources in a bunch of directions very quickly,
whereas the American system can't do anything.
Because the Republicans have shut down our government for all time.
You can make that kind of point and not be saying that it is, in fact, a better system.
Under that layer, there's another thing going on here, which is he's clearly saying that we can't do this here because psychologically it wouldn't work for Americans.
But in Michael O 'Fallon's worldview, the whole point of the lockdown is to literally reset your brains, to unplug your mind and plug it back in and make it malleable to another way of living,
a controlled totalitarian way of living.
So the goal is literally...
To, like, remove the American individualism from you via the lockdown.
So that's why he thinks that China, and this all then ties, I guess, to the woke who are justifying the endless lockdown through their undermining of science and such like that.
Now, let me just throw in one more thing here.
It's funny that he, again, as we mentioned, he hates technocrats, right?
So he makes fun of the Chinese for being these technocrats who are using algorithms to control society.
Thank you.
a radical black conservative conspiracy theory group, but who are again, heavily influenced
Bill Cooper, the same guy who influenced Alex Jones, and they were also talking about how all of wokeness, they literally say wokeness is a...
plot by the Chinese to invade and destroy Western civilization and collect
They go a little further on the technocratic side of it, but it's the exact same language.
All of these people are speaking the exact same Bill Cooper conspiracy theory language, which is just fascinating.
Once you have that Rosetta Stone, you realize that this is all just the same stuff.
It's the same stuff so much that I am now willing to say this kind of great reset conspiracy theory.
There is no daylight between this and the great replacement white nationalism style conspiracy anti-globalist stuff or the great depopulation stuff that James has talked about.
They're all just the same versions of the Jews are coming to kill you.
Yeah. And, you know, you drew parallels to the conspiratorial worldview of Bill Cooper and Alex Jones, like we've talked about.
And there really is that in this content and a kind of specific appeal to populist notions that there's a parasitic elite, which is just viewing you as like pawns in their
grand games.
And like, it's actually the extent of that they're using critical theories and public health in order to.
I was going to play those clips later, but I think they're relevant now because they're just so clear.
So let me just play two clips about him, how he sees the elites as manipulating you.
Because, you know, those deplorable average people are stupid.
The intelligentsia.
The Jacobins.
Which are the monsters, know so much more than you do.
And they have the new system that is ready to be implemented.
And by the way, in this new system, you lose your property rights.
Also in this new system down the road, you lose your cognitive liberty.
Not just your free speech, but free thought.
They just have to push the system in.
With or without your permission.
Deceiving you.
and manipulating you down and along the way.
Music by Ben Thede
That, by the way, was a nice clip about the rising emotion.
And also, I noticed telling Republican.
Government.
I know that he might be, you can take it as, oh, he's referring to the specific system, but I kind of think that was an intentional double entendre.
But anyway, before dwelling more, here's one more of the populist rhetoric for you.
Because, you know, those deplorable average people are stupid.
The intelligentsia.
The Jacobins.
Which are the monsters, know so much more than you do.
And they have the new system that is ready to be implemented.
And by the way, in this new system, you lose your property rights.
Also in this new system down the road, you lose your cognitive liberty.
Not just your free speech, but free thoughts.
They just have to push the system in.
With or without your permission, deceiving you and manipulating you down and along the way.
Welcome to the Matrix.
Whenever he talks, I don't know, all I can think of is the part in 30 Rock where she's like, Jack, this is taking too long.
Just say Jews.
Like, come on.
I'm going to get tired of saying this, but like the sinister inflection of they told you it was for your good.
They told you.
It's a bad voiceover and it's at that level of cognitive control.
Your mind was not your own.
You didn't notice they stole it from you.
It's not just like Alex Jones or Bill Cooper.
It is the exact thing that they say with the reference to deplorable.
And stuff, right?
You can tell that that's playing into standard right-wing rhetoric and even Trumpism to present it as, oh yeah, this is the elite trying to say that they know best and you foolish deplorables, they just look down at you.
But if you're willing, you can stand up and fight.
It reminds me very much of Scott Adams, actually, but he's just like a much worse at it.
He has the tone of voice, but the actual things he's saying, yeah, it feels like very low quality, conspiratorial.
Yeah, and another sort of key theme that you can pick up on here with the kind of conspiracy theorizing is this absurdly overinflated sense of the they, right?
This group that is involved in all of this.
A, they have to have the most sinister reasons possible, right?
It can't just be that there are a bunch of people who want to make money and they're trying to do these things.
It has to be so much more darker than that.
But at the second time, it also has to be so much bigger than anything plausible.
So, for example, he talks about how Forbes, noted wokists Forbes, are a Chinese front and that they have been hiding the secrets about this Ronnie Chan woke conspiracy connection.
I want to mention, just before we move on, that there's this tendency he has to hint at Having insider knowledge and being in the room when these kind of big events are talked about.
And we'll see it later with literal reference to being invited to be part of the conspiracies at smoky dinner meetings.
But here's him, when it comes to Ronnie Chan, emphasizing that he's a player.
He knows these people personally.
Now, once again, I need to give full disclosure, as I did in the Thucydides trap episode.
And let me clearly state that I know Ronnie and Gerald and their families.
They have been very good to me.
I have known them for a number of years, and let's just say that we have done some things, especially from 2009 to 2014.
They've done some things.
Done some things?
Did they, like, fight Predator in the jungle?
Like, what are you talking about?
It's very Eric Weinstein, isn't it?
It's simultaneously emphasizing that you move in these circles and you know these people.
And they're all a bunch of bastards.
Well, and it's all 100% Alex Jones, too, right?
Every other episode, Alex Jones is talking about how he's like...
Hobnobbing with elites, and he has information that they don't even realize, and for some reason just can't quite break through.
He can't quite get the information.
And you get the same vibe here, too, where it's not just that O 'Fallon was in the room.
It's also that O 'Fallon was the hipster of sounding the alarm that there was a problem, but just nobody would ever listen to him.
It's a weird, how can you both be so far in the inside in this way?
And also like no one will take you at all seriously or something.
There's a clip that actually highlights that point you're making, Aaron, because the context isn't important, but this claim to having the actual documents, like in this part, he's claiming to have accidentally been emailed the details about the Great Reset 10 years ago.
And then the saddest part is that then some...
Whom I did not speak to, after I began Sovereign Nations, sent some aspects, some PDFs of the plan for what would become the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
They sent those things to me that are part of what is happening with Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, plans that I actually already have had had.
That dramatic overstatement of the threat, that's a shadowy, all-powerful, all-knowing group of people that are manipulating all of you pawns.
It has parallels with the talk that used to be very popular in left-wing circles about the military-industrial complex and manufacturing consent.
And there's an element of truth to all of that.
You can always Mott and Bailey these things.
But at the extreme end, what...
What you see is a catastrophisation, sure, but where it goes wrong is always in assuming that there's this all-powerful group of kleptocrats at the top that is running the world for their own benefit.
It's this paranoia that it's not, yes, it's definitely a right-wing thing at the moment, but it doesn't have to be right-wing.
It's just a fallacy.
It's just a paranoid delusion that can affect.
Anybody, really.
Yeah, I mean, that's why I brought up the Hoteps because, I mean, and you see Bill Cooper's influence throughout the Black community because he was the one who presented conspiracy theories about the CIA releasing AIDS into these communities when it had the cure,
for example, or like, you know, the crack epidemic kind of stuff.
So, for example, there's a great quote from Wu-Tang Clan's Old Dirty Bastard who says, Everybody knows that they're being fucked.
Bill Cooper tells you who's doing the fucking, essentially.
And I think you really do see in Michael O 'Fallon and in James Lindsay, too, the same desire to be finding the people who feel like they are being fucked over in some way and saying, these are the people who are doing it, and I have the documents to prove it.
And I want to mention about the documents to prove it thing.
This is also...
Alex Jones and Bill Cooper to a T. Alex Jones is constantly talking about the documents that he has, but he never actually presents.
And so I do think there is something to this idea that a lot of these folks did experience potentially some sort of like...
Ironically, injustice in the world, right?
And they have this grievance that they've developed as a result of having seen behind the curtain where the sausage is made and whatnot.
But then, as you say, the problem is they go from there are some bad people trying to do some bad things to and they have an absurd amount of control and they're everywhere like Hydra and they're manipulating such strings that no human beings can ever see.
I think you're dead on.
That there is a kind of disillusionment that does drive this kind of conspiracy theorizing.
And that's what I think makes it very appealing to people out there in the world.
Because we all do deal with people trying to screw us over in various ways.
And we just have to resist the urge to turn it into these grand narratives.
Aaron, you mentioned about how deep it goes.
And I've got so many clips, it's hard to know which one to tee up.
I do want to highlight that I think this one gives an overview of the Hydra-like image that they have of this conspiracy.
I've been trying to warn all of you.
I have been warning that this will all be a top-down, bottom-up, inside-out move.
Because if you're going to create a successful revolution, you're going to need buy-in from key players in everything.
In education.
Legal structures, politics, religion, law enforcement, health, and across every facet, every single one of every affinity group across the nation.
Peace. Peace.
Peace. I'm sorry.
So, bottom-up, top-down, inside-out revolution.
I don't know which way I'm going, guys.
It's going to be confusing.
That's what the revolution's going to be.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's totally a coincidence, right, that, like, he's talking about trying to make the government aware of the danger of wokeness, and then James Lindsay and Chris Rufo are getting Trump to sign critical race theory bills and then trying to get laws passed to ban woke topics from schools and stuff.
I don't know how anybody at this point can respond to this material and say, oh, you're just making a guilt by association.
They're doing the same project, right?
It's all just the same thing.
And we should just acknowledge that, I think.
Yeah, and you can see that in who the ultimate villains are, right?
It's not just the Chinese.
Here's Michael O 'Fallon describing his villains gallery.
There are monsters out there.
Mark Zuckerberg.
Eric Schmidt, Kamala Harris, Mark Carney, Jack Ma, Christine Lagarde, Klaus Schwab, George Soros.
All these folks know exactly what's going on.
Yeah, I like that Soros got in there.
And Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris, she's one of the puppet bastards behind it.
I'm sure she was on this radar prior to this election.
She's just been biding her time, losing that primary, waiting for a moment to strike.
To Trojan horse her way in through Biden's dead body.
Yeah, you know what?
The most interesting thing about that list to me is who's not on that list.
Where's Bill Gates?
My inclination is it's just an oversight.
He would have got Gates and anyone else, but in the moment it didn't pass.
But it would be interesting if it is an actual intentional exclusion.
And on that point, again, I know this is echoing something we already raised, but I think another good example of it is when he talks about having insider knowledge of how Soros...
Is annoyed by Chan?
A little inside baseball here, by the way.
Mr. Soros is not thrilled with the idea of Xi Jinping being the one in the driver's seat or the Belt Road Initiative being the major collective data system driving force behind the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Into the concept of the open society.
Soros isn't down with that.
They've got to be more careful with who they're CCing into these emails.
Soros is telling them who he's pissed with.
That claimed the insider knowledge.
It's so Jonesian.
Yeah, there's trouble in Woke Paradise, and he's got the inside line.
I'm a little angry as someone who has some Jewish blood to me why I'm not getting the updates as to who George Soros is mad at at a given point in time.
I feel like I should be on those particular memos.
But, like, why?
You can reasonably ask here, why does George Soros care?
As far as these guys are concerned, George Soros is a dead-eyed sociopath who happily capitulated with the Nazis.
Why would he be at all concerned about the Chinese?
Like, is it just like a, a narcissism fight where he has to be the one in
Yeah, Matt,
I see you posted a link to...
Sovereign Nations article.
Is that you just trying to red pill us or what's that?
Oh, I see.
Yeah, Bill Gates, World's Most Powerful Doctor.
Speaking of, I think it's fun to note, this is something that I discovered when I was looking back at Sovereign Nations, really.
As far as I can tell, I know for sure they scraped content from Quillet without Quillet's permission.
They literally copy and pasted Quillet articles without the consent of the authors or the publishers.
And my suspicion is, because of the formatting of every article on Sovereign Nation's website that isn't bio-Fallon, Being what looks to be a copy and paste of another, like a website from the Atlantic or a website from a bunch of different things,
I'm pretty sure like 80% of their content is scraped without permission, including, I believe, probably that article that you linked.
Yeah, I think you're right.
If you go to the very bottom, it'll probably say article originally published in and it'll give the source.
It says via...
It says via Politico.
So this one was going to be based on Politico.
You're right.
Yep.
Yep.
They've got the Atlantic on there.
All of them.
Yeah.
This was being discussed by Alex Jones on an episode.
I heard them discuss this very article about George Soros being a doctor.
So it's hard to exaggerate how much this is just regurgitating standard right-wing conspiracy land bullshit.
It's almost futile to try to analyze these conspiracy theories and try to figure out the logic behind them because it is just so scattergun and random.
It's really just an amorphous blob of characters and villains and connections that it's kind of a fool's errand to try to find some structure to it.
Yeah, it has a lot of the, like, John Bircher vibe to it in that kind of way as well, where it's just like all this stuff is getting thrown in.
Something that got mentioned earlier that I wanted to just throw a pin into, when he name-dropped Agenda 21 and whatnot, that is, and I know how much Chris absolutely loves when someone cites a document and thinks that that has proven that the conspiracy theory is real.
Agenda 21 is the document that people are misreading that gets them to James Lindsay's.
They're going to kill off 5 billion people.
It's the one that probably has a conversation about population.
And these guys immediately jump to that being, therefore, they're going to murder everybody and deplete the population because they don't need you anymore.
Yeah.
I mean, I've got a bunch of clips where they're going specifically into this, but one that I think is...
It's probably one of the best illustrations of how far this isn't just right-wing talking points.
And even though the new system that is coming will prohibit your children from having a natural biological family as you have had, that all the generations before you obviously have, well, that's now on the chopping block.
That's just the price of progress in the new system.
because the new family is the state.
Wonderful clip.
Yeah, so just, you know, the notion that one of the endpoints is to end biological challenges
Childbirth and families.
It's, you know, you can even steel man, star man, whatever you want to do.
But fundamentally, you have to realize this is batshit nonsense.
It is like matrix level idiocy.
And yeah, we're supposed to act like, well, you know, this is just people having an issue with critical theory and its influence in academia.
No, they think that these people are going to stop you from having biological children.
Babies will be raised in test tubes and assigned to groups and such.
Yeah, again, it is that 100% Alex Jones.
They're going to destroy your natural vital essences and suck the kids dry of their adrenochrome so that we can fuel our demonic immortality bloodlust.
It's all there.
It's just like...
In this case, sometimes it's ever so slightly under the surface, but then other parts where it's just not even at all under the surface.
Okay, so yeah.
And when he is talking about all of the cast of characters and villains and these figures that are involved, we saw already that there's a familiar George Soros and various liberal figures that are villains on the right.
It goes even more classical conspiracy theorists than that.
So here's a clip of him talking about how the overlords won't be affected by the woke revolution.
Now keep in mind, these rules will not apply to the Davos man or woman.
For the royal family, which if you've seen, Prince Charles has come out with his whole plan for the Great Reset.
Or for those that are the engineers and architects of this new system.
You see, that's the trade-off.
You're protected in this great change.
But you've got to think about this, too.
That's what you've got to think about.
I don't know what place to cut the clip, but that's what I did.
Hey, how is Prince Charles' great reset plan going?
Fantastically.
Has he reset himself back into lizard form?
Is that what's happened?
Is that what we meant here?
He hasn't even yet managed to make himself king.
So his plan is it's in the holding pattern until get rid of that pesky queen.
And then they resurrect him and he becomes our lich king.
Yeah, like, you know, I'm no fan of Prince Charles or the monarchy in general, surprisingly.
Really, your accent doesn't give it away at all.
Yeah, I'm a walking cliche in this regard, but this is like David Icke stuff, that the royal family are conspiring with the UN and George Soros to usher in a revolution where they'll remake society in a way that benefits...
Because the thing that was...
I don't get about this.
They're already at the top of the system.
What are they not allowed to do?
Prince Charles could hunt somebody in the woods and we'd never hear about it.
What thing are they missing out on?
It's not clear at all what he thinks is the endgame of any of this beyond China winning and then doing Chinese stuff, I guess.
Historically, it's seldom been billionaires and monarchs who stage revolutions.
So the narrative that they're pushing is just so stunningly implausible, but they're giving it a shot.
So you're just not willing to accept the really important warnings that are being presented here.
This is crucial stuff coming out of those important files that you just haven't seen yet.
And that's why your skepticism is totally unjustified, Matt Smith.
On that topic, Matt, I know that you love this category in the Gurometer of Cassandra Complex.
There's a very clear example of O 'Fallon invoking that archetype.
So let me play it for you.
And this is when I really began to see that this was serious.
And sitting in a church pew in London, back in 2016, the thought came to me that I had to do something.
I had to say something.
I had to try to prevent this from happening.
And that is why Sovereign Nations was formed.
And that is why I've tried to warn and then gather nearly everyone that I felt that I could trust to bring them into fight against this all-encompassing evil that is coming.
At the World Economic Forum, at Open Societies Foundations, at the UN, with China, for years they've been planning this.
And sadly, for years, I was quiet about this.
And I shouldn't have been.
I should have spoken up.
And I should have been bolder with you over the last three years.
But with all of us, it's fear.
And also the fact that some of the things that I said two years ago, you thought I was nuts to say these things.
How crazy.
That will never happen.
Well, here we are.
Here we are.
In lockdown.
Yeah, I mean, here we are.
We haven't seen a massive depopulation.
As far as I can tell, every government is desperate to try to get things as close to back to normal as soon as humanly possible.
I mean, this is the weird thing is these guys are all banking on this theory that they're going to somehow permanently extend lockdown and make this into a new normal.
And I just think six months from now, that's going to look incredibly silly.
So let's put all our money on the table and see what happens, guys.
Yeah, but the thing is that won't matter.
It never impacts, right?
Like the falsified prediction just gets swept under the table and becomes part of the narrative.
So that's part of the thing that upsets me about conspiracy theories and these kind of things is in 10 years time when the global population has not been.
Reduced to 3 billion or whatever the Great Reset is supposed to be doing.
It's 2 billion, Chris.
It's 2 billion.
Did you not read the briefs?
Yeah.
It won't matter, right?
And it won't dent their confidence that their analysis is right.
So, it's frustrating.
I mean, think about how many conspiracy theories these guys are going to churn through in the next...
10 years.
You won't even remember that tweet where he said that they were going to kill off 5 billion people because he's going to be in deep space adrenochrome land by the time that bill comes due.
Yeah, like the voter ballot stuff is already out of most people's mind.
Who's hearing about the friggin' what were those machines called?
Goliath?
I can remember the...
Stupid time.
Yeah, you know who's hearing about them?
Fox News is currently being sued for defamation.
But these people are not going to get sued for promoting weird alternative...
What was it?
Hydroxychloroquine.
Michael O 'Fallon was pumping that at some point.
There are no consequences for all the misses.
It's like somebody asked me at one point online, what happens if one of these claims gets proven?
I'm like, it's exactly like what happens when a psychic happens to hit on something.
The whole thing is they mark that one hit and then just drop everything else.
Just a bit of a meta-reflection here.
It occurs to me just how stunningly uninteresting this kind of content is to analyse because it is such implausible conspiracy theory.
So if I compare it to some of the other gurus we've covered, people like Nassim Taleb or Ibrahim X. Kendi or even Jordan Peterson when he's talking about his mystical stuff in his books, even when these people are wrong, it's interesting to kind of analyse.
But with this, you just have to restrict yourself to point out the blindingly obvious that there is not.
A world conspiracy with the Prince of York or whoever in league with the Chinese and George Soros.
You know, it's just so boring, but we just have to state the stunningly obvious, I suppose.
Well, he does have dramatic delivery, but Matt, you're claiming that this is all obviously false.
I will put to you, that's because you haven't been in these circles and had these backdoor deal with the devil offers made to you.
I'm just going to play a clip that maybe might make you reconsider your dismissive attitude.
So how does someone get involved in this?
Well, first of all, just through a plane meeting.
Maybe at dinner.
Maybe someone's taking you out to lunch.
And here is how the talk goes.
From the person presenting the inevitable fourth industrial revolution to the new hopeful Great Reset, or big sort, proselyte.
Quote, There is a change coming, and there is nothing that you can do to stop it.
It is inevitable.
It will happen no matter what you or anyone else tries to do.
It will affect everything from economics, culture, politics, to religion.
If you come on board with our side, there is a place for you on the other side of the revolution.
But there's nothing you can do to stop it.
If you don't, it won't be good for you.
But we do have a spot for you.
It's right over here.
And all you have to do is just join in.
And we can even make this fun.
That's it.
It's always hard to tell whether or not he's done.
You never can tell, no.
I mean, look, this is 100% accurate.
Accurate, from my experience.
I don't know about y 'all.
I think y 'all work in the social sciences.
Like, literally, we all work in academia.
How have we not been in these rooms where someone is selling us, giving us money for believing that change is coming?
Like, I work for the Obama administration.
I'm pretty sure I'm on board for getting paid for some change.
Where are these deals coming from?
The only people that have hinted that there might be some money coming to me if I got on board were the gambling industry and the tobacco industry.
I don't think that's who he's thinking of.
They have their own great reset planned, but the difference is it's fucking real.
Was the gambling industry trying to get you to help them sell things to the woke?
Is that how the tie-in works here?
When you're trying to reboot their image or something?
There's no tie-in, but it is true that there are people with money who would like to influence other people.
Yeah, it's not the work, generally.
And let's just be clear, I think it is fascinating that Michael O 'Fallon, the guy who has sunk, as far as I can tell, a fair bit of time, energy, and money into promoting a very specific agenda that he doesn't necessarily actively make himself clearly associated with,
notes that that kind of activity can be coercive.
I'm just going to put that out there that he is aware for all people who are going to show up at the end of this and be like guilt by association.
Remember, Michael O 'Fallon says you can be influenced by the people who financially and various other ways back your enterprises.
Well, this ties in with something we've seen with a lot of other gurus, which is that they do have quite a cynical view of the world in that it's all this power game and shadowy networks of influence.
And so they have this view of the world, and then they rail against the postmodernist views, which are saying something quite similar, really.
And they also display a surprising willingness to play those influence games themselves, citing Eric Weinstein and so on.
Yeah, I want to live in this world with these dramatic figures looking you deep in the eye and saying, what will it cost me to join?
Everything.
I've been in meetings and...
At conferences and stuff with influential people.
And I did my PhD at Oxford, so I...
You managed to drop it in again, Chris.
I always find a way to drop it in.
Yeah, well, look, I'm just saying that the thing that I've experienced in those events, and obviously I'm not going to be invited to the afternoon League of Evil meeting in the Masters Chambers or whatever, but they're just like...
Fundamentally a lot more boring and a lot less, I don't know, like a movie villain world that operates there.
It's not to say that there aren't underhand deals and there aren't monetary influences and ideological political agreements and all these kind of stuff going on, but this just seems like a bad representation of things.
So, yeah.
I mean, this is a very common theme in conspiracy theory land in the sense that one of the major attractors for conspiracy theories is that it's weird.
They take a boring world and make it interesting, but they also take a chaotic world and give it a structured narrative.
So you get this really interesting structured narrative that ties all these data points together, but claims to see itself as being the sophisticated model, where I think the more sophisticated model is just that there are a And so
they would rather do this sleuthing cosplay where they find out, you know, what are the secret links that explain all of this rant?
It's a kind of a paradox that I've never got to the bottom of.
This feature of conspiracy theories which they at once make the world, they create this hidden world beyond the prosaic and they introduce a massive amount of complexity, paranoid complexity, which is fascinating to people in and of itself even beyond the paranoid aspects of it.
But at the same time...
That's combined with an extraordinarily simple Manichaean narrative as well, which provides a satisfying closure to resolve all the complexities.
So it is a kind of a paradox that somehow it has both those features, and it's probably too subtle a thing for us to dig into now.
I'm just going, before we get off this topic, to play a second clip, which is how O 'Fallon knows personally.
About how these conversations play out.
And it's a lived experience that he's drawing from.
So let's hear his testimony.
Now, how do I know this?
Because I heard this speech given by three different people in three different situations at three different times about 10 years ago.
And sadly, the third time that I had heard a rather softened and Christianized version of this revolutionary, deceptive nonsense was in Orlando, Florida, across the street from the Southern Baptist Convention about ten years ago.
I arranged the dinner.
I had no idea what it was actually about.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, he arranged the dinner.
But he wasn't prepared for what happened next.
It's so hard.
I mean, like, every time he pauses, I alternate between fits of giggling and slipping into a small mini coma before the next sentence arrives.
It's a weird style.
I don't know how anyone could ever listen to this at 1x speed.
Doing it for this show is just...
So bizarre to me.
Most people, when I do 1x, it just sounds semi-conscious.
He sounds dramatic, though.
Every sentence is invested with a heap of dramatic importance and gravitas.
In theatre, we teach a really basic principle where it's like you want to vary your delivery, right?
You do not want...
Every sentence to be in the exact same cadence because your audience will go the fuck to sleep.
You have to mix it up a little bit.
And to his credit, there is at least one part that we can point to where he does figure out where the...
He does need to work on his delivery.
The other thing is that this reminds me so strongly of Eric Weinstein's conversation with Douglas Murray.
Where there is a lot of references to these dinner parties, right, Chris?
It's very much conveying that feeling of being an insider than being the Cassandra and being a whistleblower.
I guess that's a useful framing to lend some credibility to these claims.
Yeah, Aaron, you mentioned the Gish Gallop tutorial weaving of a whole bunch of the theories into the grand conspiracy.
I think it would be...
Nice to hear an example of that.
I have so many that I'm just picking one at random, but there's a later one where he links all of this to the virus that might be interesting to hear after, but here's the first one.
So now, let's review exactly what the issue, the Great Reset, is by going over what I've said over the past three years and the causes of things.
Please, God, no.
Firstly, there has been an operational preparation of the environment of our civilization for the past 12 years, integrating concepts of critical theory, deconstruction, and introducing cynical concepts of anti-nationalism and hatred of our civilization from our educational institutions, our arts and media, our national pastimes,
our corporations, our politicians, and, saddest of all, coming through our faith.
All of our churches, politicians, national sports.
Musicians, entertainers, educators, and nearly every major corporation has piggybacked cynical theories, destructive ideas onto these legitimate areas of our culture to convince you to hate those that have less melanin in their skin, to hate the founding of our nation,
to hate the systems that we have fought so hard to make equal and to give every man, woman, and child the opportunity to succeed.
The End
That was the best bit.
When he went to every man, woman, and child, that was just hilarious.
Oh my god.
Every man, woman, and child.
That's just the tone of voice with that.
Right.
Stars and stripes and rainbows.
I mean, this is one of the many examples, and we can talk about this some more on its own, but it's important, I think, to throw a pin into the part where he really hits on the melanin thing, and he really wants to make clear that this is going to be about hating white people in particular.
But separate from that, there's just this idea that critical race theory or critical theory, academic views have spread out and been absorbed into the population, that everyone is completely conforming to all of these social justice principles.
And I mean, I think there is some uptake in a lot of this stuff in our society.
But again, it's this idea of that's not happening because a bunch of people look around and think, yeah, stuff's kind of bad and maybe like we need to change some of it, it's that it's just like with the Jacobins, right?
It's like, they're not mad because we're rich and taking all their stuff.
They're, they're being mad because some academics told them that race or something, right?
Yeah, and you mentioned that this has clear echoes of The themes that James Lindsay promotes, which is obvious, right?
And I think there's a good example that there's cross-pollination, in a sense, because you get the reference to cynical theories, right?
Like we listen to, about their ability to dissolve Western civilization by just being critical, right?
That they hate them.
But I think a point here is, which direction...
The influence goes.
So I'm not saying that Lindsay didn't develop any of the ideas independently, but I think there's a reason that they slot in so nicely with this worldview.
And it's that they obviously have through backdoor conversations in dark rooms where 30 pieces of silver are offered and so on.
They are discussing these ideas and influencing each other.
It's just very transparent to me that it isn't just the case that these are independently arrived at conclusions, but rather ideas that are cross-pollinating, probably in most occasions without reference.
Yeah, there's a good term for this that I picked up by a guy named Peter Boghossian called idea laundering, where an ecosystem is artificially created that gives the impression of organic complexity of thought, where what's really going on is that you're taking the same kinds of ideas and laundering them in a circle.
And so what I think you can see is James Lindsay has these criticisms of...
Social justice, right?
And we can even be generous and say that he starts with some genuine concerns about examples of overreach.
But then he starts to get sucked into these kind of conservative conspiracy theories that talk about things like the Frankfurt School.
And because he doesn't have a background in it, he doesn't know how to distinguish conspiracy theory from the real thing.
And so he starts laundering those right-wing conspiracy ideas into his accounts about the history of critical theory and such.
And then the conservatives can point to him and say, look, here's this academic liberal guy who's writing all of this stuff that confirms all of these things that we believe about the Jews.
And so that creates this nice little circle that doesn't give the impression of a bunch of people just, you know, making up stuff whole cloth, which is what you get with these original conspiracy theorists.
Yeah, that's very similar to pseudoscience communities where you end up with people who may even have related expertise, but they end up in this kind of self-citation circle jerks.
I think it's interesting just to play that too.
Link to the point you make, because I'm not going to play all the people he shouts out, but some of the people are quite surprising.
I'm thankful for Dr. White, as he had mentioned on his last webcast, that he had first heard about all this from me several years ago.
And that it sounded crazy at first, but now he can see what has happened to us.
And he's standing up.
Dr. James Lindsay has a full grasp of what we are facing.
And how we need to deal with it.
Eric Prince, formerly of Blackwater, is beginning to understand the severity of the issues.
I heard him give a presentation about a month ago where he was fairly spot on.
I have tried to explain this to the administration over the past three years.
And while they understand some of it now, they don't understand all of it.
So, yeah, Eric Prince, the administration, which was the Trump administration, and Dr. James Lindsay there.
I mean, all of those things go together, given that he did endorse the Trump administration and actively worked with it to get, like, what can we say about what these folks managed to get onto Trump's desk, right?
They managed to get critical race theory into Trump's mouth at a debate, and they managed to get the Trump executive order against what was effectively against critical race theory passed before it got So I guess we can say those are their major accomplishments in making wokeness visible to that administration or something like that.
But yeah, Eric Prince, I don't know if you're familiar or not with Eric Prince, but he's one of those who just shows up in all of the worst kinds of places.
Like he was involved with the Trump administration.
He was obviously involved with Blackwater when it did things like massacre people.
He was involved with probably in some ways Russiagate stuff.
Which I'm sure some of your hate listeners think is a conspiracy on par with the other kinds of conspiracies we've been talking about.
Which it's not.
And yeah, he's just generally a creepy, weird military ops guy who I think would very happily be in charge of a private military death squad, given the chance to do so.
Yeah, and he's a frequent guest on Infowars, which again speaks to the parallels.
Oh, yeah, fair enough.
So there isn't a huge amount that's surprising there in the shoutouts, but it just...
It always strikes me that there's allegations that the media and the political structure is being co-opted entirely by the woke agenda.
And they never seem to grapple with the existence of these very clear networks on the right, which they are a part of and playing into.
And it's almost as if those networks...
Go without saying and don't need to be interrogated.
Only the ones with friggin' Ibram X Kendi and D 'Angelo.
Mm-hmm.
I just love that another one of the paradoxes that shows up with these guys, because they're anti-globalists, but they're nationalists, but they're also anti-nationalists, is that they hate the situation globally, but then they love somebody like Eric Prince,
who is happy to work with the national government to do a bunch of questionable stuff.
But at the same time, they have to acknowledge if the government did turn on us and vans started showing up and bags started going over your head.
Eric Prince would be the kind of guy organizing it.
So it's just like, what was at that meeting?
What conversations were being had that he thinks were spot on from a guy like Eric Prince?
I would be really curious to find out.
I'm sure he was just waffling on about critical race theory and that kind of thing.
The thing that strikes me with all of this stuff is that it isn't that I imagine they're living in a complete fantasy world where there was no meeting.
O 'Fallon attended, where somebody brought up the concept of social justice and asked him to participate in some meeting or something like that.
I kind of think those things happen, but the way that he interprets it, the same way as the Kamala Harris video that came out before the election, where they had that little cartoon, which basically seemed to be a thing saying,
okay, we need to give people who haven't had the Historical advantage is a hand up in order to make the system more fair.
A fairly standard liberal thing.
But part of the problem with that video or the issue that people took was that everyone ended up at the same point on a mountain or whatever.
And they took from that, I'm one line in it, that that means everyone will be enforced to have the exact same outcome, like in a communist system, basically, where nobody can have more than anyone else.
the outcome.
And it was based on a cartoon and you got so much mileage out of that.
Today is November 2nd, 2020.
Kamala Harris just released a cartoon last night all about equity.
It's basically communism.
That's who is actually running for the executive branch.
They're not about equal opportunity, but equal outcomes.
And every system that we currently have in our society must be changed.
Education, economic, health care, legal systems, and justice, our face, police, law enforcement, environmental systems, our travel, our every way of life.
Everything will be based upon a Foucaultian, Derridian, social justice-inspired, grief-centered, vengeance-demanding system.
Intersectionality.
But when I saw it, I was just like, was it just a random political cartoon?
Maybe they could have worded it better or used a different image, but I don't think they were.
Because what you have to think there is that they were secretly communicating their plan to the primarily moderate base to get elected.
And why would they, in any case, if that was their agenda?
Be signalling it through cartoons years before they're going to be able to put it into effect so that their opponents can interpret it.
It's so stupid.
Because those are the rules, Chris.
That's what you have to do if you want to do a conspiracy, is that you have to keep your notes handy and then leave them places and then subtly drop hints to people at meetings and then release conspicuous cartoons.
I mean, what 100% the reality is, and this is, I actually just talked about this on Embrace the Void recently, there's an unfortunate disconnect where...
I think a bunch of the social justice folks will use the phrases like equality of outcome to mean equity.
And what they're trying to get at is not this kind of obscene Harrison Bergeron, like everyone leveled down to the lowest possible level of equality.
But what they don't realize is that there is a significant segment of the population that hears that arrangement of words and immediately thinks gulags.
And they just need to stop using that kind of language.
Not again, like now I'm part of the conspiracy because I'm telling the cons how to properly obscure their language, but like, but really because that's not what they mean, but that's what's coming across to these folks.
And so they should just avoid that terminology and just talk about sort of greater fairness, which is something that everyone.
is on board with.
Yeah, I think you're right there.
It's an interesting dynamic and perhaps almost an inevitable one that when one is –
Sort of deep in, say, the progressive side of politics, then you are going to get a bigger profile and more cachet by using very evocative language.
You know, like, why say reform the police when you can say, sorry, what's the phrase?
Abolish the police.
Abolish the police, you know.
Defund the police and all cops are bastards.
Yeah, like, it's just a natural dynamic that those are the things that get retweets and likes and controversy and so on.
But as you say, often that isn't what's actually meant.
And for the purpose of doing things like winning elections and achieving positive change, I suspect it would be more effective to do as you say, which is to talk about being more fair.
So the level of cynicism attributed to the opposing side is that it's often...
The woke who are chastised for this, for not being charitable, right?
For saying Jordan Peterson is the Red Skull, for a recent example.
The book's called Cynical Theories.
Emphasis on the cynical.
Yeah.
And in fact, I'm going to play a clip that relates to that.
So this is how O 'Fallon presents the agenda of the people who are pushing the secret Great Reset revolution.
These are not ideas, folks.
That come from people who love the United States.
And now those that are supplying the monetary push behind this criticism and the revolution behind it are now offering their long-planned, well-thought-out solutions.
A great reset.
They're saying that we need to replace our operating systems in our civilization across the globe.
They're insisting that we need a year zero.
A complete reset.
Just like Robespierre.
Just like Pol Pot in Cambodia.
They're saying that our systems have been damaged and we need a new system.
And golly, they're the ones that are just here to be able to save it.
Our new self-appointed masters want to transition our entire system from Analog to digital.
From the objective to the subjective.
From reality to non-reality.
From the free to the enslaved.
From the land of liberty to the land of collective equity.
The land of liberty.
So many dualities.
I know.
You struggle to see the connection between some of them, like the digital of us.
Well, it reminded me, it was funny because we were chatting before the recording about Jordan Peterson and them talking about how we've all grown up in the virtual and how that has made us more subjective, right?
It's taken us out of touch with objective reality, which I think there's an interesting conversation to be had here.
I'm just not worried about it.
I'm pretty heavily on board with.
A lot of the futurist program.
And this is, I think, where we just see that he's just a thoroughgoing, boring conservative who just wants to promote a bunch of fairly basic conservative talking points about how the present is bad and the past was better.
But beyond that, I feel like it is a lot of just these kind of recycling of basic talking points.
And again, those funny overlaps with the hoteps in terms of the fear of the digital overtaking of the world.
I think you're right.
It is like a bit of a hodgepodge of ideas.
I can trace some of those contrasts back to some sources.
For instance, the analog versus the digital is probably an idea of these organic, decentralized systems versus some centralized, hyper-rational system.
But the problem is that totally...
It contradicts the other contrast he's got there between the subjective and the object.
Like, that actually doesn't fit, right?
For him, objective is good, which actually matches together with the kind of bureaucratic, technocratic, centralised thing that people like Nassim Taleb hate.
So, the other thing too is that, again, I can't get away from the French Revolution analogy, but it was hated then and probably by him now for being too rationalist.
Yeah, this is the kind of enlightenment thinking where we should have a decimal working week and things like that, you know, to sort of parody.
But you can just reset people that way.
Yeah, yeah, along these hyper-rationalist lines.
Is that good or bad?
I've completely lost track in terms of what he's thinking.
I don't think he's really clear.
He's just adding things in.
Yeah, I think he attaches the objective to the analog because, again, he's conservative and so he's thinking like the real world, right?
The one outside of the internet is where all of the truth is and then people go on the internet to say whatever they want and make stuff up.
And so that creates the space.
And again, I do think there's a fascinating Fascinating conversation to be had about the post-truth world that we are dealing with.
I just think it's funny coming out of the mouth of a conspiracy theorist.
Like, you are actively pouring poison into the well of public discourse and then being, why are all these people so subjectivist?
Why have they lost?
Faith in the truth.
It seems silly, right?
Yeah.
It's hopelessly muddled.
Yeah.
There's also that disconnect where these guys are always at the same time saying, oh, you need to, you know, rely on experts in some situations and trust experts, but at the same time, like not those experts, right?
Science is objective and you can believe what science says, except when they're talking about vaccines or COVID.
Or climate.
Yeah.
It's a shame because as you say, it...
It touches on some topics that might possibly potentially be interesting to talk about, but it's such a two-dimensional, thin parody of any kind of interesting analysis.
So, yeah.
Okay, so we might be in danger of flogging an overly dramatic, very dead horse at this point, but let's hear another one of those beautiful...
Explanations about the real forces that are driving society and what their nefarious goals are because I just can't get enough of it.
You criticize them at every opportunity, even creating fertile fallacies that will facilitate and give momentum to their narrative.
The reason that you have the defund the police movement is to defund law enforcement.
And if you defund law enforcement and it has to shut down or leave, what do you no longer have where you are?
You don't have the law.
It also has to be in governmental systems.
It has to be in every faith.
Everything has to be deconstructed and everything criticized out of existence.
All systems.
Must be burnt to the ground.
All old systems must be shown to have systemic problems, even though our old systems in a democratic fashion actually work, and they were working quite well.
Until the virus came along.
Dun, dun, dun.
The fertile fallacy, by the way, is another shout-out to George Soros.
And is one that O 'Fallon has been obsessed with for some time.
He wrote an article on his website about the fertile fallacy, which he defines as a statement or idea that on the surface may seem true because of a...
Spurious accusation or because of inherent biases of the receiver, which I don't know if I'm missing something here, but that just sounds like a fallacy to me.
It also just like so many of their things apply to themselves, right?
You know, just endlessly criticizing, endlessly deconstructing things.
Like what's the defining characteristic of James Lindsay's Twitter feed?
Moaning.
Complaining, wallowing in the destruction of the society and claiming these giant revolutions are going to destroy Western civilization.
So if that's a problem and you'd be better to focus on the positives and engage in economic activity, then these guys are just as guilty as the people that they're criticizing.
And I like that clip in part because you get the very clear sense at the end that He's interpreting the virus, the global pandemic, as a part of this grand conspiracy,
right?
That's the catalyst which has enabled all of their plans to come into fruition.
And as he described earlier, he knew about these plans 10 years ago.
So there's a very clear indication that either the pandemic was planned over a decade ago.
Or that the world elites were just waiting in their caves and bunkers for a pandemic to emerge so they could leap on top of it and instigate their great reset and social control.
But I think it's the former more than the latter, that the virus is part of the plan.
That's batshit crazy!
Yeah, and I think, like, I want to draw on this article a little bit more, because, I mean, like, first of all, I think the thing you pointed out at the beginning there is 100% correct, that if I wanted to give an example of something that sounds plausible because of people's inherent biases, but ultimately turns out to be spurious, like, the extreme descriptions and catastrophizing of woke cancel culture...
Being the end of Western civilization to me seems to be a very active fertile fallacy that these guys are highly profiting off of.
He so helpfully gives his examples of what a fertile fallacy looks like in this article, and those examples include the migrant crisis, where migrants are fleeing violence and therefore should be allowed into countries.
Donald Trump's administration can't get anything done.
Roy Moore is a serial juvenile rapist.
This was going on during the Roy Moore stuff.
And being nationalist makes you a Nazi.
So I think that gives you sort of a good pastiche of what kind of issues he thinks are being marshaled against the good people of this world.
Yeah, that's amazing.
I think it's valuable to see the nationalism part here coming through again.
I have repeatedly said that these people are Christian nationalists, and James Lindsay's response has been, are they dominionists?
And that doesn't fucking matter.
What matters is this person cares very heavily about nationalism in a super creepy kind of way, and he cares very heavily about that nationalism being explicitly Christian, which is made clear at various points.
On his website.
So there's always this weird game of like people don't want to fully commit to what they believe.
They just don't want to outright say it.
One of the things that I pointed to in the episode 150 was...
On the original About page of Sovereign Nations, there was a paragraph that said the quiet part out loud, where they were like, some heresies are now laws and some laws are now heresies or something like that, right?
And it was very clearly that they want to make Christian law happen.
But they removed that because I think they want to be able to play with these centrist liberals and pretend like they are not going to try to institute a theocracy the first chance they get.
Yeah.
And I think I understand.
Two points you made I want to focus on a little bit.
One of them is the level of just fairly predictable right-wing tropes that are in this content.
I think we should focus on that a bit because there's a couple of clips that speak to that.
But before that, the other point that you made about are they Christian dominionists or not?
And I know that on your episode, you also hesitated to assign them that label.
But as you mentioned, a lot of it is debating Fairly minor distinctions because I've seen articles on sovereign nations which are very explicit that Christian governance is the desirable form of government for the United States and in fact is inherent to the founding constitution and the way that the society is supposed to run.
So even if they allow in principle that atheists can exist and that they might be allowed to be part of government, the clear argument is A fundamental component of Western civilization and American society in particular is Christian values.
And without those being a core force in government that we're really floundering and just waiting for society to dissolve.
So I don't think there's much ground between them and outright dominionists.
Maybe just they're slightly less extreme, but they're 100% Christian nationalists.
I don't have any hesitation saying so.
They do focus on catastrophizing and criticizing the woke stuff and in that can find common cause with people like James Lindsay and I would say would attract a great deal more attention and uptake and support than if they just straightforwardly promoted Christian nationalist ideas.
Because I don't think there is a big market.
I think tactically, there are a lot of people who don't like PC stuff and see the clickbait on the internet and go, that's crazy and whatever.
And as a result, will find themselves very sympathetic to the kinds of things that they're going on and on about in these episodes.
But if they were to not do that and just positively promote...
I think you're slightly optimistic about the level of evangelical influence in America.
But even setting that aside, Matt, I think you're right that it certainly allows the message to appeal beyond that segment to kind of link it more to it's just about PC culture and wokeism.
I have a clip that relates to the degree to which they catastrophize, which might be a nice kind of nightcap.
I don't know what the thing is to say for this section.
I think the capstone is the term you're looking for there, Irishman.
I'll edit it in.
The T.H. Chan School of Public Health would create the kind of public policy that would suspend the First Amendment.
Call for the ending of the Second Amendment.
And call for ending or defunding the police and law enforcement in the United States as we know it.
That's getting back to the T.H. Chan conspiracy because a bit of an earlier clip.
But yeah, I just wanted to highlight that it's the collapse of the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the end of all liberty in America.
That's the stakes we're involved with here, gentlemen.
But we're keeping the quartering of soldiers.
That one's sticking around.
Yeah, I mean, again, this is just straight Alex Jones.
They're going to get rid of these amendments.
They're going to come for your guns.
I feel like it should be clear to everybody in America that no amount of murdering of any number of children by any amount of bullets is going to get anyone to come for your guns.
That's just not the way any of this is really going to play out.
And the free speech stuff, the First Amendment stuff, and let's be clear.
He will talk a game about being concerned about free speech, but he's not as concerned about the free speech as he is about the freedom to do religious exemption-y things.
And the current state of our Supreme Court makes it absurd to think that 50 years from now, there is going to be less religious freedom for Christians.
So, again, two more markers he's laying down that he's never, ever going to pick up.
But I just wanted to mention from the point about the conservative Christian, the Christian nationalist stuff, there is an An article on the Sovereign Nation's website that essentially makes the argument...
Now, to be clear, they didn't write this.
This was, again, scraped from someone else's website, but they took the time to scrape it from that website, so they clearly in some way agree with this article, which literally makes the argument, to be a good conservative, you have to be a Christian.
And to be a good Christian, you have to be a conservative.
They just think that those things are fundamentally inseparable.
And to say that it means that they're not going to lay down theocratic laws first chance they get just seems...
Yeah, I think if we title this episode, we should definitely consider calling it Strange Bedfellows because he is trying very, very hard throughout to find common cause with liberty-minded liberals.
and these conservative Christian people.
And it's a real reach to sort of transmute the issues such that they are seen as one, for instance, as you described, conflating what he wants, which is essentially Christian teachings in schools and embedded in government and so on, with
freedom of speech.
That's a long bow to draw.
Yeah, and this goes back to, I think, something we were talking about earlier, where...
You know, these guys will say when you criticize them, "Oh, well, we disagree on stuff."
And at some point, we'll have that argument.
They say that repeatedly in the Trojan Horse series.
I will...
Bet you money we will never, ever see a YouTube video where James Lindsay and Michael O 'Fallon seriously throw down on any given topic.
Like, it's just not going to happen because I think this is the, like, cosplay heel-turn game that people like to play where they say that there's always going to be...
And, like, the reality is there would be a conflict.
If these people won, right, and they seized power, at some point the knives are going to have to come out because their worldviews are fundamentally incompatible.
But that's not going to happen because these people are not going to seize power, and they're not actually, I think, honestly super interested in seizing power as much as they are interested in playing out these culture wars endlessly and deferring forever and ever the actual conflict that would happen if they were forced to try to govern in any meaningful way.
So, yeah, and the point you make, Aaron, about that...
The claim at some future point there'll be a disagreement or editorializing that there are real and fundamental disagreements and yet you're still able to have these conversations.
It's really sailing into my mind because I just listened to Brett Weinstein and Jordan Peterson have a conversation in preparation for another episode.
And there's parts in that where Brett is saying to Jordan, "Look, Jordan, I know you disagree with me because I'm a radical liberal."
Jordan actually, to his credit, pushes back and says, no, no, you know, I don't have any issue with you.
And he says, you know, I think we're pretty much on the same page.
But it was just this editorializing, like, I don't think anyone outside of those conversations has ever said, the problem with Brett Weinstein is...
He's such a radical, progressive liberal that it's hard for him to engage with conservatives.
But if you editorialize it, then you will have people in the audience come back and say, well, these are just people that are willing to reach across the aisles.
Well, you don't think that people should talk to Christians just because they have evangelical beliefs?
How is that tolerant?
And I want to say, like, no, that's not the issue.
The issue is that...
These guys are not in disagreement on anything that they'll talk about or spend time with.
And the theoretical disagreements that they're very invested in and that are very important, like you say, Aaron, they never come.
There never will be a disagreement.
And I'm not even saying that's an issue.
I'm just saying you have to acknowledge that's the reality and stop pretending that you're having impossible conversations with ideological Enemies that you're just willing to work with on this cause.
No!
James has become a right-wing reactionary conservative.
He's adopted all the talking points of O 'Fallon.
And O 'Fallon's ideology, as we can see from all these clips, it just fits really nicely with the catastrophizing of the anti-woke in general.
Right.
I don't actually need to see James Lindsay and Michael O 'Fallon debate theology.
That would be a nightmare, right?
It would be a horror show.
But the point, as you say, we can highlight that it's never going to happen because it's funny, but the key takeaway, the headline of all of this is they are both actively promoting...
Genuinely dangerous conspiracy theories that could really hurt people.
And on those conspiracy theories, there is no disagreement.
As far as we can tell, James Lindsay is, if anything, more radicalized because, as usual, converts are more radical than the original people who were there.
So, yeah, there's no way to talk about daylight here.
And I just think it's bad that people continue to pretend that this isn't essential to his project at this point.
Yeah, so like you say, Aaron, there's a lack of daylight between dominionists and conspiracy theorists and this kind of content, but we've dinged on that a couple of times, but it can't be overstated the extent to which this is just repeating boilerplate right-wing talking points,
but dressing it up as being somehow transcended the left-right spectrum.
And I think...
An example that also shows how the conspiratorial framing ties into American national politics is when he talks about how the UN World Economic Forum agenda ties in with the Democrats.
What you're going to start to see is that most of the things, especially on the World Economic Forum and Agenda 2030, those are the things that you're seeing in the policies now of the Democratic National You see,
it's hiding in plain sight.
It's just that no one is referring to it, and everyone still thinks that this is just a Democrat versus Republican issue.
It isn't.
Those categories don't even exist, really, in a few years.
If the transcivilizationals get their chance.
That's it.
That's the clip.
So, yeah.
So, I mean, let's start by, like, setting up what I think is the Mott and Bailey that will occur when you try to pick this argument apart, right?
The Bailey, the sort of soft, easily attacked position that I think he's insinuating here is that there is this...
Evil, vast, global conspiracy aimed at doing something really horrible to a large number of people.
And they're signaling that through the repeated use of these phrases because, I don't know...
They like to do a fun grab-ass-y game before they murder billions of people or something.
Whereas the mot that they will fall back to when you point out how absolutely absurd that position is, is, well, you're saying that there's no overlap between these globalists' views about how the world should be globally managed and the Democratic Party,
which is full of a bunch of neoliberals and things like that who are adjacent to globalists in a variety of ways.
Like, yes, of course there's overlap there.
And...
I mean, I think we could talk a bunch about how much the Biden administration is not playing ball with these guys' narratives and how, you know, this was before the election, of course.
And I think it's very interesting to look at, like, how much their predictions have not played out in the way that the Biden administration has actually worked.
But yes, there's going to be some overlap about things like climate change.
Obviously, the Biden administration is going to get back in on the Paris Accords or stuff like that.
Of course, there's going to be more collaboration than there was during the Trump administration with countries other than Russia.
That's just the way that things are going to be.
It's not a grand conspiracy.
understandable. I think it's good to separate the Martin Bailey because there's this really hyperbolic, conspiratorial, insane version where it's about depopulation and a world government that enslaves everybody,
et cetera, which is obviously nonsense.
There's nothing really more to say about
But as you say, this is not news.
Especially in the United States, has never liked internationalist multilateral engagement.
It's a natural political split.
They've been more about the nationalism and America first.
So if you look at organisations like the UN and their various instruments like the World Health Organisation or the World Economic Forum or Sustainable Development, and you actually look at their documentation, you can see that there's obviously nothing scary in there.
They have a long track record of nominating quite aspirational.
Nice kind of goals.
Achieving gender equality, ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing for people at all ages.
Making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
So it's a little bit like corporate speak.
You know, I see those buzzwords and stuff and it is aspirational.
But the right, especially in the United States, they see danger in trying to do any of these things.
If you mention something like sustainable consumption and production patterns, it just triggers all of their alarm bells because they see any kind of initiatives along that line as a threat to...
That free market, classical liberal economics.
Yeah.
And Aaron, you mentioned that they're, for some reason, flagging up their intentions in public by using the same catchphrases.
And this tendency to fixate on those gotchas that by identifying, you know, neoliberal corporate slogans like "build back better".
Which is just, it's just alliteration, right?
That's why it's there.
But it's taken as revealing the, it's almost like numerology, that you can detect these patterns when you delve into what the slogan makes or what the iconography that they use are.
And they just don't go for the obvious interpretation, which is like, that's literally just think tanked or cooked up in some discussion, like a slogan.
And I seem to recall, when I looked into this, that Build Back Better was originally created by, I think, a Japanese delegation to the UN, and it probably has stuff to do with the idiosync crisis of that process.
But, like, who cares, you know?
It's just a slogan.
Well, yeah, and this is why I think Alex Jones is better at this than O 'Fallon, that he's the better copy of Bill Cooper in that sense, because at least he makes it out, like I said earlier, to be this giant metaphysical game where there's these cosmic rules that the evil globalists have to abide,
including putting all their catchphrases out in the open and making the dots so that people could connect the dots so that when they don't, I don't know, God can say that you're justified in suffering.
It never actually fully comes together, but at least he's putting in an effort trying to explain why this vast globalist conspiracy is doing any kind of signaling of this stuff at all in these kinds of ways.
Something else from that quote I just want to mention.
The there will be no Republicans and Democrats thing is another classic New World Order conspiracy Alex Jones kind of talking point where the idea is that the masks are going to come off any second now and these are all going to be like the exact same group of lizard people and a lot of these things are based around kernels of truth that there isn't enough political diversity within the American political spectrum.
But I wish that I could be as optimistic as he is that either of the current Political parties are going to die off anytime soon.
Our political system just makes it impossible for a new party to rise or an old party to die off at this point.
So I think we're just going to have a neoliberal and a far-right white nationalist zombie party just kind of drag on in perpetuity.
I'm very optimistic of you, Aaron.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong, though.
I keep waiting for the death spiral to stop being a death spiral.
It just keeps thrashing about and destroying stuff.
So, like, I don't know how long this takes.
I don't think anyone does.
Look, if there's anyone out there listening who thinks there's something to this conspiracy theory around Build Back Better and that there's something ominous and menacing in that...
Pretty random selection of a slogan.
Just remember that it parallels exactly the New World Order conspiracy theory, which was also fixated on the same kind of slogan.
And they built an entire conspiracy theory around the use of a particular set of words because it could be construed in their paranoid minds as being something entirely menacing.
I don't understand why he dropped the ball in this one moment.
Like, build back better.
Could have been such a great moment for his particular style of delivery.
And he just, he doesn't do it.
Where was he for those?
Those bees are right there, son.
Build!
It's there.
Get there, son.
Yeah, sorry.
The bit that gets me is that build back better is sinister and ominous slogan words, make America great again is fine.
Right, right.
We have throughout this been drawing the parallels with Alex Jones and the talk radio conspiratorial, right?
And I've got two last clips that I think if people are feeling that, and I don't see how they could be at this stage, that we're unfairly drawing these parallels.
Just listen to these two clips and see if you can justify that this wouldn't be at home on Infowars.
So we must stop what is coming.
Because you couldn't even imagine the horror and the totalitarian nightmarish control that is on the way.
And we must help others to understand what is coming.
How our entire society is being played.
And how those that are the loudest voices in the protests are all being used.
Used as human chess pieces.
Okay, so that's clip number one.
And this is number two.
But, for you...
Proletariat citizen.
Of the new oligarchical technocracy.
You of the new revolution.
You just need to do what you are told.
Do not question the revolution.
Do not question the lockdown.
and shelter in place as the entire world is changed around you.
*music* you you you
So those are great because they bring us back round, you know, to what the original pin that we threw down back in the Jacobins and why it was so important, right?
So he keeps reiterating, we must stop what is coming.
And what he said was coming, in so many words, so many words about Frenchmen at the beginning of this episode was, what's coming is violence.
Like, what's coming is a lot of totalitarian murder and violence.
And when that's your view, and this is something that, like, Knowledge Fight folks will bring up about Alex Jones all the time, when you're telling Telling people that over and over and over again, it is the only reasonable inference that the response should be everything up to, including violence and self-defense, right?
Like, you can't be surprised when people respond like they did on January 6th.
To talk of a stolen election and the threat of totalitarian crackdown.
That's just how a normal human being would respond if they were taking a claim like that seriously, which is why it's hard for me to believe that these guys take these claims seriously.
If they really believed this, would their solution be psyops involving, like...
Third-rate hack atheists?
Or would it be assembling actual forces and trying to, like, I don't know, defend a compound?
I don't know, something.
Something more, something like what Bill Cooper did when he got gunned down by believing what he actually believed.
It feels so performative.
And then the results are, send us money and get out and vote, I guess.
Yeah, I think it's very hard to tell the degree to which it is this, you know, militant cosplay and performativeness just for the purpose of mobilizing people and getting more attention and clicks and listens or whatever.
But, you know, I think a good parallel is Donald Trump, who didn't explicitly call for armed resistance and violent attacks on the Capitol.
Just as you say, Aaron, they do everything short of that.
They send out the message that you are under attack, that your way of life and your democracy is getting stolen from you.
And even though they don't say the next thing, the only logical response, if you actually believe that, is to do some pretty drastic things.
Since you both drew the connection to the Trump...
And the insurrection at the Capitol in January.
I just want to play one clip which comes at the end of the podcast where, as you said, this was recorded prior to the election.
And the rhetoric here is really familiar to the kind of thing that you heard around that event.
All to accomplish a terrible great reset into the fourth industrial revolution, into the new open society.
A great reset that you never knew anything about and never gave them permission to force upon you.
But how did we get here?
Well, it all started with a virus and the fear and terror that public health has brought to our nation.
It is the rise of the Jacobins once again.
And now that fear is the primary weapon of getting...
Actual neo-Marxists elected to the presidency.
And what will happen in the coming weeks in regards to our elections and an attempt to overthrow the government and systems of the United States will be absolutely frightening.
No major corporation, media organization, not even the military establishment is on the side of the Constitution.
They aren't concerned about the truth.
Wow.
So there's like two things here and I'm not sure which one is more fucked up.
One is the one that you keep reiterating, Chris, which is that...
Subtly worked into all of this is that the COVID situation is in some way a contrived crisis for the sake of bringing about total control or something like that.
And I don't want us to become jaded to how it should still feel really disturbing that these folks are deeply involved in these anti-vaxxer, anti-globalist conspiracy theories around a genuine pandemic that no reasonable person could deny exists.
And like is a serious problem that these governments are doing their best to genuinely try to manage.
So like that's point A. And then like point B, going back to the riot thing.
You know, what I really don't like about these guys that makes it so that I don't think that we can just say, oh, well, just ignore them, is that a bunch of people are going to end up in jail for a really long time because they listen to these fuckers, you know, because they took seriously what these people were saying about the risk to their world.
They, unlike us, did not laugh at those breathy, you know, we are Batman stuff.
They took it up and became Batman.
But the problem is the leaders all get punished.
I was just reading an article before we were chatting about how the leader of the Oath Keepers, who instigated part of that riot but didn't go into the actual building, may not actually go to jail.
It's so much harder to hold the leadership accountable, and part of that is because, I think...
We have really dived way too deep into this idea that language doesn't have consequences, that words spoken do not reliably impact behavior in a variety of kinds of ways.
And so it's so easy for people to get off the hook by saying, I didn't explicitly say go in and do some violence.
I made it completely implicit, and therefore I am in no way morally culpable for anything that happens afterwards.
An extreme example of that kind of situation of language having consequences is, of course, the Tootsies were called cockroaches on the radio in Romania.
It's a famous example.
But that was just speech, right?
That was just political speech.
And that obviously has consequences.
So people might not like me giving such an extreme example, but there are consequences.
And you cannot be a total free speech absolutist.
You can still think free speech is extremely important and great and worth defending and all that stuff.
But the absolutism part, yeah, it just doesn't work.
It's easy to think with people like Alex Jones and perhaps even these guys is that they're a bit of entertainment, a bit of counter-orthodoxy, wild ideas, but not really something that people take seriously.
Yeah, it's quite amazing to look through the...
Comments on the YouTube channels in which these are posted because our response is not the typical response.
There are a lot of true believers and a lot of people agreeing 100% with the pretty crazy stuff that we've just been listening to.
Yeah, so the point you make about dehumanizing language, I know that was famously seen as an important factor when it comes to I know there's been a little bit of a backlash in the research literature about debating how crucial a factor it is,
but just speaking from my personal experience growing up in Northern Ireland, the fact that you have these disparaging terms for your out-group, right, the Catholics are called Taegs and Protestants are called Huns, it really does make a psychological difference to the way that you perceive the out-group,
not just as I think that's the case here when we have that it isn't just that the Democrats disagree with you and they have an emphasis on different values.
It's that they're being controlled.
By an elite class of globalists who are pulling the strings and they're a death cult, right?
So if you're objecting to that, it's not just a matter that, oh, it's important that you get out and, you know, elect opponents.
It's that if they get in, they're going to destroy your society, kill your children, and prevent your grandkids from having any biological offspring.
So the legitimate response to that is...
To freak out or to stand up or get armed.
So I'm just echoing, I think, both your points.
It is funny, his delivery.
And a lot of the conspirators are so wackadoodle that it's like shooting a fish in a barrel.
But the fact is, these have massive reach in the US and elsewhere and with QAnon and all that kind of stuff.
It just has an impact.
It isn't just a joke, unfortunately.
Yeah, I wish it was.
And look, I'm...
I have these arguments online a fair amount, and the number of times that I've seen recently when I attacked the divisive bills that are being pushed by folks like Rufo and Lindsay to remove things that are upsetting to them from the curriculums,
the response by people who claim to be liberals, like who were just like 10 seconds ago supporting radical free speeches, well, a liberalism has to be fought with a liberalism.
They've immediately flipped that talking point and are now on board with the other side of it.
The paradox of tolerance and are willing to just say critical race theory is such a totalitarian dictatorship and waiting that we should ban it from the schools.
It's the safest.
It's the only option at this point.
So I do think there are really serious implications for the kind of endlessly catastrophizing treadmill of threat that these guys use to continue to whip up concern against their political opponents.
Well, here, I'll do another Michael O 'Fallon.
I get emails.
Emails from other countries where people are like, what the fuck is happening in America and why is it showing up in my country?
On the, like, left, I would say there's a lot.
There's a lot more, like, fracturing of the communities.
And so, whereas I think on the right, there is the insulated brand, interbreeding, passing around thing that we've talked about with, like, naturalist folks and stuff.
I think they have a real critical mass going on the conservative side, where it's very effective as a means of propelling particular narratives up and down the community.
And I think that's why we've seen...
In the short period of time since James Lindsay has gone full MAGA mask off, how quickly he has been absorbed into that community and his language has been absorbed by that community.
Yeah.
To pivot to the last topic that we'll cover with this, you know, we're talking about the grand narratives and conspiratorial ones, and maybe some of those clips have been pretty hardcore, but it's also just the day-to-day bullshit of Fox News.
Here's Michael O 'Fallon talking about how far the woke revolution has interfered with his life.
As I've said before, you can't even watch a ball game to try to relax for the evening without having it shoved down your throat.
Attempting to wipe out our nation's past, our civilization's past, destroy our heritage, every memory of the past for this to work.
for this great reset, this year zero, this Jacobin plan to work.
Even Abraham Lincoln, even Frederick Douglass,
Anyway, he managed to tie it into something dark and ominous, but, you know, not even able to enjoy a ballgame, presumably because players are kneeling or politics have been injected.
I don't even think it needs pointed out about how stereotypical of a talking point that is, but Hunter Biden's laptop, Also gets an appearance.
They are here to change everything without your vote or without discussion.
None of this is being talked about in the presidential elections.
And I've really tried to explain that these are the things that need to be talked about.
And as much as everybody needs to be concerned about Hunter Biden's laptop and what his dad's been doing and taking in money from China, This has got to be also part of the conversation, and it just hasn't happened.
Yeah, I mean, I would be genuinely shocked if a plurality of your listenership could remember that Hunter Biden's laptop was a thing that happened.
And bonus points if you can remember what was in theory supposed to be on that laptop.
And if you can remember which particular Trump goons were carrying the laptop around.
And when Tucker Carlson claimed he had secret access to Hunter's info and then didn't.
Like, it was a silly couple of weeks there at the end.
It is funny to just notice.
How quickly that stuff disappears, especially in conjunction with him talking about the destruction of history.
Because I think this is another classic paradox with these talking points where they want to say that the left wants to destroy history.
But if you read woke literature, so much of it is about history, right?
Because they want to talk about all of the historically bad things that led to the present.
And again, you're right.
It is just sort of classic Fox News talking points.
But it's also those ones to me are particularly conspiratorially silly to me because history classes are not going away.
They're just going to involve more diversity of viewpoint, and that's terrifying to people
Yeah, so the point that he takes for granted, of course, we all should be concerned with Hunter Biden's laptop, but we need to talk about other things.
Like, really?
Do we?
Should we be concerned about that?
But I think, Aaron, you might be slightly optimistic in assuming that that's been memory hold, because I think Hunter Biden's laptop has now entered Right-wing and even heterodox lore to an extent in regards the social media networks and traditional media networks being able to prevent a story from entering the public consciousness.
And, you know, there were efforts made to stop that story spreading.
But the point I would want to make there is that it isn't like that story didn't spread all across right-wing media.
And that it wasn't a talking point isn't still a talking point on right-wing networks.
So, again, this is this inability to treat the existence of right-wing media as if it has any impact or any reach.
And it always strikes me as, yes, this was a topic.
It was covered endlessly.
And the administration did attempt to play it up.
So, yeah, it just doesn't strike me as...
A coherent analysis of what the media environment is actually like.
Not that we were expecting that.
When Hunter Biden is the president, that is the time to be really concerned.
And maybe that will happen.
But for now, we're okay.
So, you know, there are other things that we could go over.
Is there anything that, Aaron or Matt, we haven't covered that you want to hit before we head to?
Wrapping up?
No, I think shortly after listening to those clips, my brain just blocked it all out.
And so unless you play the clips to remind me of the nonsense that I listen to, it's just gone from my brain.
So nothing more from me.
Matt and I have different responses.
I'm like, I pull out the third binder and I'm like, well, let's turn to page notes.
So, I mean, the one other thing, we've talked a little bit about the white identity politics stuff.
And I just, I think maybe there were like a few more spots where it might be good to just, you know.
This is what I said on my original episode.
People can make up their own minds about what amount of identity politics is playing a role in this particular political project.
I would say the answer is larger than 0%.
It's not 100%, but it's up there.
And again, Michael O 'Fallon of Cuban descent, not unlike the former leader of the Proud Boys, doesn't mean anything in my mind.
He could still be very much involved in those kinds of activities.
So I just think it's fair for people to at least hear his throwaway lines to white identity red meat activities.
Yeah.
And we started the podcast by playing the classical music interlude that introduces things.
And there's a clip which speaks to classical music and also the white identity politics that you're speaking to.
Classical music.
You see, classical music is just too white.
The rabid social justice critic must seek out and find those systemic things that might marginalize.
But here's an example of the actual kind of rants that that fits into.
All of our churches, politicians, national sports.
Musicians, entertainers, educators, and nearly every major corporation has piggybacked cynical theories, destructive ideas onto these legitimate areas of our culture to convince you to hate those that have less melanin in their skin.
To hate the founding of our nation.
So, yeah, I mean, I think you get all the sort of different levels of dog whistle here.
In the context of everything else he's been talking about is very clearly when you're asking, who are the people who are going to use equality to harm people?
Yeah, you know, tying it back into the Lindsay verse, I will mention that in a recent episode, he essentially ties all of the great work.
Conspiracy to queer black feminists as the masterminds behind everything.
We can get to that maybe in a crossover episode.
But so, you know, we try.
It's hard with content like this to be charitable to a certain extent.
I don't think I've succeeded in that throughout this because it just annoys me and it's so reminiscent of Infowars.
Is there anything positive that you two have to say about it?
I'll say one thing.
I kind of enjoy the overly dramatic delivery of things.
It's like a bad...
Serial with sinister forces lurking behind every corner.
So I kind of enjoyed that.
And I think if you really, really wanted to extend charity, you can say that there is validity to criticisms about neoliberal global agendas.
On a low level, there's something to that.
But yeah, not to the level he takes up.
So I can't even give that.
What about you two?
Look, probably the most I could concede is that People like him and James Lindsay do naturally fixate on examples of woke or progressive overreach, you might say.
I don't know about the classical music thing firsthand, but I've heard it secondhand from professional musicians.
I presume that it's something like the kinds of somewhat toxic cultures that evolved in knitting and sewing circles or young adult fiction.
I think it happens in a variety of very progressive circles, I suppose.
What you can see is some examples of toxicity, bullying and so on, which can be quite easily justified using woke principles.
But what he does is cite those things as examples of...
It's a plan of neo-Marxists to destroy America, right?
Most people will see an article like that or hear of such a thing or it might be done to them with a bit of moral grandstanding and so on and will get very annoyed by it.
But it's nuts to say that that kind of toxic interpersonal behaviour is a plan to destroy Western civilisation, right?
It's undesirable, yes.
So I can't go very far in extending some charity.
As you say, he's like an Alex Jones who's not yelling.
Not much more to say.
Gentlemen, I'm disappointed, I'll be honest.
I have spent a lot of time on Twitter defending y 'all, suggesting that you could, in fact, be high decouplers.
But I'm a little sad that you couldn't starman our man O 'Fallon here more effectively.
I mean, I can drop right into a space and say, well, look, of course, you know, O 'Fallon believes everything he's saying to some extent, right?
I think he believes in Christianity.
He believes that...
Christian America is the best America that it could possibly be, and he wants to get the world there, and he thinks that it'll help the most people if he does that.
So, he totally is motivated by the good.
He just doesn't understand what the good is very well.
And then, I guess, on top of that, I love that he just says the things that conspiracy theory analysts have to unpack.
He just says them outright.
You know, a classic problem that conspiracy theory analysts will raise is if your conspiracy theory was real, like thousands of people would have to be in on it and they'd all have to be knowledgeable of the secret and they'd all be keeping it from everyone around them or something like that.
And that's just statistically impossible.
And he just comes on here and says, no, I know that thousands of people believe this and shame on them.
Right.
You see, that's the trade off.
You're protected in this great change.
But you gotta think about this, too.
I'm not the only one that knows this.
There are literally thousands of people that know what's going on.
They're just not saying anything, or they're just participating in it, even though they know that this is treacherous.
I don't understand how you can sleep at night.
There's a kind of beautiful, sweet naivete at the middle of all of his cynicism.
At the very core, he's like, a bunch of people are doing a bad thing and shame on them.
But if enough people hear me say shame on them, that's gonna fix it, I guess.
So yeah, I think he's a sweet, confused little boy, much like Lindsay and many of the other people involved in these projects.
And it's just unfortunate that this was the particular path that they took to X-ray
Yeah, you actually got me going, Aaron.
You helped me think of something terrible, which is, I guess, a good analogy is to take a different culture.
So I can imagine...
A similar kind of traditionalist who is in a different country, say Japan, because I happen to know Japan reasonably well.
They love Japanese culture.
They think Japanese culture is absolutely great.
They like it traditional, they like it to stay the way it is, and they want to defend it against what they see as forces that are dismantling it or changing it.
And, you know, I may not agree with that person, but I don't think...
It's inherently evil to be a traditionalist.
Where I think someone like O 'Fallon goes terribly wrong is in the paranoid conspiratorial fantasizing.
And that's where you cannot say, oh, look, we just might disagree about our vision for how Australia or America or Japan or whatever should be.
But you're actually being crazy now.
You're being delusional.
And when you paint your opponents in such hyperbolic, demonizing, Yeah, and this is a point where I think...
If we could de-escalate the language here, the woke and the anti-woke could actually have a fairly interesting philosophical conversation about the ethics of preserving culture.
Because clearly the woke believe that a wide range of cultures should be preserved and that it's bad that they are being pushed to the brink or have already been destroyed or something like that.
So there is, across all people, to some extent, a shared...
Valuing of this kind of diversity of culture.
I won't say all people, obviously.
There are some people who will disagree.
But amongst the people that we are reaching out to here, I think you could have people sort of come together around that topic.
The hard part is preserving a culture doesn't necessarily mean preserving every piece of it in amber.
At this moment that you were born into it and the things that you value are preserved forever, stuff still has to change some, right?
You have to change culture to some extent, but you can still preserve many parts of the culture that is valuable.
It's 40, 50 years from now, if America is still standing, people are still going to be celebrating the 4th of July and doing the firecrackers.
That stuff's not going.
So, if they could just be happy with those parts and not the banning abortion and gay rights parts of their culture, then, like, this wouldn't be a problem.
So, to pivot to our final thoughts on these, well, this character for the minute, Aaron, I'll let you go ahead of Matt.
No, I should go first.
I should go first, because I'd be very quick.
No, forbidden.
Yes, okay.
If you can manage to get yourself quick, go ahead.
Three words.
Quiet, Alex Jones.
Done.
Over to you, Aaron.
Son of a bitch.
Stealing my...
What am I going to say?
I mean, we could just end with the bard, right?
If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended that you did but slumber here while these bullshit conspiracy theories did appear and these weak and idle themes are no more yielding than a dream.
Gentles do not reprehend if you pardon.
We will mend.
Else, the conspiracy theorist, a liar.
I mean, yeah, I wish that they loved their own culture as much as I love their culture.
And I wish that they could love it and be critical of it at the same time and not view that as the collapse of their civilization.
But sadly, we are all going to continue to live in this fever dream for the foreseeable future.
Yeah.
In terms of gurus that we've looked at and where they fit in, it's just...
Like I said, it's just echoing your point, but I think that O 'Fallon does fit into the Alex Jones side of the conspiracy world.
The level of populism that he appeals to and this Eric Weinsteinian view that he's at the center of all these global...
We've said it all throughout the episode, but he really is a fitting figure to look at as a guru.
He might not be the most well-known or most successful, but I think in some respects he's a better guru than James Lindsay.
He's the guru behind the guru.
Yeah, the guru's guru.
Look, James Lindsay is a poor copy of Michael O 'Fallon, is a poor copy of Alex Jones, is a poor copy of Bill Cooper.
Please go and study Bill Cooper.
Go and study your own history.
You say that you love your own history.
Learn about it, please.
Well, I did say that Douglas Murray delivers Daily Mail opinions in a Times tone of voice, and I think O 'Fallon delivers Alex Jones.
Opinions in a Douglas Murray tone of voice.
Well, thank you for classing up the podcast, Aaron, and for dealing with the various technical difficulties and insane numbers of recordings that we produce.
So it's been a pleasure and we will have you back on to discuss the...
Epic crossover of O 'Fallon and Lindsay if you will return after this experience.
Oh, absolutely.
I can't wait for them to drop all four videos because they've already peaked at Critical Reset.
And I just want to point out, you can go and watch the video.
They reference the stuff we're talking about here.
So it's not like any of this has totally faded away.
It is still key to their views.
So yeah, I'm happy to do some more anytime.
Thank you so much, Aaron.
We're looking forward to you doing the research so we don't have to.
Yeah.
And if people want to follow you, is the easiest way to embrace the void on Twitter?
Right.
At ETVpod and embrace the void in Philosophers in Space on all your favorite pod apps.
Come join the Philosophers in Space group on Facebook.
It is a much nicer place to be than many places on the internet right now.
That was a thing.
That was an experience.
A joyful, synergistic...
Convergence.
I'm trying to think of big words and feeling for what we just went through with Aaron together.
How was that for you?
That was good.
I don't like the way that Aaron's careful research and coherent statements throws my own performance into stark relief.
But apart from that, it was good.
Don't worry.
Matt, that's just the same.
It's the same as every week.
Don't worry about that.
So let's...
Wrap up nice and neatly for the listeners who have other things to be doing with their day.
So what we normally do is have a look at some reviews, give a shout out to our patrons.
Now, in terms of reviews, we actually have a legitimate negative review and a nice positive review, as usual.
So let me read the negative review.
The title is Petty and Disjointed.
And this is by Dan29472.
Decided to give these guys a listen due to Very Bad Wizards recommendation.
The recent podcast on Harris is essentially an hour of surprisingly personal evisceration over a few minutes of Harris soundbites.
Fairly ridiculous setup.
And this is coming from someone who generally agrees that the Harris podcast they're discussing was one of his worst.
Additionally, ironic when they preceded the episode saying they wanted Harris on their podcast as a guest and then proceeded to name and number all his personal character flaws.
And just aesthetically, the podcast is not enjoyable to listen to due to the very disjointed way of speaking.
Needs more chill to be enjoyable.
Matt, I feel that Very Bad Wizards have done us a disservice by being too chill and they've created like a chill baseline that we cannot reach or hope to reach.
Part of this is baseline expectations, but the Sam Harris bet, surprisingly personal evisceration.
I didn't think we got that personal on the episode.
And I also didn't know that we had indicated that we wanted him as a guest.
Like, if we did mention that, didn't we just say, as usual, that...
Anybody, if they wanted to, is welcome to come on and, like, any of the gurus that we cover has a right to reply.
But we're not actually expecting them to happen because, one, the podcast is really small, but two, why would they?
They're mostly famous for not engaging with criticism.
Well, the thing is, Chris, I think it's fundamentally impossible for this person to really understand what it is we were talking about in this episode.
They, like me, are lying on a floaty in a pool drinking a cocktail, then they really are not going to understand where I'm coming from with Sam Harris.
Yeah, I felt that.
If you had engaged in the correct introspective practices, I think you would have seen that our criticism was fair and that our viewpoints are pretty impossible to deny.
So maybe engage in...
Some more introspection, Dan 29472.
That's the solution.
That will solve that problem.
Yep.
Good.
I think we dealt with that feedback very fairly.
Very fairly.
Yes, we did.
In a reasonable and non-biased manner, as is our way.
So the positive review said, the title is, this podcast feels correct to me.
And I'm pretty sure this is written in tongue-in-cheek.
So here's what it says.
Almost all other podcasts feel very wrong to me now.
The hosts have convinced me with their soothing arguments that most podcasts are part of something that I now think of as the disinformation supply combined and cannot be trusted to inform accurately without steering me towards their own ends.
Thank you so much for lifting the veil so I can now see reality.
Oh, that's good.
That's really good.
Did you detect any ironic content there or parodic content, Will?
Yeah, I think what he said, the disinformation supply combine.
That's when the penny dropped for me.
It's dripping in parodic ooze.
But I enjoyed it for that reason.
And that was by...
OT Owner.
Really?
Where do people come up with these names?
I mean, Dan followed by a random string of numbers.
Not very imaginative, but that makes sense.
But the other person, was it Gender Not Something?
Yeah, that was...
Cannot into gender.
That's the guy from the beginning of the podcast, which was now hours ago, Matt.
And this person is OOT owner or Oto owner.
I don't know how to say it, but yeah, the iTunes reviews often do have crazy usernames.
I cough in your mouth is still a classic.
I'm not going to be able to stop turning over not into gender.
Or whatever it was.
Just try to parse it.
Try to figure out what that is.
Cannot intergender.
Cannot intergender.
I wonder if he has some issue that might make him hypercritical about our coverage of ContraPoints.
Not that that would be ad hominem, so I wouldn't do that kind of thing.
No.
But anyway, Matt, our Patreons, the good people on the SS Patreon Decoding the Gurus, we give them shoutouts, a couple of them.
They're chosen by a very...
Tantric methods and exotic elixirs that I use to decide who gets a shout out.
And the first one that was selected via that process is a familiar name.
Somebody that has appeared on the podcast before.
One, Daniel Gilbert.
Yes, Daniel Gilbert.
And he is a conspiracy hypothesizer, which we both know from dealing with him.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Yes, thank you, Dan, for the interview.
And next we have James Ruchela, who is also a conspiracy hypothesizer, and I'm very sorry about your name.
Think of it as a feature rather than a bug, right?
So thank you very much, James.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
It must be very exciting for people just wondering how you're going to pronounce their name, because it could be anything.
Yes, that's right.
And what about this one?
So this is a revolutionary thinker, and I can pronounce his Twitter.
He's put his Twitter handle in, so I presume when people do that, that we should say it.
So it's OnCuePodcast.
I suspect he might have a podcast.
But his name is Matt Salomone.
Salomone.
Okay, nice.
Salomone, yeah.
See, Matt?
I didn't get that one wrong.
You didn't butcher that one.
That's good.
Well done.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
Okay, yeah.
And the last one for this week, Matt, is another conspiracy hypothesis, Nazar Zobra.
Sorry, Nazar, for his pronunciation.
I do apologize.
But yeah, I'm not selecting the names that are hard to pronounce.
They're just all hard to pronounce.
So yeah, but you are a conspiracy hypothesis, and we thank you for that.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
The good thing, though, Chris, is you can't be accused of any kind of cultural insensitivity in terms of failing to pronounce certain people's names because you can't pronounce anyone's name.
So it's very much equal opportunity butchering.
Well said, Matt.
Well said.
And I will also note that we legitimately shouted out somebody who had said that her name was Mike Hunt.
And we might have noted, Matt, that that is a well-established fake name used to get people to say something that sounds like a particularly...
Are you saying that someone is getting some kind of juvenile entertainment from hearing us saying my cunt?
I am saying, Matt, that there are probably a lot of my cunts in the world that have had to suffer unduly.
And my good nature meant that I simply didn't consider that anybody would be so malignant as to do that.
But I should have, because what I realise now, Matt, as well, is that that person asked about this shout-out.
And said their name shortly before cancelling their Patreon subscription.
So I think this was their parting shot after being disappointed at the Patreon content.
So that's, look, they got us, Matt.
They got us.
Well, we've had the last laugh because we've milked there.
Small joke for a good day.
Yeah, the $2 donation.
We got more out of it from this.
So thank you very much for that, Mike Hunt.
Mike Hunt.
All right, Matt.
So we're done.
And the next episode is going to be the advertised Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein crossover.
This one just cut into the queue.
It was two.
Delectable to avoid.
So are you prepared?
Are you ready for that?
Yeah, it's like double jeopardy, isn't it?
It's going to be Guru squared.
It's going to be amazing.
So you can follow us on Twitter at C underscore Kavanaugh for me or R4CDent for Matt.
And the pod is at...
We have a subreddit, which as you gathered from the intro, we do read and occasionally not just complain about in intro segments.
And then we have a Patreon where we post additional content and we will include the Gurometer breakdown for Michael O 'Fallon, which you can join if you want.
