James Lindsay has been in the “hot seat” for the last nine months over using and promoting the idea that there is a “woke right.” Bret Weinstein sits down with James for a special DarkHorse intervention. Joining them in Palm Springs is their friend and filmmaker, Michael Nayna. Find James Lindsay on X at https://x.com/ConceptualJames and on https://newdiscourses.com. Find Michael Nayna on X at https://x.com/mikenayna and on https://www.michaelnayna.com. ***** Sponsors: Masa Chips: D...
Hey folks, welcome to this very special Dark Horse Intervention.
I am, of course, Brett Weinstein.
I'm sitting with James Lindsay, the subject of the intervention, and I'm, of course, also sitting with Mike Naina.
Welcome to both of you.
I'm feeling like this is a setup.
Well, yeah, that's the only way this works.
But in any case, glad to have you here.
Obviously this is not the usual dark horse setup.
We have decided to use Actually, this is being filmed by Reed Nicewunder.
I believe that's how he pronounces his name anyway, very generously doing that for us.
And we are here together actually at Freedom Fest, the largest gathering of free minds in the world, I think is how it builds itself.
But in any case, we decided to have this conversation because you, James, have been On the hot seat for, is it months now?
Getting on nine.
Yeah, nine months.
Nine months.
Baby's ready.
Well, I can imagine that you're feeling back on your heels.
You've taken a tremendous amount of heat, and a lot of it has been very ungenerous to you.
That's true.
And I think you know that And so maybe you have something to tell us that we haven't figured out about what you're saying.
And maybe we have something to tell you about what's not getting through about your message or about the possibility that you have framed things in a way that isn't all that helpful.
So anyway, let's have that conversation.
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This, of course, centers around your claim about something you have called the woke right.
And I will just say, at a personal level, I've heard you describe woke right many times, and I never get it.
Never.
And I will say, I'm not against the idea that woke is a concept that can be broken away from the equity movement and properly applied elsewhere.
I've done it myself.
During the bad days of COVID, I regarded many of the people who took me to task as medically woke.
I would agree with that, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think it just simply fit.
So I have an intuitive sense of what it is that causes woke.
To be applicable to some other movement.
And when you talk about the woke right, I don't get it.
And then when you tell me who's in the woke right, I really lose track of how you've gotten there.
So maybe you want to articulate what it is that you're saying, and this will give me the opportunity to ask questions about it.
Mike, you jump in anytime.
Well, just before you go on, I would say I have a more narrow definition of woke.
I think it needs intersectionality to be called woke.
And I think once we start moving away from the quasi-religious movement that proceeds from this kind of intersectional worldview, where we might be talking about the framework that's in a similar realm, but I don't think we're talking about woke anymore.
I think it kind of loses its function, really.
And so I think I know what you're looking at.
Although I see the landscape on the right as far more complicated maybe, and so I don't necessarily think you're off in the middle of nowhere.
You're looking at something, you're trying to describe it.
I just think it's a bad idea to call it woke.
That's kind of my position.
Can I follow up on that?
I think actually in some sense what we're going to do is tease this apart carefully and figure out what it means.
But woke used to be a term that I would have resonated with.
Because what it meant was it was a term used by blacks in America for whites who understood the predicament of blacks in America.
So it was a term of honor.
And there is something to the black experience in America.
And so I would have aspired to woke.
And then woke got taken over by something else that, of course, had that...
Multicultural?
Intersectionality.
It had that intersectionality component to it, but that was really a trope.
And what defined the woke revolution, as far as I'm concerned, was a passionate desire to include people who were understood to be useful and exclude people who were understood It's a way to get different groups with grievances together to create political change.
Well, I would say it is a mechanism for dispensing with people whose positions are hard to reckon with.
So that's woke.
Right.
What both of you guys just said.
Okay.
What if you had disparate groups on the right who don't agree with one another but they've cobbled together a way say through a no enemies to the right policy or sometimes no enemies on the right policy to create a functional block of people who don't necessarily share the same views who want to Include certain people who are functional to that project and exclude certain people who are not functional to that project.
And now you have a functional political ideology cobbled around perhaps different identity groups, but the identity groups are incidental, as we all know, to woke on the left as we traditionally understand it.
Larry Elder's black, but he's not politically black, so he doesn't count.
You have to have the political view that went along with this.
And I agree with you, Brett, colonizing ideology.
And we should name what that ideology is, which is a form of neo-Marxism.
So now you're losing me.
I've already lost you.
I think so.
I mean, and this may be a personal defect, right?
This may just not be a way in which my mind works.
And so when you go down this road.
Well, I'm still with you if you want to.
I don't know if I can...
So it's an ideology.
It's fundamentally a few different kinds of nationalism is what they're all circling around.
And power politics attached to national identity as such.
So is there...
Yes.
I don't know how familiar with some of them you will be.
Let's shoot for ones I'm likely to be familiar with.
That's the specific challenge here because this is, There are different factions.
On the left, there's been, with this intersectional framework, a consolidation of power on what effectively works as one kind of constellation worldview.
I say constellation because there's the race, there's the sex, there's the sexuality, and so on.
They've been right-hand, left-hand.
They'll take anyone with a grievance as long as you fit into their worldview.
The right, you have people, if we even just stick within the nationalist framework that I've articulated, there are at least three ways, without even getting into the American unique kind of experiment, there are at least three ways to think of a nation.
It is a people.
almost always is what you end up with is the definition.
It's not necessarily That it's defined by the covenant that it's made.
Israel with God.
of the Old Testament or the Torah and the U.S. the covenant is that we're going to have this project of self-governance based on these inalienable rights that we accept by faith or natural law are in fact inalienable and thus universal to everyone and propositions like all men are created equal which means political No man has any inherent authority over another man.
So this is a covenant, right?
So I'm going to take that one off the table.
Because there's cultural, ethnic, and political ways that you could define a nation.
It's a people that are defined by this, you know, commitment to this geographical region, language, history, common destiny.
That's a political definition.
But maybe what made those people that was that they had a common ethnic heritage.
It was very significant in many nations, but also very significant in Germany, quite catastrophically, when it got amplified to remarkable excess, wrapping in a weird occultism to it.
And then you have the experiment in Franco's Spain, which was that there was a cultural identity.
That define the nation, which this is a Catholic Spanish nation, right?
So you have a cultural, you have a political, you have an ethnic way you can define the nation.
And so you intrinsically end up with this kind of identity group thing, but there are different ways to do it.
Now, I know you asked for specific names.
Within, say, the religious cultural, there is an entire large movement within especially evangelical Christianity.
That refers to itself or has referred to itself as the Christian nationalist movement.
It sometimes calls itself the New Christian Right.
Yep.
Stephen Wolf wrote a book about this.
I don't know if you're familiar with Stephen Wolf.
He wrote the book called The Case for Christian Nationalism.
And this book is quite explicit about being a vision for a America that has a highest office above the three divided powers.
That's outlined by the Constitution called the Christian Prince, who is described as the living avatar or vicar of Christ on the earth, which sounds a lot like the Pope, except that this is Presbyterian as opposed to Catholic.
And this theocratic element is one of the things that I lump into this woke vision, because they have a vision of a religiously reunited and defined national identity that has been excluded from, in their view, Full participation in society and its politics by a system of power that sometimes they blame as the post-war consensus, sometimes they blame it on this kind of generally anti-Christian attitude or secularism or secular liberalism.
And so, like, Stephen Wolf wrote that book, but there are many other players.
William Wolf, not related, is a major player in politics.
He's the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership.
You have characters like Nate Fisher, who is the, or at least was, I don't know if he's still the chief of the American Reformer, which is a kind of a journal, an online publication that's maybe their largest publication.
It's hard to talk about these things if you don't know these people, right?
So that's not going to work.
Could I come in for a second?
Because I think a lot of people misunderstand what James does.
I think the core of what you do comes from your background in mathematics.
You're a PhD, combinatorics, mathematical combinatorics.
which is a kind of puzzle solving, mathematical puzzle solving.
You spot patterns and you kind of move them around.
And I think that you've applied that to the realm of ideas.
And that's why he was a weapon in writing these papers, I used to call him a supercomputer.
He sparks the pattern.
He could reverse engineer the generating function and then he could apply it in some new space.
Exactly.
And this is his master skill.
He was ChatGPT before it came along.
And so what you're doing now to the idea space is, and you're not wrong.
I think you're great at this.
You're spotting the structure of the ideas, remove it from its content, and then you're finding the same structure on the right.
These are similar structural elements.
Math, we call them homomorphisms.
Well, there you go.
And so that's what you're doing and you're doing it well.
But I think once you remove it, move the content and you just look at the structure, we're in perfect idea land because some of these things are actually attached to the reality on the ground.
Do you know what I mean?
To me, if you remove intersectionality from woke, then it's like what we're talking about is structures.
We can start talking about maybe archetypes or conceptual organs or something.
I think we're off track here.
We are.
You're not wrong about what James does.
Yeah, yeah.
I think the question is, Has he wrestled free from, you know, the chaos, the noise?
Has he found an entity that's real, that doesn't have a synonym, and that can be...
And here's the problem, is that I don't do what James does, but I do something analogous in a very different way.
And the fact that what James hands over never lands with me is a red flag.
Because my sense is, I ought to be able to figure out, if he's pointing to a natural grouping, I ought to be able to find it, having had a hint about what it looks like, whether I like the term woke right or not.
I ought to be able to find that thing and then say, ah, here's where you have an edge defined incorrectly and we can have that discussion about who's got it more accurate.
But it shouldn't be an amorphous thing that runs through my fingers every time.
And I must tell you, I'm having the exact experience right here.
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Let me try something different with you, Brett, and at the risk of us again going on a different off track track, what would you say In terms of, and I'm going to, I'm not doing this like gratuitously.
I mean this, but not biological evolution, but mimetic evolution.
What would you describe, we'll take it out of the context of now and intersectionality and all this.
Let's go back in time a century.
What is to you the relationship between communism or Marxism and fascism as its reaction against it?
What's the evolutionary relationship of ideas?
What are the mimetic leaps?
What are the contours that continued?
I think that's a good question.
I'm not 100% confident of my answer here.
But I will say, every single time, and I spend a lot of time now, despite being an unrepentant progressive, I spend a lot of time with conservatives now.
And I hear a lot of favorable things said about nationalism, and every time they say it, I stop them and I say, I think you're using the wrong term, right?
You have to distinguish between nationalism and patriotism.
And patriotism, I believe we should all be able to get on board with.
And nationalism, we should be very troubled by.
And I say there's a very clean place that we all share that we can look at the distinction.
And that is in John F. Kennedy's question when he said, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
What your country can do for you is the nationalist description.
Nation as a bludgeon, as a weapon, right?
Your nation is moving forward together in order to collect things from the world.
Your willingness to sacrifice on behalf of your nation, that's what patriotism is, right?
And you can be, I would argue, patriotic to a lot of things.
It doesn't have to be a nation.
Anything that you're willing to sacrifice for, ultimately maybe even your life, for something, you are patriotic to, whether it's good, bad, or neutral.
I would argue that fascism is the sort of distilled nationalist essence.
There are certain things that tend to go along with it, you know, the partnership between corporation and government.
There's a very decidedly militaristic aspect that emerges very naturally from it.
And so I see it as a set of beliefs.
With respect to communism, you have kind of the inverse thing.
You have this Ideological belief that the interests of the collective are the thing to be maximized.
And anytime you have somebody naively maximizing anything, you're going to get a disaster out of it.
And this is, of course, what we see with communism.
So I guess the point is...
You have a puritanical obsession with something that's maximized and a willingness to accept the carnage that comes along with it, often literal carnage in both cases.
And then you have the thing that divides them, which is, are they focused?
On individuals benefiting by using a nation together as a, you know, like a weapon?
Or are they obsessed with putting aside individuality, which of course will never work, and partnering in some grand exercise?
So, that's not a bad answer.
My thought is that there is a universalizing This is a funny word to say, so I'll clarify it in a moment.
But there's a universalizing force in the communist ideology.
The idea is that all human beings share something in common.
And that thing that we all share in common is that we've been alienated from Karl Marx actually described communism as the complete return of man to his social, which is to say his human nature.
So a return is actually there.
This is what we naturally are, but we've been alienated.
What did he say alienated us from who we are?
Well, in his case, it was private property.
Critical race theory, we would say it's the imposition of racial categories through white supremacy.
And if we were in queer theory, we'd say it's the imposition of norms and legitimacy through the decision processes of people who defined themselves illegitimately to be normal, whereas everyone outside of normal is queer.
And so you have the same concept that, again, appears in the Communist Manifesto from the beginning, saying that the entire movement of history All of what human history represents, all of human activity, therefore, represents the conflict of the contending classes that are separated, for Karl Marx, by virtue of something that makes an upper class versus a lower class.
But the fact is that we're actually all one, except for this stratifying line that generates an intrinsic conflict.
Can I try and bridge a gap here?
An Australian political philosopher, Kenneth Minogue, he did this, what James is doing, many, many years ago.
So he started, he's got a book called The Alien Power is a Pure Theory of Ideology.
And he's looked at different, even libertarianism, feminism.
Marxism, fascism, he looked at them all and he goes, what are the common features of this thing?
And it's fascinating that he can find, just like James has, the similar story structures and similar mechanisms that unite all these seemingly disparate ideologies.
The identity politics comes from what I just said, right?
So that you've now, intrinsically, you've got everyone alienated in two different ways from who they really are.
But before we get into the details, I'll just finish off quickly if I can, because I think it might be able to link it to your world.
After I read this book, Alien Powers, I had a gestalt shift that changed my perspective, because I'd been looking at the intersectional ideology for many years and looking at its structures and trying to figure out what the hell this thing was, because it didn't look like it was a description of reality, it looked like something else.
And I came away from this thinking, It's like a successor kind of thing.
And it struck me as this was...
And I think that this is what James has stumbled into and this is what he uses his great skill for.
And I'll tell you what, I see it too.
I just don't think that calling these different things by the same name, I think it creates a cartoon.
I've still got to do fascism here.
Okay.
Sorry.
But I am getting something from this for the first time.
Okay.
Okay.
There is, and now we're squarely in my territory.
Yeah.
There is a set, there's a toolkit that And one of the key features of it is the falsification of history in order to justify the next move.
And so the idea, I mean, I can even halfway defend Mark's point about the fundamental nature of humans being collective.
Because when you're a tiny little tribe that, you know, finds food or starves together, And so really the thing, it's not private property that wrecks this.
It's scale, right?
You get so many people, you don't know everybody.
You don't have shared fate.
The internal competition dynamics become overpowering, whereas they were the minor feature when you were a tribe of, you know, 10 people.
Or 30. So anyway, I do think there is something to this falsification of history.
You can make an argument that religious origin stories all have this character.
And the problem is that the religious origin story version of it is, in my opinion, legitimate in order to create a cohesive mythology.
Now, if that mythology is a good one.
If it's a justification for stealing other people's stuff, I feel exactly the inverse way about it.
But the point is, it's an amoral technology.
Creating an origin story to justify a move is a thing that people do.
And it does make me wonder about your application of woke here because it's so universal that I'm not sure Thaddeus Caves woke.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, you find it everywhere.
Gramsci.
It's all Gnosticism.
Yeah, well, it is interesting, isn't it?
It's like, yeah, you see the structure again and again.
That's why I call it woke.
'cause you've had a Gnostic awakening to the true structure of society.
But the question here is, But the question for me here is, these are structures, but they have differing levels of fidelity to reality.
and so to call them all the same thing is to you know throw babies out with bath water because i think right now i'm more sympathetic to I think actually everybody should be, but the problem is that we're not confined to the choice.
There are not two choices on the table to which we are committed with a rifle to our heads.
We've got to hold off on that.
I want to let you finish your thought about the fascists, and then I want to get back to the question, because I think what we now have is a better question.
You've compelled me that there is That you're using a technique, that that technique reveals patterns.
You say you've seen one.
I want to know whether the thing that you see is a natural grouping that I can recognize from my perspective with your help to find it.
And we can talk about whether the term is right at that point.
Or it's not a natural thing.
And you mentioned, or I guess you mentioned, ChatGPT was analogous to what you're doing.
I want to know if you're hallucinating.
I mean, it does.
It does.
I had it.
I asked ChatGPT actually to write me, just tangentially, a short summary of Woke Right on a 10th grade reading level so that I could maybe find something I could help people with.
And it wrote me this thing and it gave great examples, very lucid examples, about Republican congressmen, a famous Republican congressman.
I said, "Well, who is it?
Oh, that's fictional." And it had like four or five of them.
It just made them up, but it didn't mention that it made them up until I asked.
So maybe this.
But okay, so my question to you was, what is the evolutionary relationship mimetically between communism and fascism?
And historically, actually, which is a different philosophical grounding.
But then you also had the incursion of Marxist Agitation into that society.
Mussolini was answering that in Italy.
Hitler was answering that very, that's what Mein Kampf is about, actually, in Germany.
And that's literally the reason that Franco rose to power in Spain, was to stop the commies, right?
And so the evolutionary link, what I was hoping that you would say, is reaction.
So reactionary is a word.
We're all familiar with the word.
It's distinct from conservative.
It somehow means something stronger.
But it's reacting to this combination of a weak and decadent liberalism that is enabling a communist agitation.
And what it sees, in my opinion, is that the weak and decadent liberalism is allowing a, which is ultimately very individualistic, is allowing a collectivist Ideology to come in and destroy things.
So you need collectivism to answer collectivism as part of the mentality.
Where is that collective?
Well, what you had in communism is this universal idea.
You're saying you have nationalist collectivism responding to communist collectivism.
To universal polarized.
In a pragmatic fashion, it's not.
This works for me.
So communism has a dipolar or bipolar, I don't know.
Bipolar is better, I guess.
As a bipolar universal.
It's in fact, as I mentioned the word, I'll say it anyway, it's the Manichean Gnostic framework recreated in social politics and economics.
What you have in fascism is, holy crap, this is going to ruin us.
Our current system is not capable of stopping this.
So we're going to replicate the parts that work, and we're going to get rid of the parts that the universalist radicalized
So what you end up with is, rather than everybody in the world being alienated from who they really are, or in other words, their inheritance by dint of some original sin, the introduction of private property that becomes the basis for exploitation, whatever the story is,
What you have instead in fascism is that there is a rightful inheritor to that national object and its fruits, which they have been alienated from by the excesses of tolerance of the soft liberalism that has allowed the Marxist agitation of radical egalitarianism.
So you have radical anti-egalitarianism in a nationalist identity framework, which can be intersectional across ethnicities and across polities and across cultural.
Okay, let me ask you a question.
So, by the way, I do think I now get where you are.
I do think you're hallucinating, and I'll tell you why.
But this is productive.
I get your taxonomy now.
What were the three things around which we could group?
Ethnic, cultural, and political.
Three ways to define a nation.
Alright.
Yeah, I think I know why I do disagree with you, and I think I do disagree.
I've made the argument that communism has an unfortunate analogy or an unfortunately tight connection in our minds with Marx.
And my point is, Marx didn't invent this.
It's actually something that will canonically re-evolve when certain conditions occur.
Material conditions.
Yeah.
It's reacting to something real.
And I think I know exactly what it is.
Nature is a free market, more or less.
Okay?
Free market, to the extent that it works correctly, looks like what happens in nature.
There's resources.
Creatures figure out ways to access those resources.
They exclude other creatures from the resources.
That's kind of the way it's the downside and the upside linked.
When people There comes a point at which something like 50% of the population recognizes that if forced to compete, they will be on the losing end.
For whatever reason, either through their own error, but more often because they just weren't given the proper environment to arm them for that competition, they know, ah, I live in a system in which I am destined to be a loser.
Now those losers have an incentive to collectively overthrow that system and redistribute its product.
They may even have a legitimate gripe if the system is corrupt.
The point may be, hey, you're actually, you know, living large on...
It's not my fault that you sent me to a shitty school and I don't have the ability to compete in this market or the market isn't as open as it looks and I can't get access to it.
So let's just overthrow the thing, right?
And the point is, so they create a phony story about the natural order of things and the equality of this, that, and the other.
It gets the losers to group together.
They overthrow the system, and it turns out their utopian vision doesn't work at all, and there's a pile of skulls.
So that natural process happens, and the version of it that we know well is Marx, just as the version of genocide we know well is Hitler.
So he's too closely associated.
it's a natural process and it's one that we should learn to spot and interrupt.
And the key thing is...
That's really good.
So I don't disagree with you because I see what you're seeing, but I think you're jumping the gun.
Because I see the right, intellectuals on the right, trying to, many of them, or many trying to equip Margot with an ideology, a successor ideology that's similar to what you're talking about.
But if we use the term woke and we call this, it's nascent idea space, like everyone saw the recent...
So there are lots of ideas in this space and for me it's looking more like a soup of ideas, a lot of interesting stuff and a lot of valid grievances.
And in there is the risk that you're trying to nip in the bud.
But in nipping it in the bud and going too hard after this kind of woke thing, there are all these legitimate grievances that if we cut off Listen to this thing.
This resonates for me.
I think you think you see something.
I know I see something.
But I agree you see something.
Well, I do too, but I now have a pretty good...
The point is, he sees something crystallizing.
It's too early to say it's a thing, because it isn't a thing.
In fact, it might not be a thing.
It's definitely a thing.
Well, all the pieces are in place, so I get that you're worried about it.
It is a set of factions, some of which are bent on gathering power to themselves through Machiavellian techniques, which are very similar to the communist manipulations in their own right.
And my hypothesis, which I've referred to for a long time as the law of intolerant factions, is that soup you're talking about will be dominated by the ideologues unless they are identified.
Because the most intolerant faction, through Machiavellian techniques, unless they are identified and people are hopefully brought back out of that lost sense of grievance, I don't want to cancel people, but you do it eventually.
The solution to the paradox of tolerance at some level requires quarantining sufficiently intolerant views and the reason that it will win is the same reason that conquest second law is so widely recognized here across the world.
I think you're jumping the gun.
And intolerance will beat tolerance every time.
Here's the problem.
We have a new player in this story and that new player Has powerful advocates.
The alternative to the pattern of history that you are describing is what I would call the West.
The West is the alternative to going through this cycle.
The West has never been completed as a project.
There are days when it shines.
There are days when it embarrasses itself.
But the idea of a level playing field in which all ideas are expressible It turns out to be fantastically productive, and it turns out it is so productive that you are actually better off tolerating getting the short end of the stick in the West than you are getting your fair share in a much less productive system, which is a strong argument for not going down this road.
That's right.
So again, we're going to get back to the problem of putting some names in this category, which I think the reason that there is a problem is that you're very...
Early in spotting the crystallization of this process, you think you know where it's going and you don't know because you don't know.
How early do you think I am?
How long do you think that this has been a phenomenon?
I want to know who's on the list.
Is there anybody that I know and talk to regularly who's actually in this category?
I don't know who you talk to regularly.
I think Tucker Carlson's in the category.
Here's why I don't think Tucker Carlson's in the category.
Because Tucker Carlson talks to people like me all the time.
So?
Look, I'm not a Christian.
I'm damn close to an atheist.
He understands me to be a patriotic American.
He values my opinion.
He allows his audience to hear it.
So the point is, there's nothing about Tucker Carlson that is excluding people like me, or Glenn Greenwald, frankly, from the conversation.
Tucker, I would say, is one of the people who does not understand why I'm obsessed with the distinction between nationalism and patriotism.
I think he hears it, but I don't think it changes his way of viewing these things.
So I understand that there's a part of him that just feels like, oh, screw this, right?
But at the level of who he's choosing to amplify and talk to and listen to, it's actually, And that sounds to me like the precise opposite of Woke.
But before you defend, I'd like you to make the case, because I'm interested.
Well, I want to ask a question to get this case rolling.
Okay.
If you had to describe Tucker's M.O. In terms of what he presents on his show, not necessarily just who he platforms, but the ideas that he presents, how he validates ideas, what ideas he thinks are the most important for people to listen to, and you had to do it within the framework that the left refers to as other ways of knowing.
Would that be an easy or difficult project?
In other words, marginalized epistemologies, marginalized knowledges.
It may be a flaw of mine, but try it in simpler terms.
One of the key components of the woke epistemology, as we typically understand the term woke, which is called critical constructivist epistemology, if you want the technical terminology, which was outlined by a guy named Joe Kinchelow in 2005.
Just to know the history, there is a book by the title Critical Constructivism, and so he devotes a very large portion of that book to talking about how it functions as a system of knowing.
Here's the thing.
There's some book.
No, no, no.
This is the book of woke.
No, I'm sorry.
It is.
You're talking to a guy who was literally chased off his own campus as if he was a witch for possessing racist beliefs that he did not possess.
I know a lot about woke.
I don't need to read the book.
Wait a minute.
What?
I mean, I lived it.
That's what they said to you at Evergreen.
Where is the evidence?
Asking for evidence.
No, no, no.
I'm telling...
I lived it.
I don't need evidence.
I remember that clip in the film.
But the point is, you're telling me that our discussion hinges on a book that I have not read.
I was going to describe to you what this means.
Well, but you've already lost me Why does it require so much verbiage?
But I wonder if I can translate, because, yeah.
No, no, I can't translate yet.
I'm just trying to hear it.
Yeah, yeah.
Hold on, just one second.
Okay.
You are putting an idea, right?
A two word idea into the world and you are saying, this is Now, if we talk about the woke revolution, the intersectional one, it does not require you to read a book to figure out who belongs to this ideology.
We have this argument, not you and I, but culturally, we had this argument for a year, I spent two years, Brett, on stages across the country speaking to sympathetic conservatives and libertarians, trying to convince them of this following thing, that critical race theory, If you take out the middle word and just get critical theory, I spent two years trying to convince America, conservative America, that critical race theory is a form of critical theory.
All you have to do is delete the modifier in the middle and you're there.
This was not an easy discussion for people, for CRT, for woke on the left.
I think I'm sympathetic.
Darwin spent more than a decade trying to wrestle.
His hypothesis into a presentable form.
We can now summarize it in less than a paragraph.
So my point is, I get that there's a lot of work that went into you figuring out what it is you think you see.
I don't get why it is so hard to convey it and why we have to reference.
Woke epistemology means a preference for outside knowledges.
There is a truth regime that excludes everything that would threaten its power base.
And so anything outside of that truth regime is more likely to be valid and true because it challenges the existing power structure.
That's woke.
that's literally woke.
I think you just invert It is not a preference for anything outside of the power structure.
It is a preference for a very particular alternative.
Right?
Yeah, it's a successor ideology.
It's not anything outside.
No, it's a very specific, very outside thing.
Correct, correct.
Very pragmatic as well.
So maybe we talk about what, if we're talking about ideologies and their connections, let's talk about what ideology is.
And I think Carl Benjamin might have come up with this definition.
And it's great.
Ideology is political programming for MPCs.
I mean, that's a definition.
The best treatment of ideology I ever read was in Charles Mills' book, From Class to Race, where he explains why he stopped being a classical Marxist and started being a critical race theorist.
I mean, I'm just giving a hyperlink.
We can talk more and more and more until we write a book.
You could use the word secular if you want, but it is functionally a mythology that the ruling powers Tell as the story to the entire population, including themselves, to convince them that's how society really works.
Political programming for NPCs, because both of these sides want something.
They want power.
And so they've created structural stories in order to mobilize large groups of people, to unite and mobilize large groups of people.
I want to wrestle this to something simple enough to comprehend, to pass on, and to critique.
It shouldn't require James' presence to operate the thing.
If it's a real thing, it ought to operate.
Interrogation of power structures?
Well, here's the point.
You say they want power.
I'm going to say, you know what, that's the default state of nature.
There is one alternative to it.
That alternative is the West, in which we agree that we actually want a level playing field.
Now, is that stable in the long term?
Can it be?
I suspect so, but I don't know.
But it is the alternative to every faction is going to want more power for itself.
The idea that I actually, given the opportunity to corral power, to hoard it, will actually prefer to level the playing field for future generations.
That is a counterintuitive way of being.
And my point is, it doesn't actually mean I want less power.
It means that I will end up with more absolute, I don't mean political power, but more absolute ability to control my environment and make it the way I want it to be, more liberty, if I engage in leveling the playing field and therefore everybody having a stake in protecting that level playing field rather than playing king of the hill all the
time, I will have more of whatever that liberty is in absolute terms if I...
So it is an alternative.
I don't know that it can be stabilized long term.
My sense is it works great during productive times and then it gets overthrown as the music stops in musical chairs.
But the story that you're telling, I believe you are warning us about something.
And that warning is important because the process you're talking about can catch you off guard and it can up and up.
And all at once, right.
So I'm on board with the idea that, hey, if I love the idea of the West and I want the West to work, I've got to be very careful to keep an eye out for the thing you're talking about.
I've got to be very careful not to embolden people who are committed to the thing you're talking about.
But then you tell me it's Tucker Carlson, and I feel like, well...
He loves the West, and he does not want me excluded from it because I'm Jewish or progressive.
As far as I can tell, he's actually...
But you tell me, I'm misunderstanding.
And he's not an ideologue.
I think that insofar as he's got a worldview, he might be absorbing it from other people who are constructing these.
I mean, he is an ideologue.
He's a Buchananite paleoconservative.
Now, let me try a different direction.
Maybe we come back to Tucker Carlson.
Maybe we don't.
Do you agree that there was a phenomenon 10 years ago, five years ago, whatever years ago, called the alt-right?
Was that a...
It wasn't what the mainstream media was calling it.
No, no, no, of course it was not.
It was a phenomenon.
The mainstream media destroyed the term.
And they applied it to you, they applied it to your grandma, they applied it to rocks, they applied it to everything that they didn't like.
Anything they didn't like was put in the category.
I was alt-right years and years ago when I was still openly screaming that I was left.
And you were as well.
Yeah, of course.
But was there an alt-right?
Yeah, I think so.
Which called itself the alt-right, as a matter of fact.
Yeah, I think so.
And they were kind of pro-masculine, a little patriarchy on that side.
Jared Taylor is the openly white supremacist guy who was writing for them.
Yeah, and it had a culture.
Pepe the Frog was a funny and ironic portrayal of self in this regard.
It's an abbreviation.
Well, alternate.
Yes, that's right.
And what makes it alternate?
What is it alternate to and what Well, I mean, it's interesting because I think there's actually a lot in the term, you know, I would put progressivism against conservatism.
I think you need to figure out which things to conserve and which things require change, and we're always in that dynamic.
But the alt-right was a non-stodgy conservatism.
It was modern.
It was young.
It had a sense of humor.
There was nothing dusty or gray about it, right?
It was about there are some values.
We've lost them.
Let's not be embarrassed about talking about them.
And then it had this decidedly nationalistic aspect, which was frightening.
That's a punk energy, you're playing with the fact that we're It was punk conservative.
Was it generally, in your opinion, a problem?
At least something worth keeping an eye on.
Certainly the latter.
Certainly the latter.
Okay.
And we all agree that the term was abused by both the left and the media and so on.
Just to re-clarify, that's mostly for the audience.
If I was alt-right, that term didn't mean a damn thing.
Yeah, exactly.
your dog was all right too, by virtue of being your dog.
And so, what if I put on the table that the which is a local tribe versus the universal dichotomous or bipolar tribe of communism.
It is the reaction That I was talking about earlier.
But now, not in a modernistic, militaristic form that you would have seen in the 20th century, but in the postmodern context.
If we take Jordan Peterson's woke is postmodern neo-Marxism, and we say there's this postmodern neo-fascism, at least an element within the alt-right, why not call that woke right if that's the only thing different?
Well, I just, I don't see...
Maybe it's helpful to tell the story of why I started using the term, which I did not create, by the way.
I'm not the progenitor of the term woke right.
The first appearance in print that I know of, I'm sure it was somewhere else, was in an article written by a preacher named Kevin DeYoung, writing in The Gospel Coalition.
Reviewing the book I mentioned by Stephen Wolf earlier is a book review for the case for Christian nationalism.
And he called his review "The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism" and described it in those terms by saying, you know, the same kinds of intolerance, the cancel culture, the victimhood.
The identity, politics at the heart of it, and went through Stephen's book and showed in great detail, which is 500 pages I don't necessarily recommend you get into, but it shows in great detail why he thinks calling it a mirror image of woke is correct.
Neal Chamby is good on this as well.
Neal Chamby picked up and he was using it.
And then some other people were writing about it through I called them new right.
I called, specifically when I was Christian nationalists, I called them Christian nationalists.
That's what they called themselves.
I didn't ever like the term dissident right, so I didn't use it because it wasn't clear to me that that was the great term, but a lot of them use it for themselves.
And then what happened to me in September last year, so 24, this is when I changed my mind and said they're woke.
They attempted to cancel me for something.
Completely innocuous.
We got it.
I think we've got what's happening here.
If you want to finish, you're on a good run.
I put out something.
It was on the Catholic holiday of Michaelmas, which celebrates Archangel Michael or St. Michael.
And President Trump, famously religious man, put out an image, a famous painting of Archangel Michael slaying the dragon, the Satan, and the prayer.
Which came from, I think, Leo XIII, which is a battle prayer.
And I said, as I tend to do, this is just part of my research, do you know that the New Age occultists have a different view of Michael?
So making this a huge thing in MAGA without adding the clarity that there is an entire occult interpretation of this you might not be aware of is dangerous.
And I think somebody put him up to it, and I don't think he knows what it is, but we should be careful with this.
The blowback I got was so disproportionate, was so unbelievably insane.
Lost thousands of followers.
James hates Catholics.
James wants to ruin Christians.
James is the enemy.
Nasty threats.
All in my direction.
I have tripped that tripwire, too.
Uh-huh, and so I was like, I got 30 times the blowback that I should have.
You got religious fervor back for having I understand that some Catholics, first of all, might have misunderstood it, but I also watched the phenomenon play out where I watched people who are influencers take what I said, change it into something I didn't say, and then that's the only thing I said.
So can I frame what I think is going on here?
I think that this is the problem, the center of the problem, is that Twitter has become a bit of a hellhole, there's Groypers, there's a lot of awful behavior there now.
Groypers, by the way, are a visible group that are woke, right?
The Groypers are unambiguous.
I agree about the Groypers, for sure.
The Groypers are an issue.
So what's happened here is there's an intellectual project.
Jim sees something.
And when you're on this intellectual project, you need to be quite precise about where you're pointing it.
But there's the Twitter kind of Twittersphere personal problem that's going on here where people are coming after you.
And I think that you've come into this kind of militant almost mode and you're shooting wildly.
I come in and I haven't seen all this stuff that's happened to you.
When I speak to you personally, you're telling me all this horrible stuff is going on.
I'm like, of course, that's the reason he's acting this way.
But if I look at your tweet thread, I'm like, what the fuck is he talking about here?
Exactly the same horrible stuff that the left did to me.
First, when we did the grievance studies.
Second, when I said I was going to vote for Trump.
But it's not one thing.
You can't take a thousand people and say, hey, this is one single entity.
You're absolutely right about this.
And this phenomenon, we are evolved critters.
Yeah.
However that happened.
As evolved critters, we make a natural assumption about what somebody else who was present saw.
Because you can make that assumption.
I know what your experience of this room is like.
I can teleport that far and imagine, right?
We come in and we see, you know, James, like, wow.
Swiping at ghosts and things that just at phantoms and it's like what the heck is going on?
And we have no idea what's been targeted at him and part of what's been targeted to him is undoubtedly organic and part of it is probably bot amplifiers and something may involve a program with his name on the file folder that says how we're gonna drive James crazy.
We don't know what the mixture is and that That means that that's where I feel like I lost track because this is very personal to you in a way we can't intuit what happened.
Well, I mean, again, I'm more interested in the pattern than the personal.
And at this point, I was more confused than hurt or angry.
But then the phone calls started from people that had booked me.
This was in September.
I had speaking engagements booked out through the end of the year still last year.
And so I started getting the phone calls.
I'm getting a lot of pressure saying you hate Christians.
People are calling, people are asking and saying we shouldn't have you.
Can you explain yourself?
I start getting the phone calls.
Some things did cancel me.
Some things didn't.
Some organizations had me and it turned into a giant struggle session in their organization over whether I should be there or not.
And the fallout was bad for those organizations.
And then the invitations disappeared.
Gone.
All of them.
Now you're talking my language.
Because if you ask me, the thing that I've been waiting for you to say, right, when I hear you defining woke right, and then I can't follow your definition, there's a reason.
And it's because I know that there is an element that is probably not sufficient for the term woke, in my opinion, but it is definitely necessary.
And it is cancellation.
Cancellation.
It is the desire to silence.
The purge and the silencing.
That's right.
The right wing.
Go on.
But here's the problem.
Tucker Carlson isn't canceling people.
Is it that he's not denouncing?
Is it that the right have their own purple head goblins now?
You needed a name that you know.
But that's my point.
I don't think it's in the category.
And I say that he's adopted.
I don't think he's adopted the cancellation tactics necessarily, but I think he's adopted the epistemology.
And I think the epistemology is foundational to the worldview.
Well, and this is where I think you're jumping the gun, because what I see him doing is talking to people who have the epistemology and talking to people who disagree with it and doing what I think he does very well, actually, which is synthesize what he's encountering based on a sense that he's entitled to ask questions and...
He can see through your eyes for the hour or two that you're sitting across the table from him.
So, do I think there's a danger?
That there will be this concentrated thing that you see rising and it will capture his attention or something will happen to him that will cause him to default in that direction?
Or there will be a file folder with his name on it and somebody will push him in that direction?
Sure, I think we all have to worry about that sort of thing.
But do I think he's in the category now?
Would you have categorized, say, a typical journalist on CNN, say it's 2018-19?
Who decided just, you know, to have interesting interviews and conversations with Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi before anybody really knew who they were.
Do they qualify as part of this woke apparatus?
But are we getting into pre-crime here?
Yeah, it's pre-crime.
Exactly.
I understand that it might turn out that you're, at some point, extremely prescient.
And this is embarrassing for us.
I'm actually 10 years behind the curve, in my opinion.
You think I'm way ahead.
I think I'm 10 years behind.
But do you know what I mean?
We can't like spot patterns in people's tweets and then just call them.
Yes, but I wanna answer your question first.
The journalist who does what you said is part of the apparatus, and in fact, the woke may take advantage of the journalist who's trying to get ahead by having the conversations, but no, I don't think these journalists are The fake news media.
And so I contend that at a bare minimum, though I think he's adopted the epistemology, and we can disagree on that and be friends, it's fine.
I think there's a fake news alt-media as well, and I think that Tucker Carlson's central in that apparatus.
Not peripheral, central to the fake news alt-media apparatus.
I personally don't think so.
That's fine.
From every direction?
Well, we're swimming in propaganda from every direction.
My question, and this is increasingly like the central question of my public life, is who is actually on our side?
And when I say our, I mean those who would defend the level playing field of the West.
There are lots of people who will temporarily adopt that position because it advances their cause, but they're not committed to it in any deep way.
And then there are a lot of people who are committed to it in a deep way.
It's very hard to tell the difference between those two things until something forces them to choose.
But that's the question.
Do I think Tucker is invested in the level playing field of the West?
I do.
Could I be wrong?
Of course I think that this may be true I don't think he would disagree with my definition.
I'm pretty sure I've said it to him very directly, and he's resonated with it.
So again, I don't know.
Frankly, I think the entire activist sphere is confused about how even to understand the game.
You know, we're so busy looking for phantoms, spooks, people who come out of the intelligence apparatus that we're not even aware that It's probably divided in particular ways.
There may be elements of it that are patriotic.
External state actors are involved in this now.
It's an absolute mess.
The signal-to-noise ratio is nowhere.
The point is, there's an exact analogy to the fog of war here.
You really don't know for sure who's actually on your team and who's just playing that way.
And you have to begin to intuit it.
And you have to make, you know, that your meeting with the person doesn't tell you enough.
You have to allow time to reveal the depth of their commitment and you have to imagine that something that really wanted to fool you and had a very large budget.
You know if somebody wanted to spend 10 million dollars to create an unassailable person to put in your movement and then have them blow it up you know at the very.
You just throw, give them the Bitcoin.
Do you know what I mean?
If someone matches your interest, you just go, you just fund them from afar.
Exactly.
And we all know that some of our income is coming from anonymous sources.
If somebody is paying attention- You can actually skinner box them.
I think that's the sophisticated propaganda techniques that are going on now, more so than injecting spooks into festivals and things like that.
I don't want to derail us, but what I would say is, I've probably talked to you about the time-traveling money printer idea.
The idea that if you know what's coming historically, you're in a position to take millions and turn it into billions with trivial effort.
Whatever our antagonist is made of, it has access to this time-traveling money printer.
It knows about, surely not every event, but it knows about many events ahead enough that it can print money.
And if you have an unlimited black budget that isn't subject to control by any entity that would tend to control it, you don't have to choose between Skinner boxing people with likes.
I think the problem is...
I think there are so many interests now.
It's almost like media got democratized, but so did propaganda.
And so even on a one-to-one, like some of the guys that we're talking to at this festival itself are propagandists, and they're doing it off their own back.
And so it's like so many people are in the propaganda game.
This is why it's so confusing.
Well, this is what I'm saying about the fog of war.
Yeah, this is where we are.
And you know what it looks like?
It looks like nature.
If you walk into a tropical forest, that vine may be a snake.
You need to actually focus on it to know what you're even looking at.
It's very McLuhan what you're saying.
But the point is that the critters in such a forest operate despite every creature That has an interest in doing so, distorting their perceptions.
The point is, it's an arms race.
Can you untangle what's out there faster than it can tangle it?
And that's where we are, and frankly, we have to get used to the idea that that's the skill we have to hone.
Well, there's a problem with the content treadmill as well.
I don't know if we're getting off track here, but this is why I pull back from being on the internet.
It's not good for my bank account, but being on that treadmill and having to talk about everything without sufficient...
I think it's a huge, huge problem in all this.
Especially too much information is like having no information at all.
We don't even have, the thing that scares me is we don't, there needs to be the equivalent of a site where we can simply have a chronology of events that we agree to place, right?
Things that were said.
Things that happened.
This country attacked that country.
Just so that we can all reference a shared factual narrative and then talk about all of our different perspectives on what it means.
But the fact that you don't have that means an event can happen.
The algorithm doesn't show it to you because it doesn't find you interested in it at best.
And then it's like everybody else is up to date on the fact that something occurred that was very important and you've never heard of it.
That's bewildering.
It's like the AP wire that's actually functional, is what it would be.
Exactly.
It's what journalists used to use, although it was still propaganda.
These things never worked as they should have, but they were good enough for at least us to have a conversation that we now can't have.
And I think part of what we're discovering here But one of the things that we're discovering is that there's something profoundly important about the novelly unique version of history that we personally are experiencing, which may show us something that others can't see, and they may come to regard us as having lost our minds, when in fact, you know,
And now I have to live with the knowledge that there are aliens and everybody else is like, that's nice, you know?
So, okay.
Were you headed somewhere?
No.
If you wanted the story of how I first caught wind of these guys or became aware of them.
Outside of the vague, you know, alt-right of the first Trump election.
So, maybe then before we do that, let's collect our gains.
Okay.
I think Mike and I both have the sense that you are seeing something, that it is worth being alarmed over, but that you're very early in spotting it.
And maybe I'm now speaking for myself.
You say if you agree that you may be jumping the gun on both the ability to define it and.
And also the problem of legitimate grievances.
Like, I think there's a real problem with smearing, going too scattergun approach, and then taking down people that need to be heard.
because i think that that's a that's a way to radicalize people and so well and and you know this is one of the things about uh But you have a terrifically unfair society.
Part of the responsibility for that falls on the right.
imagining that the market is fairer than it actually is, imagining that externalities and unlevel aspects of the playing field are Basically, you know, if rent seeking is 70% of the profit made in the market and your free market mythology says it's 10%.
You're doing your Gen X economic left thing.
Don't try and salvage the identitarian.
Sometimes economic left salvages absolutely insane people who are ruining everything.
Tell me that this is not a correct...
If the idea that saves us is the level playing field in which everybody has an investment in playing the cards they are dealt because the playing field is level enough that that's actually a good move.
It's likely to work.
Yeah.
Then the point is the thing that takes us back and forth between some sort of communist meltdown and a fascist meltdown stops.
So from the point of view of what the objective of the exercise ought to be, I think it is getting rid of that oscillation between these two impulses.
But I would say that that economic analysis you were talking about that the right overlooks, I think they have it now.
That's MAGA.
That's with MAGA now.
I agree.
So when we use left or right, we're kind of, yeah.
All I'm saying is, If bad luck has made it impossible for you to participate in the market, right?
Something through no fault of your own, you're born without the ability to walk.
You're actually our responsibility, in my opinion.
If your own bad decision making puts you in that situation, that might be a different story.
But See, this is the interesting thing is that what we're talking about And this is why all the heterodoxy, as far as I can see, is on the right right now.
And we have to allow that landscape to find its footing.
And if we're scattergunning all sorts of ideas in this and calling them work right, then whatever this new paradigm, So I think then all three of us are agreed that this is a perilous moment and an exciting moment.
And the question is, which direction are we going to go?
James is focused on a failure mode that is, I agree.
I have a positive side too, by the way, but we can come to it.
Okay, but nonetheless, the idea that there's something to worry about, I think we're all agreed.
The question of whether or not it's a definable something in the present that we, I mean, you know, I will point out, I've wanted since the beginning of our conversation a list of people, and the only guy we've got is Tucker Carlson, and I don't think it's a good guy.
You just aren't going to know most of them.
R. McIntyre at the blaze.
I know him.
He's woke.
He's woke as hell.
Is he excluding people?
He's spent the last two years trying to convince the world that I hate Christians so that Christians won't invite me.
Okay.
Yes.
He accused me on his podcast, not his Blaze show, of openly calling for the assassination of the sitting vice president so that people would think that I'm a horrible person.
He devotes entire shows, to my watching at least, knowing me.
Where every three sentences he says about me, at least two of them are malicious lies.
Okay, so I can't speak to those things.
I haven't seen them.
I can say, from my perspective, anybody who wishes to exclude well-intentioned people, good faith players, on the basis that what they are exploring is not tolerably voiceable, is, in my opinion, in the category.
I think you're clearly well-intentioned.
I do not see you as malicious in the slightest.
I'm, as you know, willing to disagree with you when what you say doesn't make sense to me, but there's no part of me that worries that you're acting in bad faith.
Certainly not.
So I can't see why excluding you from a conversation would make any sense.
I don't even want these gentlemen cancelled.
I just want them to act in good faith.
Okay.
So what's the positive thing you were going to say?
There are more names.
Are they names I would know?
I doubt it.
I mean, a lot of these people are not famous except kind of in this niche world of, you know, whether it's Christian nationalism.
If you didn't know Stephen Wolf, it's doubtful.
It rings a bell, but I don't know it well.
Nate Fisher, Aaron Wren, Joshua Abattoi, John Harris.
You just kind of go down a list of a lot of these.
Eric Kahn, Joel Webin.
Joel Webin is this pastor that looks vaguely like Matt Walsh, but like a bad Xerox of him, that puts his foot in his mouth severely and is on right-wing watch every week now.
There are lots of these guys.
These are all openly theocratic.
Some of them are openly anti-Semitic.
Some of them are not.
Some of them are openly racist.
Some of them are not.
So there are lots of people.
And just within that world, which is the part of it that I paid the most attention to, because that's the first part of it that I really saw.
Dave Smith isn't in this category.
Dave Smith's a libertarian.
Yeah.
I called him woke right once because I didn't know who he was.
And he said the same thing that some of them were.
That is the seed of what's going on.
You're getting attacked and you go into this machine gun mode.
Specifically, I was getting attacked and being asked, James, the thing you're saying doesn't exist.
Give us examples of it.
Then I see this remark from Dave Smith about something to do with Israel that matches exactly this kind of stuff the Groypers were saying.
I don't know who he is.
I just know he's a big following.
And I'm like, there's an example of what I'm talking about.
It's like when you go to the park and a little dog starts following you around, and you don't know why, and you're like, go home, little dog.
And Dave Smith's been following me around ever since, and all the libertarians here are like, say Dave Smith's not woke.
And I'm like, well, he's a critical government theorist as far as it goes, but he's not a woke right.
He's not even on the right.
Okay, well, so that, you've got to admit, that's an expensive error to have made.
You live with him.
It'll all boil down over time.
In my opinion, my advice to you is to clean that up.
I did that like in October.
But there's other stuff going on.
It seems you and I have this joke about Peter Boghossian.
It's like he throws stones at a beehive.
And he's like, why am I being stung?
Why would they sting me?
And I see that's happening.
Well, that's what happened when I started getting stung over the first couple things.
But then I realized this jungle's infested with hornets.
And I've got a rock cannon to fire at them intentionally, willing to take as many stings as it takes to get rid of the nests.
In fact, I kind of enjoy the stings.
See, there you go.
That's the problem.
That's why you're in this position.
I'm not complaining about my position, though.
No, no, no.
I'm actually getting quite happy about it.
But you're losing people like me, and I don't think that's such a good thing for you.
What you're doing is...
There's something you quoted to me about more than flack over the target.
Yeah.
What was it?
So, when you know you're getting, when you know you're right, it's not just that you get the most flack when you're over the target, but when you get mutually contradictory flacks.
That's right.
Yeah, so the example that I use is And it's like, oh, that's the sign that you're onto something.
Right.
And so right now I'm getting, James is irrelevant, so we have to stop him.
Okay, but here's the problem.
I think you have flipped a bit with respect to the Hornets.
You are used to a world in which as you get close to something, you get hornet stings and you've become like a bear.
Okay, now we have to go back to bees instead of hornets because you need to be getting the honey from the hive.
There is no honey.
It's an empty hive.
Well, but you're pursuing something, right?
You're pursuing some model of something that's really good and nobody else can build it because they don't have your toolkit.
And you know that as you get one of these models really right, you get stung.
Right.
A lot.
And so you've come to associate those stings with success.
And the problem is that there are ways to get stung that don't involve this.
I'm totally aware of that.
And so I think you're getting some stings from the machine gun indiscriminate shooting thing that you are falsely being reassured by rather than being driven to do with what I now think you should do, which is reformulate your critique.
Say, look, there's a canonical danger.
At this moment in history, here's the thing that could happen, and here are six examples of what it looks like when it does.
Here are some people who seem to be leading us in this direction, and then you need to be very careful not to include anybody who's not clearly in the category.
You know what's even more fun is when we don't name names and you say things, and they all come out on the internet and say, why did they name me?
For example, when Jordan Peterson went on whatever news show it was and said, CNN, maybe it was, and he said there are psychopaths in every movement, and dozens of MAGA influencers said Jordan Peterson called us psychopaths.
Yes, I actually am.
Same thing happened when I talked to Jordan, because it came out after the fact, because we talked about Lucifer, and Jordan called us Luciferian.
I don't want to be too naively marketplace of ideas kind of guy here, but Not on Twitter, because it just doesn't work.
You can't do it on Twitter.
But I'm grappling with a lot of the stuff.
In that realm.
And I think there's a lot of legitimate agreements there and some interesting thoughts and interesting players.
And so that's where the action is.
That is quite, by the way, perfect ideal end.
Because when you're dealing with subversive movements, for example, the Gripers are subversive.
So why don't you debate Nick Fuentes?
Because if you go on Nick Fuentes and he says 40 things and you hit 39 of them out of the park like a Grand Slam home run and you stumble, not even get the last one wrong.
That gets clipped and that's the whole story.
It is a malicious game that they're playing.
And the entire apparatus, while I've spent the last nine months condensing and trying to understand what I'm talking about clearly, right?
Yep.
They've been demanding I go debate them when it's clear that I'm not ready for that in the environment of an asymmetric political warfare circumstance.
It's not a conversation.
Someone like Kyle Benjamin, you could have a great chat with.
I've had great chats with him.
Yeah, yeah.
He's a good actor.
I would argue you are not obligated and should be very cautious about interacting with people who are not acting in good faith.
But I do think that there are people who are acting in good faith who are put on the back foot by your scattershot approach here and that you should be talking to them.
that that would be productive and valuable.
You're trying to accomplish something.
It involves wrestling your model to a high level of polish.
And I'm sure you're not there because it's been so hard.
I mean, it's required this conversation for me to even know what you're talking about.
So I would argue that those conversations with good faith folks who you think are somewhere near the milieu that you're trying to describe would be perhaps the best way To get to a tool good enough to prevent the failure mode that you're pointing to, which I agree is very important.
It is on the table as a possibility and it does need to be avoided, but So just to draw back to Marx, Marx says that the history is a contention of classes.
But at the end of the first paragraph of chapter one of the Communist Manifesto, he says that this fight through all of history ends in not one way, two possible ways in the revolutionary reconstruction or reconstitution, I should say, of society at large.
Or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
So a second failure mode is not that MAGA becomes this neo-fascist force.
It is simply that MAGA destroys itself from within and becomes unviable to continue the mission, good or bad, that Donald Trump is looking likely.
It's looking very likely.
Blowout in 26 or 28 that puts us not back where we were under the Biden regime, but in a worse place, because now the right has been badly discredited on its own terms, which is in fact the failure mode I think is coming.
Okay.
Well, that's interesting.
I do think that that is very worth paying attention to.
Frankly, I think, and I don't really think of myself as MAGA.
I feel I'm closer to Maha.
I'm definitely...
But I do think that I'm watching those tensions jeopardize the political clout and the ability to navigate intentionally.
And it's spooking me because, I mean, the worst case scenario might be that whatever has taken over the blue team does reassert itself.
You know, the red team having stumbled and called itself into question and that basically the deep state comes in foot on the gas and, you know, turns the key on the totalitarian state that it's been constructing.
So I'm very concerned about that.
And I do think it is a service to civilization for you to be spotting these nascent dangers.
But in order to do the job right, you've got to be really careful not to overstep what's already taken place or what you can already say with clarity.
Sure, of course.
But I'm forgiving of my own mistakes, and there's a process there too.
Iron is sharpening iron as long as you go.
You propose a thing, people say, no, you're wrong.
You refine your view, they refine theirs.
And there's a process to that that we don't have to freak out about in the short term.
All right.
Anything you want to say in summation?
Nothing, really.
I think you hit it.
I'll just say, since I never said my positive thing very quickly, the level playing field is called something.
It is called common sense.
Not in the sense of the things everybody kind of knows.
That's not what it means.
Common sense, technically, in the philosophical school, means that reality is out there, objective to us.
And we all have both the sense apparatuses to detect reality with some fidelity, not perfect fidelity, and the sense-making apparatuses of rationality to be able to process what we're taking in.
And so common sense is this idea that there's not some secret hidden knowledge that only the people who agree with the cult are allowed to be the ones who dictate how things work, right?
When you put the ability to put sense-making into everyone's hands, not merely the people who have the right virtues or the right values or the right identities or whatever else, that's where we defend the thing that is kind of one of the key foundational pillars.
Not the only one, but we're running short on time to talk about the entirety of the West.
That's a pillar of what holds up the West and what has made the explosion that we've had.
Since over the last 500 years, plus the entirety, in my opinion, of the American experiment, truly work, is that it's rooted in the idea that each of us, without having to appeal to some special authority, as opposed to somebody who's demonstrated their competence being a different kind of authority, but a special authority.
I read the secret tablet.
I read the secret book.
I have the right heritage or whatever.
Therefore, I get to speak.
And you have to listen, just like with the woke left.
I'm black.
You're white.
You have to listen to me.
Shut up and listen, right?
That is the problem.
That is woke.
And the answer is, no, everybody who wants to participate in good faith participates in good faith.
All right, there's one thing I would critique about that, which is that your focus on the level playing field is about the idea layer.
The most fundamental thing about the level playing field is the well-being layer.
The idea layer is as important as it is, and it's disproportionately important to people like us who think for a living.
But the important thing about it is that it allows us to discover what is true in various different senses of that term through and Unlimited discussion.
And I agree, good faith is the key element.
Subversives are a problem.
Subversives are a problem.
We have to tolerate them in order for all of us who are acting in good faith to have the freedom to actually consider ideas that are at first troubling and then turn out either to falsify themselves or to lead us to something useful or to turn out to be less troubling than we thought.
The hallmark, I would say, of bad faith is the desire to limit the discussion.
The unleveling of the intellectual playing field through cancellation is the key to how the well-being layer gets unleveled, which is what results in these revolts.
Anyway, this has been a terrifically important discussion.
I'm really glad, I think, to finally understand what it is that's motivating you.
I would caution you.
Other people are not seeing what's happening to you.
They're not seeing through your eyes.
And so it looks like...
Well, that's not the issue.
The point is the utility of what you're doing depends on your ability to convey it to people and to persuade them that there's something worth paying attention to.
to the extent that you look like you're lashing out at phantoms that aren't real, you're not doing yourself or us any favors.
So I would just Ask your friends whether they can see what you're seeing.
And if they can't, then realize that that has to be part of the story too.
Here's what I saw that you haven't that tells me there's something we need to pay attention to.
It's fundamental.
Twitter is a communication device.
If that's even what it is.
Yeah.
Whatever's going on there, it's a deranging kind of tool.
And so, I would say it's a deconstruction machine.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah, in any case, great discussion.
Thank you, gentlemen.
Mike Naina, James Lindsay.
Thanks for joining me.
You guys want to say something about where people can find you?
Most of my work is on Substack these days, so just michaelnaina.com.
I am at newdiscourses.com.
That is newdiscourses.com.
You can tell I've done it before.
newdiscourses.com or follow me at conceptualjames.
