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June 10, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:06:15
The Establishment’s Bad Boys
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Alright, hello everyone.
Welcome to this week's Left, Right, and White.
I'm Chris Roberts, and I'm of course here with... Gregory Hood, and put on your fedoras, because we're going to be talking about the New Atheism today, or what used to be the New Atheism.
Yeah, so we decided to talk about the New Atheists, by which we mostly mean the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, as kind of the biggest three of the New Atheists.
Yeah, the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, as they called them then, was the Professor Daniel Dennett.
But a lot of what he talked about was more biology and neuroscience and what we're going to talk about today is how this movement was really more about social proof and internet subcultures and how it sort of paved the way for both BreadTube and I would say the alt-right.
Well, and something that's interesting about it as well, this will be our first podcast
talking about an intellectual or an intellectual movement that Greg and I don't consider very
influential on our own thinking, or at least not in a positive sense.
You could arguably say we were like, well, yeah, this is terrible.
We got to find something better than this.
I guess we're really showing our age here.
New Atheism was a really big deal when Greg and I were growing up.
You know, you're talking like mid-aughts, Iraq War.
Well, when you were growing up.
I was growing up already.
Well, but still, I mean, this was a big deal when you were in college.
Yeah, I mean, I remember listening to the debate between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway, which they built up as like the biggest, greatest debate of all time.
And it was in New York City and all these lefties were there.
And, you know, one half of the audience was screaming insults at the other half.
The speakers looked like they were going to come to blows on occasion and everything else.
And this was... Christopher Hitchens was, I would argue, at one time, clearly the most prominent public intellectual there was.
But now, I mean, I can't think of someone whose influence faded more quickly.
I mean, this was a guy who at one point or another was hailed as not just one of the greatest writers, but the greatest speaker in the English-speaking world.
When people constantly compare him to George Orwell, which I think is so monumentally insulting to George Orwell and George Orwell's intellectual legacy, I also...
I don't really get the comparison in terms of prose or even just thoughtfulness.
Hitchens was such a polemicist and he was so... he's just such a quick drawer.
He's just so eager to dominate, so eager to insult.
And Orwell was so reserved and so pensive.
I mean, even their essay styles have nothing in common.
And also, Hitchens didn't write really influential novels, which is what Orwell is obviously best remembered for.
What is Christopher Hitchens' animal form?
Beginning with Christopher Hitchens, he obviously wrote quite a bit about his own life right before he really started dying from cancer.
He was able to get his autobiography out before that.
And of course he had his collection of essays and a number of other books.
He had a certain following in the conservative movement because he very famously backed the Iraq War and after 9-11 he went on a speaking tour where he would repeatedly, you know, crush or dominate to use the watch Christopher Hitchens obliterate leftists on campus.
So I'm glad you brought that up because Hitchens was really the first guy that that was a thing.
Yeah.
With this like, I mean what you see everywhere now especially with Ben Shapiro of A public intellectual who's all over YouTube and so many of these titles are just these silly bombastic... Yeah, some two-minute clip.
Which I think is... I mean, arguably, I think that style and that kind of like...
Internet partisanship is perhaps his biggest legacy.
Well, I mean, I think Jon Stewart and what he did when he took over The Daily Show really paved the way for that.
But of course, Hitchens was on The Daily Show all the time, and he was also on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.
And what Hitchens really... He wrote a book called Letters to a Young Contrarian, but I think he was actually quite skilled, and he kind of owned up to this in his autobiography, Taking precisely the right stand where he could still be relevant to just about everybody and not be completely cast out, but he could still be seen as somewhat edgy.
Yeah.
And those will be kind of offensive.
I mean, the best thing he did for his career was die when he did, because there's absolutely no way That he would be allowed to write or speak or do anything because I mean this was a guy who was on Slate and I'm frankly surprised not just that Slate hasn't removed the archives but that they haven't written a full-fledged denunciation.
I mean this was a guy who talked about oh women aren't funny and what he had to say about Islam.
That's got to be in the works though.
You know it's coming.
Maybe this podcast will do it.
It would be kind of funny if it did.
But there's a very famous speech that he gave defending free speech and of course he used it as an opportunity to go after religion.
Because he said religion, but more specifically Islam, was responsible for all the big restrictions on free speech.
Now I would say that's not really true, but that was the angle he was taking back then.
But he said the following, and he said this in front of a crowd that was not very supportive of what he was saying even back then.
And I quote, this is Christopher Hitchens.
One of the proudest moments of my life, that's to say in the recent past, has been defending the British historian David Irving, who is now in prison in Austria for nothing more than the potential of uttering an unwelcome thought on Austrian soil.
He didn't actually say anything in Austria.
He wasn't even accused of saying anything.
He was accused of perhaps planning to say something that violated an Austrian law that says only one version of the history of the Second World War may be taught in our brave little Tyrolean Republic.
And he went on to say that If there is one person who has a point of view and the entire rest of the world disagrees with it, that one person not only has the right to speak, that person's right to speak deserves extra protection because what he had to say might contain a grain of truth, took a bit of effort to come up with, and might lead us to re-examine first principles.
Now I would argue that the primary role of the left today and 99% of self-identified journalists is to shut down speech.
I mean, if we didn't have newspapers, we would have more free speech and be better informed.
That's sort of the paradox where we are now.
And that's also why I don't think he could... I mean, there he's taking arguably the most extreme calls he could take.
This was probably the boldest thing Hitchens ever said, and I say this as somebody who's really, really not very sympathetic to Hitchens.
I think you like him a great deal more than I do, and you do not care for him very much.
I respect him.
I think his... I'm extremely jealous of how quickly he was able to turn out pros.
I think as an SEST, he was brilliant in terms of just pure style.
And how quickly he was able to do things, but at the end of the day, as you said, what do you take away from all this?
What did it all mean?
And he was sort of a true liberal in the sense of free speech and the marketplace of ideas and all this kind of thing, but that was always a lie.
I mean, that's never been a thing.
And it's not as simple as him being a pure kind of classical liberal.
I mean, I don't think Classical or old-school liberalism leads you to the very
hawkish foreign policy positions that he took on not just Iraq
But I ran and a lot of I mean a lot of the other a lot of the other new atheists
Especially Sam Harris have the same Sort of hang up where they're just so bothered by the fact
that there are Religious states in the Middle East that they just end up
being pro Paul Wolfowitz and being Yeah, right Maybe we should just invade all of these terrible Islamic republics, you know It's just it gets my goat that they pray so many times a day like this is just awful They gotta do something about this.
I mean, that's not that doesn't make you an old-school liberal talking about, you know the potential Morality of pre-emptive strikes on Iranian civilians because maybe the Iranian government will get a nuke and that'll be a catastrophe because then an Islamic nation will have a nuke.
Because as we know, since Pakistan is an Islamic nation and has had nukes for decades, it just spells mass terror and doom for everyone.
Pakistan is the only nuclear-armed nation that has ever used them in combat.
That's why we know no Islamic country can ever have nukes.
It's just that simple.
It's funny because I think they accepted the frame of Jihad versus McWorld and said we have to fight for McWorld.
And I think where it's important to us as Identitarians is that the very idea of us having our own civilization or of us having a civilization that is rooted in Christianity or at least respect for the Christian tradition or what our people made out of it, that's just completely foreign to them.
They can't go down that road and they can't really say things like, If you admit all these millions of Muslims, you're going to obviously get these problems.
But they can't say that, because everything has to be a battle of ideas and abstractions, so therefore you actually get the much more...
Violent and disastrous policy of let's invade everybody.
Well, and this really shows that the new atheists were always kind of like the system's bad boys, right?
Right.
So they really hated Islam.
But the manner in which they did hate Islam or do hate Islam is in the most like narrative approved way, which is being really pro-war.
But none of them have ever been like, oh, well, since Islam is so dangerous, that should really inform our immigration policies and the immigration policies of Europe.
They never went down that route.
Sam Harris has never been like, well, maybe we should just bar all Muslims from coming here since it's so bad.
But he has said, well, maybe we should do these tactical bombing runs on Tehran because they're so bad.
And that's, again, because it's way, incredibly, I mean, unbelievably, it's way less controversial to advocate for bombing random foreign countries than it is to be like, we're just not going to let in certain kinds of people.
I mean, as a slight...
Aside, in the first column after September 11th, in which one of her friends was killed, you know, Ann Coulter famously wrote, we need to bomb their cities, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity, and she got fired from National Review for that.
The part that got everybody upset was convert them to Christianity.
They killed their leaders and bombed their cities.
That was policy.
Yeah, nobody cared about that, but the idea that We were actually defending something or advancing something or that there was something more at stake other than like, oh our property and our stuff are here and we need to make sure our marketplace runs in an efficient way.
Like even the conservatives couldn't bring themselves to say that.
And of course I know when Christopher Hitchens died, not that I'm spitting on the memory of a dead man, I think there were a lot of people who were a lot worse than Hitchens.
Oh sure.
And I actually do give him credit for standing up for free speech even in the most quote-unquote extreme examples.
I don't know whether he would still be doing that now.
I know that if he would still be doing that, he wouldn't have a platform.
Certainly not at Slate.
It's important to remember that this whole New Atheist Movement, there were two things going on here.
One, it was a pushback against evangelical Christianity and what was seen as their influence in the Bush administration, especially in the second term, where he had basically won office on a pledge to pass a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
And of course then he turned around and tried to privatize Social Security instead, and that was the end of the second term.
And then there was the intellectual case about, well, can we still defend organized religion?
And that's where Daniel Dennett really came in because he was the person who was arguing that, well, consciousness is kind of an illusion.
This is just sort of the way the brain processes reality and there's nothing particularly special about you.
This isn't the product of creation.
It's a product of evolution and trial and error on a long-term scale.
But it was significant that I think I mean, he was the one who I think had the most important things to say and the most substantive things to say, but he was clearly the least popular.
Because that's not really what people were interested in.
Exactly.
You don't get attention for any of that, and Hitchens and Dawkins and Harris...
Yeah, dunking on pastors and stuff.
Somewhat in that order really thrive on the controversy of them being, you know, rude to evangelicals, of them being really condescending and talking smack about Bill O'Reilly.
Right.
That was really their fuel.
Right.
Which, again, just gave them this really almost sort of privileged position in the culture wars that were going on at the time.
Because, while they were doing that, they were also supporting all of these neoconservative foreign policy moves, which let them be these kind of reasonable centrists.
Exactly.
Look, I'm not into Bush's silly provincial anti-gay stuff, but he's absolutely correct when it comes to the really important things, which is invading Iraq, so that we are all safer.
And the way they would do it is, they wouldn't just say, So it's safer.
I mean, Christopher Hitchens, of course, was always wearing, like, the pin with the Kurdistan flag, which, of course, is the cause of all leftists throughout the world, you know, the little anarchist zone in Kurdistan and everything else.
Because all those Kurds are atheists, just like Hitchens, right?
He's a very, very consistent guy.
He hated all religious people equally.
He championed this idea and it was implicit in everything he was saying in his work in the later years especially and this is something that we on the right now are starting to come around to.
I mean the funny thing about people who say America first is it's America first one day and then the next day is like America is like the leading force for all the negative things in the world.
Right.
And Hitchens actually would be a part of that latter camp and he'd be like no but all those terrible things America is doing is good.
Right.
Are good because it's They're pushing out left-wing social policies, and they're destroying tradition, and they're destroying religion, and they're destroying nation states, and they're making sure that we just live in a global shopping mall.
Right.
And something I never understood about the right-wingers who played patty cake with Hitchens because he was so for All of these, you know, all these invasions and all of this smack talk about, you know, Islam and Jihad and all of this stuff is like, you know, the way he talks about them, the way he talked about these Muslim theocracies, it's like, what do you guys think he would say if y'all created a breakaway evangelical nation that was like, you know, as like,
That had Christianity in its governing doctrine to the extent that Iran has Islam in its governing doctrine.
Right.
You know, he would be just as condescending.
I mean, maybe he would want to bomb that place too.
Right.
Right?
It was just really convenient for Hitchens and also for Harris to find a group of very religious people who were also largely despised by the powerful.
Well, there's the obvious parallel here, if you look at the polls, what evangelicals think about Israel, and then the way certain people view evangelicals, where it's a very one-sided relationship.
And I think that was exactly what was happening with Christopher Hitchens, where he would say things about American foreign policy, and the Republicans would be like, oh, he's one of us, look, this fashionable guy is actually on our side, but then when you actually boiled it down, it's like, no, he doesn't like you guys.
He's not on the right.
And this also leads to, you know, the so-called intellectual dark web, which Harris supposedly is a part of.
You know, your Jordan Petersons, your reasonable centrists, where they have these mild critiques of left-wing orthodoxy, taking on what I would say are some pretty easy targets, but then not following through with the logic of those arguments.
But that's what allows them to have a certain platform, and that's what allows them to say certain things.
I mean, Sam Harris He'll go after the repression of speech on campus.
I think he left Patreon because he said it was politically biased.
He would talk about the problems of the woke left.
Still does.
Dawkins, of course, recently lost some lifetime award for humanism or something because he wasn't militant enough about supporting transgenderism.
I think he had some sort of suggestion of doubt that this was a real thing.
Well, he made the obvious comparison of, well, if we don't think people can be transracial, like if a white person can't just say, oh, I'm black, like if that doesn't follow, why can somebody with male genitalia just be like, oh, I am a woman and we all just accept it?
And of course, lots of people are trying to pull off the transracial thing either sincerely or in bad faith in order to get certain government benefits or jobs or whatever else.
I think that Really, it's just the three of the so-called four horsemen, because Dennett basically retreated back to academia afterward.
Yeah, I have no issue with that guy.
And Dawkins and Harris...
I mean, Harris has got his podcast and his intellectual dark web thing where you're moderate centrist and Dawkins just kind of steps into one rake after another like Sideshow Bob, where he keeps walking into these traps and acting surprised that this is happening to him.
And it's like, well, you set this up.
And every once in a while he'll say something to the effect that, wow, maybe this old Christian culture that allowed me to do all these things wasn't quite as so bad and tyrannical as I made it out to be.
But rather than following through on that, you know, the very next thing is like, actually, the right-wingers are stupid and they should all be killed and whatever.
He doesn't say they should all be killed.
He says how stupid they are and shouldn't have any influence.
The most cringe thing I can... I think that has ever actually happened is I think he endorsed the word brights.
For replacing the word atheist.
That atheists should self-identify as brights.
And this was what underlay a lot of that movement was just showing, oh we're the better sort of white people.
We're not like these other ones.
Yeah, we're not rednecks.
We're not hillbillies.
Right, we're not rubes.
Yeah, and it was all, I think it was, you know, all for, all for what?
Like, I used to watch You know, these legendary debates between Hitchens and all of these other defenders of religious freedoms.
There were some good Christian apologists and people like that.
William Craiglin or something like that and all these other guys.
They've all dropped off the face of the earth too.
Something Hitchens used to, almost every one of these debates, He would make this joke with, you know, raised eyebrows and, like, a little wink of, the only time I have ever prayed was for an erection.
Yeah.
It would always get, you know, this big, you know... Oh, you're titillating the roof.
Yeah, the crowd would go wild.
Oh man, like isn't that something he's so clever like he's so different and something
And then he often follows us up by and when I say that people always want to know if it worked
Right, I know the crowd would go wild again. There's a you know, there's there's the old saying of
You know the jokes people tell says a lot about them, right?
Right.
That really applies here.
It's like, oh, the one time turning to God or a higher power felt perhaps important to you was in order to have sex.
Right.
That was the most important thing you could think of.
You never in desperation prayed for, I don't know, world peace or economic prosperity.
It would have been just like something of the sublime.
I mean, there have been plenty of atheists who have said, Looked at a church, who have looked at a ruin, who have looked at a sunrise, who have said, there is something that transcends our everyday existence.
Something that speaks to the highest and best within us.
That doesn't necessarily imply belief in a personal God, but he didn't even go there.
Right.
Instead, it was just mind in the gutter.
Yeah.
It was really frustrating about it.
And again, I was like, one of the reasons I still, you know, can't bring myself to say, well, he was just worthless, is not just because how rare it was that you actually have somebody who defended free speech, who had something to lose by doing so.
But this was a guy who was a product of a British education system and a British society, really, that no longer exists.
And so, I mean, he was obviously incredibly well-read.
He was incredibly skilled at being able to pull references from all over the place and put it into a cogent argument and deploy it in Rapid time.
He wasn't bilingual, interestingly enough, which you wrote about quite a bit.
You would think that he would be the type of guy who would speak several languages, but he didn't.
But even the kind of system that created him no longer exists.
And one of the main reasons it no longer exists is because of people like him.
Because when he was a younger radical, he was part of that group that tore it all down.
And so, when you're sort of taking aim at the past in this...
Oh, this is all so stuffy, but maybe there are some things worth preserving from it.
We still want to keep references to art and literature.
Dawkins has said things like, well, people should read the Bible as literature and everything like that.
It just doesn't work that way.
A culture comes from the cult.
You have to have a foundation.
You have to have a touchstone that everybody comes from.
You have to have something at least for people to know before they can dissent from.
Yeah.
And these guys help tear all that down.
And offer truly nothing to replace it with.
They've never come even close to providing any kind of comprehensive or coherent moral order that will replace Christianity in the West or religion at large generally everywhere.
Right.
It's like the scene in Man for All Seasons where the guy says, you know, we tear down every law in England to get to the devil.
And then Thomas Moore says, and having done that, once you've torn down all the walls of England and the devil turns around to face you, where would you go for protection?
They had ripped apart the culture, there was nothing left except this sterile McWorld, and then they wonder why young people are being attracted to quote-unquote extremes of left and right that at least offer something.
At least offer some structure of meaning that offer something beyond, hey, here's Bono singing about some vague sense of global charity or something like that.
Right, well in another debate, I believe this was on Bill Maher's old show, The Black Celebrity Most Deaf was on with Christopher Hitchens, and Most Deaf, credit where credit is due, said something to the effect of...
Look, everybody's got a religion.
Everybody's got a god.
I don't care what you call it.
I don't care if it's organized or not.
We all worship something.
We all have something higher that we aspire towards.
And Hitchens, being Christopher Hitchens, had a lowball of cognac or whiskey or something and raised it up to a toast and was like, I've got it right here.
I think he called him Mr. Deaf, too.
I think that would get him called racist and kicked off the air.
That is hilarious, Mr. Def.
But again, you know, it's like the New Atheists are some of the only guys who can debate just like, you know, random black celebrities and it's like, oh yeah, the random black celebrity won because Hitchens reply to that very insightful comment was, well, I love drinking.
Drinking is my god.
I worship alcohol.
Right.
You know, that's like an old, it's an old punk song by Noah Fax or something.
Yeah.
Like, you know, beer is my religion and this is where I pray.
Punk was never good.
I just think it was so, it was just, especially for Hitchens, to a lesser extent Harris, it was always this like, we want to replace religion with this kind of smug, Nihilism that's kind of dressed up with scientific language.
I mean, Hitchens died prematurely because he drank and smoked so much and he was very proud of that.
Again, to his credit.
I mean, his last...
essays about death and meditations on death and didn't did contain some regrets about the way he had lived his life in terms if only because he wouldn't be there for his kids and everything else and his wife so I mean I don't want to dunk on him be like haha you got what you deserved or something like that I think it is sad that he died when he did but You're right, because what they offered really was just something sterile.
I mean, it was basically an ideology to make the world safe for consumerism.
And you're especially right when you say that it was just sort of this smug, ironic...
Oh, we're better than these stupid rubes.
That Daily Show Jon Stewart type thing where he would just read a quote and then make a face at the camera.
And that's the joke.
And so that ultimately, even though he actually looks better than so-called comedians today, It led to that environment of comedy today where it's not even, there aren't even jokes, they're just signals to an in-group.
Yeah.
And by laughing at the joke, you show you're in the in-group.
There's no message being communicated, there's nothing being pointed out, it's just us versus them and that's all there is to it.
That's right.
And that's why I think these guys were sort of a, they were an important movement because out of this, you got the beginnings of the alt-right and you got the beginnings of what I would say is the woke left.
Let's start with the alt-right first.
And as somebody who can, I think, speak with a little bit of credibility on this, like how it develops.
I mean, before the alt-right was the alt-right, I mean, the main issue, immigration was always there, right?
But it wasn't even the main issue.
I mean, when you think of the alternative right, okay, what was an alternative to?
It was the alternative to the policies of George W. Bush.
I mean, the main thing that people were talking about was foreign policy.
And on that thing, Hitchens was aligned with President Bush.
And Harris as well, who's now considered this big gateway drug to the alt-right, which I think is just freakishly overstated.
I'm sure you could find an example of somebody who jumped from Sam Harris to Jared Taylor.
The fact that this was published anonymously, quote, It nearly turned me into a racist by Anonymous and The Guardian.
Yeah, I remember when this came out.
It started with Sam Harris, moved on to Milo Yiannopoulos, and almost led to full-scale Islamophobia.
If it can happen to a lifelong liberal, it could happen to anyone.
I just can't imagine going through life this way.
If you see an article, you're so traumatized that you have to run to the Guardian.
Under anonymous, no less.
You can't even give your name.
You're that Poisoned and tainted and write a story about how Sam Harris almost turned you into an evil guy.
But I mean the one thing that I will say where something could have come out of this is if you base your whole personality on, oh I don't care about who I'm offending.
And I'm a contrarian, and I really love science, and science is the answer, and science will lead us to everything, and even Hitchens would say things like, oh, there's more beauty in like a galaxy or something than whatever religious imagination can conjure up.
Dawkins would say much the same.
If you say, okay, I'm gonna follow science wherever it goes, what happens when you start reading about evolutionary biology, and what happens when you start saying, does evolution apply to humans?
Or does it just magically not apply to us just because?
And what happens when you start thinking about race?
And what happens when you start thinking about population groups?
And what happens when you start thinking about IQ?
Especially when you're calling yourself bright and trying to pretend you're smarter than everyone else and IQ becomes your measure for a person's worth.
I mean some of those people are going to start looking into things and hopefully they'll lose some of the self-importance and snobbery, but they're going to look at it and say, well, wait a minute, the world is not the way respectable liberals told me it was.
And they're going to start looking into other things.
And I think a good chunk of the original alt-right were those people.
How many people have you met who Reed Amran or Reed Videar, or part of what at least used to be called the alt-right, came in by way of the New Atheists I'm not sure I've ever met somebody.
I wouldn't say there were that many in terms of who stuck with it, but I think there is a real distinction between the alt-right, which was something which was well before Trump, and didn't, it would have existed without Trump, it existed before Trump.
But it was really, I would say, kind of urban.
Not really concerned with spirituality or altogether dismissive of it.
And it was more basically, oh I'm a gentrifying liberal who also knows what's happening in terms of race and IQ and the consequences of certain social policies and things like that.
That was sort of the demographic.
But the alt-right was also really influenced by paleo-conservatism, paleo-libertarianism, which always had this very Catholic underpinning.
Yeah, but I mean, would you say the early people who were involved in the alt-right were deeply committed to, say, the pro-life movement?
I mean, I wouldn't.
No, by no means, but that's a false binary that you're either pro-life or into Christopher Hitchens.
No, but I think that You know, as we were saying with foreign policy, the initial alternative right was a response to what mainstream conservatism was at that time.
And that wasn't just being anti-interventionist at a time when the right was defined by support for the Iraq war, but it was also downplaying a lot of the social conservatism, because even though Bush didn't actually do anything about it, the bedrock of his coalition were evangelical voters who were pro-life, who wanted marriage amendment to the Constitution and everything else.
And so the people who would come in would say, oh, either this stuff doesn't matter, I disagree with it,
or it's just being used and it's not the real issue, these other things are more
important.
I think now people who are coming in post-Trump are much more religious and see it as much more central.
But that's also because the culture has just collapsed utterly in the last eight years.
I mean, if you showed an evangelical, the America of now, from the perspective of 2000, they would assume that Satan is ruling the earth or, you know, all the people were talking about the tribulation would assume it's already underway or something.
I guess this is probably the part of the show where I should say that I am an atheist and have been Basically, always.
I mean, I wasn't raised in a religion of any kind.
Both my parents are lapsed Catholics.
If you asked me when I was seven, if I was an atheist, I'd have asked, well, what do you mean?
But I had no... I mean, I didn't even really learn about the story of Adam and Eve until I was in middle school or something.
I was raised in a very, very secular environment, which I think is part of the reason
why I hate the new atheists so much, is it's part of that adage of,
there's nothing I hate more than a bad argument for something I agree with.
Where all of these new atheists act like they are like, let's say the leaders
of this new anti-religion, religion.
Bye.
But they really, there's no obvious reason, to me at least, why not believing in God would lead you to a lot of the conclusions that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens reached about, I mean, just a whole plethora of issues.
And moreover, I find it, kind of like a neutral atheist, I find it So strange that all of these guys are so deeply bothered by the fact that somebody somewhere is praying.
Yeah.
It really eats them up to know that there are religious families who send their kids To church, or to temple, or to whatever.
It's a reversal of what Mencken said about Puritanism.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And I find it moreover so bizarre that they thought this was one of the big moral issues of our time, is that there are people in the South and the West and the Midwest who attend megachurches.
And maybe even people you know.
Right, and that they don't believe in gay marriage.
You know, and that was really, I mean, for the new atheists, To buy into that, that was essentially just drinking the liberal Kool-Aid of the mid-aughts of evangelicalism is about to just sweep the nation and we are going to live under this form of, like, Christian fascism where, you know, George W. Bush is going to become president forever and Blackwater is going to become his royal guard and they're going to start executing gays in the street.
I mean, if you look at some of the leftist takes back then.
And all of this weird fantasy stuff.
And the New Atheists bought into that whole hog And then just added this kind of anti-Islam to it, which is sort of what Bill Mauer does as well.
Bill Mauer is basically one of these new atheists himself.
He doesn't get to label as often.
But it's that same smug, cultural cosmopolitan, anti-Heartland, anti-evangelical, like, condescendingly asking Ann Coulter,
like, oh, but doesn't your friend Jesus say love thy neighbor or whatever?
But then they also, like, Not that I've ever read the Bible.
But then they also really hate Hamas.
Ergo, there's something new and different, and they're beyond just
Democrat or Republican. They're above the culture war somehow.
And it's really not true, because it's really easy to
be important in politics and have this really anti-Islam perspective.
That's not controversial.
Maybe that's controversial on Fox or something, but it's not even that controversial in the New York Times or in the Wall Street Journal.
You can write op-eds there about how we need to bomb Iran and all this stuff.
New Atheist just combined that with just like John Stewart snarky liberalism of just the worst kind and it's like so that's what atheism means to you?
Like atheism just means being a condescending liberal and then also being really anti-Islam.
Like that's the best worldview you could come up with.
You know, Christianity has been the guiding light of the West for two millennia, and you
have broken with it so definitively that you fit very, very comfortably into the political
discourse.
All of its establishments and everything else.
Yeah, and you still manage to not be controversial at all.
I mean, it's like, there are such bigger issues that you can think about, you know, with or
without atheism.
Regardless of whether or not there is a God above, immigration is this really important issue.
It's going to shape our future fundamentally.
Demographics.
It's going to shape our present and the here and now.
Right.
Demographics are of immense consequence regardless of You know, Mary's virgin birth of Jesus and whether or not that's true, that's immaterial to like a lot of the really important issues we face about law and order, for example.
And then with just everything going on in America...
That Bill Nye, the science guy, will survey the status of the nation.
Bill Nye, the B.A.
and mechanics guy.
The status of the culture and say, you know, it's possible that parents who homeschool their children and tell those children that evolution isn't real, maybe Health and Human Services should get involved and take those children away from those parents.
Because boy, if we know anything, it's that, you know, kids who just go into the system in foster care or whatever, you know, those kids are just, they'll be way better off in that environment than being told evolution isn't real.
Like, it doesn't even...
For the vast, vast majority of people, it doesn't matter if you believe in evolution or not.
I mean, the number of professions for which that is relevant to is just tiny.
I mean, you can be a successful rocket scientist and not believe in evolution.
It just doesn't matter on a day-to-day basis.
I don't even think you necessarily have to believe in evolution to note certain differences in behavior among population groups.
I mean, historically, Christians have been race realists.
I mean, we talked about this, I think, The first ever episode of Left Right and White, there's kind of the thing of like everything in the West is sort of before and after 1968, right?
Because before 1968 or whatever year you want to choose, I mean, everybody acknowledged that racial differences were real.
I mean, it was just taken for granted, you know, regardless of, I mean, racial consciousness doesn't necessarily like need or not need religion, but We're getting into the weeds here.
here. You know, having said all of that, like, why do the new atheists pick the cultural
battles that they do? And I generally find that the answer is because they're pretty
They know it's going to get a lot of hits on YouTube.
They know just how far to push the envelope to get on TV.
And they know who you can go after.
And be a big news story, but never push it so far as to stop getting invited onto TV.
They're just masters at occupying This media space of always being just controversial enough and never too much.
Right.
Which is ultimately meaningless.
You're not going to get in trouble for attacking Sarah Palin.
You're not going to get in trouble for going after Pat Robertson.
Like, wow, it's so daring.
And it's like, is that the best?
Atheism is a pretty meaningful position to take in the sense that it's Not particularly normal.
There aren't actually that many atheists in the West, especially not in the United States.
So for you to go out on a limb and say, I'm an atheist, atheism is really important, everybody needs to be an atheist, this is such a big deal.
You're trying to convert people to atheism.
Right, exactly.
You're proselytizing constantly on behalf of atheism.
But then, like, what's the result?
It's like, oh, well, the result for Hitchens is I only ever pray if I need a hard-on.
Right.
And I love to drink because whatever, nothing matters.
For Harris, it's like, well, I hate irrational people.
And, you know, all of these irrational people, like Trump supporters from Ohio or Sarah Palin, you know, they're all just losers.
And I'm much better than them.
And it's really important that you all listen to me talk about how superior I am to them.
It's like, you don't need Atheism to feel that way, and if you feel that way...
It is what it is.
Congratulations.
But you're not, you know, you're not this super enlightened, brilliant person.
And all of them act like atheism is this, like, absolute revelation that it will bring about this new renaissance.
That if everybody just becomes an atheist, everything will be so much better.
Everybody will be so more logical and benevolent and loving.
But then you look at the kind of day-to-day things that they're into.
It's like, okay, so everybody becomes an atheist.
We invade Iran.
We start censoring Sarah Palin more often.
I don't know, maybe we bring in the National Guard to shut down some of these megachurches because, you know, these poor people in the suburbs, you know, they cannot have nice things.
They're not allowed to enjoy this thing that isn't bothering anybody else.
Right.
That's absolutely horrible.
It's like, what kind of society would that be?
I know a lot of people say this is a cheap shot, but none of them ever address the fact that the most famous atheistic societies of modern history have been totalitarian communist states, which are way worse than anything any of these evangelicals would set up on their worst days!
One of the biggest dodges Christopher Hitchens had when he debated his brother Peter Hitchens.
And Peter Hitchens owned up... Peter Hitchens, of course, is a Christian believer.
Yeah, basically a paleocon, for those not in the know.
Right, and he's got a lot of value in his writing.
Maybe he'll be a subject of a future one.
But Peter Hitchens basically asked him, you know, I've admitted that there are times when Christians got it wrong.
Why can't you simply admit That the Soviet Union did all these things and committed all these atrocities and that these communist regimes
I'm responsible for all these things.
And Christopher Hitchens' response was something along the lines of, oh, well, they weren't following the guidelines of humanism and, you know, which is just... That wasn't real atheism.
Exactly.
Where it's just like, oh, well, you know, that's not how I define it, so therefore I'm not held to be culpable.
I mean, you could say anything then, you know.
Well, the real America has never been tried, so therefore we haven't done anything.
Exactly.
Well, and you end up in this, at this point where it's like, okay, so some Christian governments Have been, you know, tolerant good governments and others have not been.
And some atheist governments have been good and tolerant and others have been horrific.
It's like, well then maybe this isn't that important.
Maybe at the end of the day, believing in God or not believing in God isn't the ultimate, isn't the most determining factor over whether or not a society or a person is good.
Well, speaking for the theists, I mean I would say that societies that lack a sense of the sacred I tend to self-destruct.
That said, I don't think that every single person has to subscribe to a particular form of what that should be.
But I will say that when we talk about the new atheism, we aren't talking about something that has come and gone.
I mean, it is a movement of the past, and I think what matters now is what it led to, which you accurately described as basically just an anti-culture of snark.
I mean, it was really just a question of saying, oh, we're in this social position.
And so you don't really believe, it's not even really about God or it's even about Christianity or anything like that.
It's just about, I don't like middle class Republican voters, essentially.
And at the end of the day, you can say, well, Islam is bad.
But you can't really say anything about like, well, maybe we should stop them from immigrating into Europe because that would put you on the side of people you consider to be gross and unfashionable.
And that's ultimately more important.
If you say, well, where do they get their ultimate meaning from?
That is where they get their ultimate meaning from.
And I think that just as there were some people who looked at these arguments and went into the direction of what could be considered the precursor to the alt-right or the beginning alternative right before Trump, There were a lot of other people who took that and just took the sense of alienation from white America, majority white America, and turned that into the woke left, which now at this point really has become
A religion.
Not a substitute religion, it's a religion.
I mean, you have straight-up claims of supernatural events, you have a cult of martyrs and saints, you have all sorts of outbreaks of emotional hysteria and people screaming and going nuts, the same way you would read about mass panic during the Middle Ages when everybody would claim that a demon was possessing a village or something like that.
And interestingly enough, historically, when you look at the periods of the greatest witch burnings and religious hysteria, It wasn't when the Catholic Church was unchallenged.
It was like right when its power was starting to fall apart with the Reformation.
It was during these times of turmoil.
And so, why do we have this outbreak of religious hysteria now?
Why do we also, some would even argue, maybe QAnon as sort of a substitute religion on the right?
Where you have these claims that, you know, God is going to intervene in this thing to save America or something else.
I think it's because you have this lack of societal agreement about what defines us.
You don't have a sacred center.
You don't have something where you say, this is what it means to be an American.
This is what it means to have an identity.
Instead it's just one group, which I would say is the left, which is defined entirely by its resentments.
It has no positive vision of where they want to take things.
It has no desire except just to tear down stuff.
And then on the other side, you have these right-wingers, the majority, you know, mainstream conservatives, quote-unquote, who are just kind of haplessly opposing what's happening and saying over and over again, isn't it terrible how bad things are?
And then I would like to think, we're the guys out there saying like, actually, there are solutions to these problems.
Yeah, it doesn't have to be this way.
Yeah, a different kind of world is possible.
Now, I would say that you do need Sort of a religious temperament or belief or a sense of, I don't know, duty, destiny, whatever you want to call it, mission, to go forward with this kind of thing, at least for most people, at least on a societal level.
But it's interesting to look at where these quote-unquote new atheists ended up.
I mean, Dawkins He's sort of like J.K.
Rowling in that he's like one of these hero figures who now his name cannot be spoken in certain... That's a really, really strong analogy.
Yeah, people don't care.
I mean, even... You don't get any credit for doing this!
His autobiography came out in 2014, and that didn't make a fourth of the splash that it would have had it been released in 2007.
Right.
And now, yeah, now he's just this punching bag.
Were you and I joking last week, I think it was?
Yeah, like Sideshow Bob, he's just constantly stepping out of the ring.
Greg and I have no idea why Richard Dawkins is still on Twitter.
He just time and time again puts his foot in his mouth.
Yeah, he just keeps blundering into traps that nobody's laid out for him.
It's his own fans that rip him apart because they took out atheism and then did actually build something after it which is this like woke monstrosity religion which is terrible and I'm not endorsing but it's funny that Dawkins can't You know, for all, you know, Dawkins who thinks he should be called a bright and, you know, claims that atheists are smarter than religious people, Dawkins himself doesn't get the role he played in creating these woke, one-time fans of his that now insist that he shouldn't even be considered a humanist and that he should be stripped of these titles and these awards because they found... That he's just as bad as Watto.
Because he found, you know, because they found something to believe in after atheism and For Dawkins, Dawkins is just kind of this aloof nerd who's just like...
You know, he found atheism, he's like very smug and satisfied with that and now he just wants to study various scientific questions and it's like, yeah, that's not going to cut it for most people.
Very few people are going to find that to be a meaningful life and, you know, not that many people are going to let you just leave it, you know?
But also this is where it gets important when you say, oh, I love science and I'm willing to follow where the science leads.
We know they're not willing to follow where the science leads.
I mean, at the end of the day, if you believe in The scientific method.
Science as a method, not science as a religion, not science as a way to dunk on the grandmother who took you to church and you're resentful because you had to wear like scratchy pants early on a Sunday morning or something.
But if you like actually believe in the idea of uncovering the mysteries of the natural world, you're gonna run into the fact that egalitarianism isn't true.
It's just not true.
It doesn't matter how many people you censor.
It doesn't matter how loudly you scream.
It doesn't matter how many times George Floyd appears in your mirror after you say Black Lives Matter three times and turn around in a circle.
Whatever crazy fantasy you have.
The public school test scores are not going to be the same.
You're still going to have these social problems wherever you are.
You can still try these same liberal policies and you're still going to end up with the same failures.
And I think the reason the new atheism died as quickly as it did and left really nothing behind except maybe these split into these two movements that really aren't even aware they come from this.
Is because they weren't willing to follow where the science led.
I mean you could find like individual, I don't know, e-celebs, and I almost used the face, F word, that they use for people who try to make themselves into like internet cult heroes.
People who started off as like new atheists, but then went in politically in correct directions.
Maybe had a career for a while getting some money baiting the woke people and the PC people and then lost everything because they got booted off the platform and that's the last you ever heard from them.
I mean at the end of the day you have to ask yourself did this have any real contribution in and of itself not what it led to but did this have anything to say about the human condition and I would say no.
I mean, it was completely pointless.
It's really hard to say.
You cannot think of a guy who... I can't think of a public intellectual who is more famous, more beloved, omnipresent on the media.
When he died, every single publication from every single wing of every movement gave him this worshipful obituary.
And yet, I can't think of any influence Christopher Hitchens has on anyone today, whatsoever.
He wouldn't be able to get published at a college newspaper, let alone Slate.
Yeah, that's certainly true.
I believe Jamie Kirchick is probably the most prominent journalist and commentator who considers Christopher Hitchens to be an enormous influence of his.
But even with that... I remember when he was important.
When's the last time anybody heard anything from him?
Sure, he took the Never Trump train to largely irrelevancy.
But even with him, You know, I take him at his word that Hitchens was influential on him, and I think that's a lot of the reason why Kirchick is just so polemical and so condescending.
I mean, I think Hitchens was really influential on him in that way, but Kirchick is a religious Jew and was a neocon sort of before it was cool.
Like, his actual policy beliefs aren't really That impacted by Hitchens, because Hitchens' actual policy prescriptions weren't very unique.
What was unique was his boastfulness and his polemical hooks.
And they're overemphasized in media now.
It's sort of like when we talk about Liz Cheney.
Does Liz Cheney have a constituency in the Republican Party, like a mass appeal?
Not really, but she can always turn to the New York Times.
Right, that's right, yeah.
And I think that's true of neoconservatism generally.
I mean, I guess the big question, and this goes for all of us who are identitarians, if you're trying to define the West, more importantly defend the West, on the grounds of the post-enlightenment West, the West defined as the place of tolerance and the open society and democracy and liberal values, At the end of the day, does anyone really believe in those things?
Or is that just the stage in the decline?
One civilization collapsing and turning into something else?
Because a guy like Christopher Hitchens, for all his faults, I think really did believe in ideas of anti-discrimination, free speech, the marketplace of ideas, the idea of having civil debate with anyone regardless of who they are.
Of not assaulting people in the streets?
Debate, anyway.
Maybe not civil debate.
I would not go that far.
Yeah, but I mean there's a difference between calling someone the most filthy names in the book.
At least he would do it to your face, you know?
He would do it at the podium, and I actually give him credit for that.
As opposed to, you know, putting a mask on and hitting him over the back of the head when their back is turned.
Sure.
But when he died, I mean, that was sort of like the last person who actually seemed to believe in any of this stuff.
Now, if you look at what the left is, it's much more full of belief in tearing something down, even if they don't have a precise idea of what they want to put in its place.
And as far as identitarians go, you know, we're not defending the West on the grounds of, well, it's the most liberal civilization and therefore is the one worth defending.
We wouldn't have all these problems.
Which was the basis of a lot of new atheists' anti-Islam posture.
And that was also the basis of a lot of the so-called conservative defenses of the Iraq War and everything else.
Right, we have to make sure women have rights.
Right, the West is great because, you know, someday we'll have PhDs in feminism in Baghdad or something.
And it's like, well, okay, but...
Is that something to die for?
A. And is that something we can force on alien societies at the point of a gun?
B. And most importantly, C. Is that such a great thing anyway?
Because it seems to be creating a society where everybody's miserable and screaming at each other all the time.
Yeah, well, what's funny about the new atheists is I think part of the reason they're sort of blind to the vacuum that atheism can create is that for whatever weird personality traits they personally have, it did not create a sort of vacuum for them, or if it did, they were content to fill it with booze and cigarettes in the case of Hitchens, or in the case of Harris and Hawkins, Dawkins, excuse me, of just being These condescending kind of public intellectuals are like, well, that is what is best in life.
Yeah, and there's just something... I am not, in my background or belief or anything like that, I'm not the evangelical Christian from the South or anything like that, but I want to defend these people.
And then the New Atheism, when I saw that movement coming up, it made me Like these people a lot more and want to fight for them because it just sickened me how they were constantly being attacked even though they had no real power anywhere where it mattered.
I mean, and this was also the idea of betrayal, which I guess is just inherent to the right.
The right never loses, right?
It's just betrayed.
And when you saw George W. Bush get re-elected on this socially conservative message, I mean, you had all these homeschoolers and Christians working really hard to get him in the office, and the first thing he did was turn around and cut the taxes of all the people who despise them, and enable the woke capital that we have to deal with today.
I mean, all of this was so clear and was coming for so long, And there's just something sickening about looking down on your own people.
And even if you don't agree with them on a certain religious question or something else, the religion takes root among a people because it speaks to something in them.
It's not just a random thing.
It's like, oh, we could have been worshipping Mithras or something.
No, there's a reason why a religion takes root in a people in the form it does.
Richard Dawkins used to always make this argument of Well, everybody is an atheist minus one god, their own god.
Right.
So I am simply, like everybody else, I'm just an atheist plus one god, where everybody is an atheist minus one god.
Number's a little different from me.
And it's like, well, so Dawkins, do you believe people just choose their religions, like, at random?
It's this weird...
It's this weird form of academic autism.
It's like, do you not believe sociology is real?
It matters to people that they have the same god as their ancestors.
Right.
For most people that's what religion was at the beginning.
It was literal ancestor worship.
It was literally saying, I am of this line and my gods are, I mean the founders of our line were gods or demigods or something like that.
Just about every royal family, even today, if you say where they derive from, they'll trace it back to a god.
Right.
And sometimes you'll see people pull out a map and be like, wow, isn't it crazy that all the people who live in this area randomly chose this religion?
And all the people, it's like, no, that's the strongest argument for religion because it's this coherent force that provides meaning and structure and a value system.
And the type of person who says, oh, I'm going to file a lawsuit Because some valedictorian said, God bless America.
Yeah.
Or because the currency has some vaguely religious slogan.
I'm gonna make a big fuss about this.
I would argue that they're not really objecting to God.
They're objecting to this idea of being part of the people.
They really want to say, no, I'm different.
I'm not like you.
You know, what you guys are doing is totally different because I'm special and I don't have to be a part of your rituals and everything else.
That's really celibistic.
Right.
When you're saying, God bless America, To some extent, yes, it's a prayer and it's a plea to the divine.
But in another way, it's just a simple statement of solidarity with your fellow citizens.
I mean, look, if we were to define Christianity as believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ, Thomas Jefferson, for example, was not a believing Christian, probably.
I mean, he created a Bible where he took all the miracles out and everything else.
But even Thomas Jefferson He issued proclamations of a day of prayer.
He didn't go out of his way to root out every reference to religion everywhere when he wanted to design the National Seal.
It was a biblical reference on one side and the first two Anglo-Saxons who came to England on the other.
I mean, this idea that we have to tear down God, that we have to tear down traditional religion, that we have to tear down traditional morality, I think in so many cases it's just an excuse to tear down white people and their traditions.
You get at people by destroying their traditions first, and then you have nothing left.
And as you say, you do ultimately... That's in the UN's definition of genocide.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, that was the original meme, right?
Diversity is just anti-white.
But if you applaud what's being done to us with any other people, Everyone would be like, oh yeah, obviously that's what's happening.
I mean, if you look at what China's doing to the Uyghurs, I mean, these same Republicans who are beating their chest and calling for World War III, they're really, really upset about what's being done to Chinese Muslims and really, really upset about what's being done to their religion.
But as far as their own constituents and the religion that they supposedly believe in, how many of them actually do, I mean, they just don't seem to care.
I mean, I'm a bigger defender of white Christians in this country than their so-called church leaders.
If you look at things like the Southern Baptist Convention, the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops, I mean, all of these people are just gleefully plunging the knife into the back of their own people.
I think that what really is the takeaway from something like this is, it's not just, when we say, what is a people?
It's clearly not just genetic, right?
Because if it was just genetic, we wouldn't have a problem.
Sam Francis said as much.
Right.
I think it's also a mistake to say, well, it's just purely religion.
Because especially now when you do have global communications and global religious debate and everything else, there's much more of an element of choice involved.
And it's not something that just gets passed down generation to generation unchallenged.
But a people is a union of a culture, a tradition, of a kinship, of literal genetic familiarity.
All of those things coexist in some way and we can argue about what's more important or what's the defining factor.
But when people try to tear apart religion or tear apart particularly the predominant religion of most white people, I can't help but see that as an attack on white people themselves.
And it's especially frustrating, and this may be a topic for another day, The leaders of the so-called Christian right in this country have been cataclysmic failures in terms of fighting, not just fighting off this attack, but
They keep doing these workshops on structural racism and everything else, and then wonder why they lose 2% of their congregations every year.
I mean, if you look at, you alluded to before, how unusual it is to be an atheist in this country, because the U.S.
traditionally has been seen as more Christian than other Western democracies.
But that's not really true anymore.
Even just over the last 10 years, the amount of Bible-believing Christians has plummeted.
It's clearly not a majority anymore.
And that's partially because the churches don't offer anything meaningfully different than what you'll get from the New York Times.
It's just the same site, guys.
Yeah, it's just only you vaguely mutter something about God, but at the end of the day, is that so different?
You'll get some liberal journalist who will say something like, oh, God is love, or, you know, some meaningless statement.
And a church is a building block of a people.
Yeah, for an evangelical leader to say something like, God is love and love is God, is basically as vacuous as Hitchens and company saying, well, You know, atheism is this absolutely morally transcendent force, which is why I just sort of believe what the New York Times says.
Right, right.
And let's get back to Daniel Dennow, who I think was the most intellectually sophisticated of these guys, and it's something worth reading.
But I mean, that's when you're reflecting on science and the nature of consciousness and things like that.
There's always this kind of takeaway of, well, we're just bunches of atoms and nothing matters, and therefore we do nothing.
And sort of, they're less interested in saying that by saying, oh, we're just a bunch of atoms and nothing matters.
Somehow that turns into, and I'm so much more important than the rest of you because I know this.
I'm enlightened.
I'm separate from you guys.
And what do I care whether my people dies out?
Because what is a people anyway?
In fact, what does it mean to be human?
We're just a bunch of stuff, right?
Everything is so absolutely meaningless and existential, which is why it's imperative we remove, in God we trust, from our currency.
Exactly.
And nothing matters, but if you don't recognize my social status, I'm going to cry and scream and deplatform everyone who, like ever, says the slightest thing against me.
It really was, even though it seems kind of unimportant now in terms of what it contributed, I think it did spawn these kind of warring camps, at least of the people who were extremely online, so to speak, that we see today.
And I think the woke left and the alt-right, it's different now, but I would say the alt-right did come out of this to some extent.
Well, I mean, I see you looking skeptically at me.
I just think that, I just think a lot of people who were in that first wave were people who took science seriously and said we need to start bringing this sort of rigor, you know, human... HBD, right?
But again, the atheists don't have a monopoly on taking science seriously.
I mean, lots of people before and after them were taking this science very seriously.
I don't think you need Dawkins or Harris To get the sort of permission slip of, I will follow the science wherever it takes me.
But there's a reason why journalists, for example, you never see Harris described as anything other than, you know, ooh, right darling, or something like that.
Even though, like, I don't know anyone who would ever listen to any of his stuff or ever will.
Well, and didn't Harris say something to the effect of supporters of Trump are less rational than supporters of Osama bin Laden?
Right, but it's just more social proof, right?
I mean, it's just more of the same.
Those are just the atheistic hard facts.
Right, don't lump me in with those people.
I don't want to be like those people.
And there's also the thing that we always see from the conservative right, which is they're just so desperate to be accepted by these people who despise them.
I mean, what is it?
Even as we speak, Matt Walsh is out there raising money for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's grandmother or something like that, because this will somehow be an own.
She had posted something online about how her abuela had a house that was falling apart or something, so Matt Walsh says, oh, I'm going to raise a bunch of money for her.
To prove that we're better than them morally or something, that we'll get a pat on the head or something.
It's like, no, they're just gonna still call you racist terrorists and that's all there is to it.
And that's sort of how it was with this.
You had the people who went out there, the people who voted for Bush, the people who supported the real policies that the New Atheists supported, at least Hitchens, in regards to the Iraq War.
Did they get acceptance?
Did Bill Maher smile upon them?
No.
When they started even making a tentative move of acting in their own self-interest, as you saw with the 2016 Trump campaign, all hell broke loose.
And you saw the real fear that That combination of identity and faith and the perception of a common destiny that that could overturn this whole rotten system that they claim to be opposing, that they claim to be edgy and on the outskirts of, but they're really at the center of.
I mean, you can't be a more direct manifestation of the system than Christopher Hitchens was.
But it also shows how meaningless it all is because, you know, the man wrote incredibly.
He had more books and articles than I'll ever hope to catch up to, but does anyone care?
I think that's a place to leave it.
I think we'll close.
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