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June 18, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
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Hello everyone, it's this week's Left, Right, and White.
I'm Chris Roberts, and I'm joined, of course, by Gregory Hood.
And this week we're doing something a little different.
Instead of talking about one particular thinker, we asked our listenership for recommended topics, and we got a whole lot of recommendations.
Thanks to everybody who left a comment as to what we should talk about, and everybody who emailed me as well.
Put them all together, and we're gonna go through probably the majority of them.
And we're going to go in the order of what people brought up most frequently, which, to my surprise, I would have never guessed this, but a lot of people wanted us to talk about George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World, two very intense and very influential political novels envisioning Different, but ultimately similar future dystopias.
And I think this is largely because we recently did an episode on Gene Raspall's Camp of the Saints, which, you know, I would say Raspall's book actually makes, sort of completes, a kind of trinity with the works of Orwell and Huxley.
It's just that Raspall is controversial and considerably underappreciated.
Now, anyway.
Yeah, now he's controversial.
And, you know, as we discussed earlier, His was probably the most accurate.
I mean, nobody writes articles saying, oh, we're actually living in 1984, but people say with Raspell, like, wow, look, every day it's Camp of the Saints.
Well, I mean...
People make a lot of comparisons to, people use the term Orwellian constantly.
People don't say, like, we are living in 1984, because it's, like, way too high-handed.
But, you know, when we get news about the surveillance state, or the NSA, or these kinds of things, people, pundits are very, very quick on that draw of, oh, this is Orwellian.
Yeah, but it is, again, to refer to one of the earlier guys we talked about, as Christopher Hitchens said, you know, it's just such a cliché.
You're using other people's writing, and that was one of the things he really hated about it.
He pointed out that he couldn't, even though he was consciously trying to avoid it, he couldn't avoid making that comparison when he visited North Korea.
But then, I just saw an amusing article earlier today where a defector from North Korea attended an American University and said the brainwashing in the American University is worse.
So, what does that tell us?
Yeah, so, there's a lot there.
One, yeah, North Korea would be the only place on the planet that is really extremely very similar to 1984.
It's not just one aspect of 1984.
You know, one dimension of 1984 is comparable to, you know, this particular thing that's happening somewhere in the West.
I mean, North Korea really is 1984, but this is really instructive because that is to say that 1984, as powerful as it is, got some stuff seriously wrong because here we are a few decades later and there's only One tiny speck of an isolated nation that's really a lot like 1984.
Meanwhile, Camp of the Saints, it's like, oh, yeah, it's here.
It's happening now.
Right.
I mean, Orwell's, the thing that he was closest to the mark, I think, was where he talked about the manipulation of language.
And the way words change, I mean, it anticipates a lot of things that we say when we talk about narratives.
And when we say narrative, we know that it's being used in bad faith.
It's just something that people literally create and put out there for a political purpose, and then you see which useful idiots, knowingly or unknowingly, push it or support it.
But that's not really unique to him.
I mean, he was writing about stuff he saw happening in his own time.
I mean, he pointed it out, but it's not like he came up with the idea.
He just described it better than anyone else.
One thing he got wrong was something that he actually took from James Burnham, which was this idea of three super states engaging in this never-ending geopolitical contest about total world ownership.
A war that could never be won, but was really waged against the peoples of their own states.
That also really hasn't come to pass, at least not in the violent way that many were suspecting.
Yeah, so the biggest thing that both 1984 and A Brave New World missed is that both
of them predicted a future where every aspect of society is defined by the totalitarian
state, by a massive, super all-powerful, all-intrusive state that just takes care of everything as
in A Brave New World or controls everything as in 1984.
And that was something that they ultimately got wrong.
Now look, I don't really fault them for getting this wrong.
Both men were products of their time, the time being the mid-20th century, and yeah,
at that point if I were writing in the 1940s and 1950s, I probably would have made the
same prediction of like, yeah, the future is going to be defined by these super powerful
super states, you know, and there are going to be these colossal wars.
There's going to be absolute total surveillance.
But what the reality that we live in is, you know, like that of a mixed surveillance state, you know, it's done by private, you know, the private entities and the so-called public entities.
And that's that's something that Orwell missed.
And meanwhile, for A Brave New World, You know, it is the government in a brave new world that cranks out Soma, and everybody just takes Soma and is stoned and placid and high all the time.
And in our world, it is not the government that's churning all of this stuff out, it's the pharmaceutical companies.
It's done on a market basis.
It's done by private companies.
The surveillance comes from private companies, and a lot of the surveillance is stuff that we give them freely.
I mean, the same people who were protesting George W. Bush and the Patriot Act and saying, oh, this is going to create,
you know, 1984 or something like that.
We're giving away where they live, what they do, everything they've ever thought to Facebook for
free 10 years later. Yeah, I think the satirical magazine or the satirical newspaper, The Onion,
was the first one out of the gate on this, which was CIA-led.
learns that everybody has Facebook, retires.
Yeah.
And the article was just like all of these C.I.A.
operatives like, you know, golfing and they were just periodically checking their computers to see what everybody was doing because they just had to log in to Facebook and that was it.
It's not funny but, you know, a lot of right-wingers who get themselves in trouble get themselves in trouble because I think they made the same mistake that Orwell and Huxley did.
This idea that all the bad stuff has to come from the state and if it doesn't come from, right, If it doesn't come from the state, then it's actually nothing to worry about.
And of course they'll put their every view out there on Facebook, or even like what future plans are going to do, which then get pulled up later to get them in trouble.
Right, I mean we could talk about that in the context of what happened in the Capitol on January 6th.
That's something Glenn Greenwald and Jared Taylor have both pointed out of like, look, these guys filmed themselves doing it.
They clearly did not have this big plan for how they were going to get away with it.
They clearly had not thought this through very seriously.
Yeah, January 6th will require another thing in its own right, but suffice to say this idea of an insurrection is absolutely ludicrous, and it's nice to start seeing some pushback on that from the conservative movement, which I wouldn't have expected.
Yeah, but getting back to 1984 and A Brave New World, That weakness of theirs of, oh, it's going to be the state, is a weakness that is not shared by a camp of the sane.
Yeah.
At all.
It's the weakness of the state that causes the problem.
And it's the weakness of everything.
The weakness, that spiritual weakness that Rassfal detects and describes is at every level of society.
The rot, right?
Yeah, there is this rot.
And something I love about Camp of the Saints, and that Raspal is an absolute genius for having put together is that that book takes place during the Cold War, but both East and West are equally weak.
Yes.
Not being able to resist the rising tide of color.
He already, writing in the 70s, Raspal was already aware that like the next big question facing humanity was not going to be some kind of ideological conflict.
It was not going to be a matter of philosophy or religion or anything like that.
There was this deeper kind of like ethnomassacism that did not discriminate based on political ideology.
Yeah, back to blood is Tom Wolfe.
Yeah, back to back to blood.
That's right.
That's right.
And that's not something that's really observed in 1984 or Brave New World.
Again, Neither Orwell nor Huxley would have ever guessed that people would just voluntarily let themselves be surveilled, you know, that everybody would just sort of, not even necessarily explicitly support it, but just sort of be lulled into doing so for the sake of convenience, you know, or just like peer pressure.
Like, I was very, very resistant to Facebook in high school.
I hope y'all listeners find this, you know, personal thing at least mildly interesting.
But I thought Facebook was dumb.
I thought social media was dumb.
I really didn't want anything to do with it.
And I mean, I got a lot of flack for that in high school and into college, and it did occasionally cause you know, problems, or you know, people wanted to invite me
to a party and it was all organized on Facebook. And if I wasn't on Facebook myself, you know,
people had to take the time to text or to call me, which as it turned out was actually at times
asking quite a lot of people.
I only eventually had to get a Facebook for a job. Like, part of my job, like the requirement
for the job was to get a Facebook.
So I caved and got one.
I mean, I wanted the job!
That's one of the more insidious things that's happening right now.
I mean, one thing that people say is, you know, sign up for a Twitter account so you can lose your job ten years later.
But a lot of people, if you're applying for a job now and you don't have a Facebook, That alone will get you cast out because they assume you have something to hide.
Or it's just, as you say, considered part of the job.
Branding yourself, branding the company, doing social media online.
It's also why deplatforming and Branding and control over big tech is so important because you're essentially determining who the winners and losers are in the economy.
Because if you don't have a social media presence, you really can't run a profitable business in this day and age.
Right, and all of that nuance, again, is just not present in 1984.
Now look, I'm not asking for George Orwell to be clairvoyant and to have been able to predict all of the, you know, I mean, how was he supposed to predict, you know, Twitter or Facebook or any of these things?
I mean, that would have been totally impossible.
So I don't, like, fault him for it, but it still remains a fact that, like, that is a major weakness of the book 1984.
And frankly, I'm kind of more interested in talking about the weaknesses of these books as opposed to the strengths, because the strengths are well known.
People talk about the strengths.
Yeah, we've all been to it.
People have already made the comparison between Soma and Fentanyl, you know, like a million times.
Like, we, you know, we get it.
You know, you mentioned, you know, liberals talking about how the Patriot Act was 1984, which I don't think is actually totally out of bounds, but again, like, we don't need to do a podcast on that because Everybody gets it.
Back when Snowden was a liberal hero, we all knew what that was.
That's right.
Something else that I always thought was interesting about 1984, and that's really rarely talked about in it, is that it is the government that is putting out pornography to keep people subservient and placid.
The protagonist, at one point, Orwell is at the Department of Pornography, or he knows a guy who works there, and they're printing out... Pornosec, I think it's called.
Yeah, they name one of the comics that they're putting out, and it's a very believable title.
It's like, Overnight in All Girls School, or something ludicrous like that.
But again, we have way more porn than Orwell ever predicted, and None of it is coming from the government.
The government doesn't need to make porn.
People can just profit off of porn and there can be the internet and like, man are we off to the races on that.
Same thing with the government runs the lottery in 1984.
Now the government runs most lotteries in most parts of the world, but The lottery is rigged.
Yeah.
The protagonist learns, I don't know why I keep saying protagonist, Winston Smith learns that nobody ever wins, like, the Power Bowl.
Like, nobody ever wins, like, the really big ticket ones.
Those are fictitious and never given to anybody.
They're given to, like, dead people.
They only ever do, like, really small payouts or they'll occasionally give people, you know, 3 or 5k or, you know, whatever the number is.
And again, it's like, you don't, you know, the lottery A lottery, even in which people win the power poll, is still pernicious.
It's still bad.
It doesn't need to be rigged to be destructive.
Lotteries and casinos and stuff now are not consciously rigged.
In the way that Orwell envisioned.
And that doesn't change that they are a waste of money and that lots of people just blow through their savings doing this because they don't have any hope.
It's horrible and it's very sad.
But again, Orwell overstates the role of the government and the conscious maliciousness of the government in rigging it.
That's not really the world that we live in.
We just have a regular lottery and that's bad enough.
Well, I think that one thing that he took for granted, which people today don't, Is he took for granted the idea and again, you know, this is one thing that your typical National Review leader needs to get just pounded into their smooth brains.
George Orwell was a man of the left.
He was a democratic socialist, small d, small s. Yeah, for all the leftists lurking on this podcast, and you're going to make fun of us being like, oh, these two guys think they're so smart.
Yeah, we know that he was a democratic socialist.
We don't care.
We're not partisans.
He still wrote insightful things.
We also know that he wouldn't have a prayer being published on any of these things, much like Hitchens at Slate, right?
That's right.
But there is a certain assumption that functional communities were Good thing in and of themselves.
It's not really talked about but obviously the idea of Sexual freedom is political control.
I mean, he's pushing this from almost a left-wing point of view here.
And with gambling, now it's not even seen as a negative in and of itself.
It's almost seen as a boon that you award to protected constituencies, i.e.
Indian tribes in this country.
Right.
And then also you'll see states try to do it as a way to try to boost the education system, which is kind of hilarious when you think about it, where you're basically taking something Which emphasizes high time preference and trying to use it to fund a system that's going to get people to act more responsibly.
That's right.
Kinky Friedman, who's a long shot gubernatorial candidate.
Don Imus, right?
He used to be on Imus all the time.
That's right.
One of the things he wanted to do as governor of Texas was, um, like legalized gambling on like a mass scale, you know, so there can be like, um, you know, slot machines like in gas stations and stuff.
And all of the proceeds were going to go to the schools, and his slogan for it was, Slots for Tots.
Interesting.
Yeah, I don't know about that one.
It's bad on several levels.
Yeah, I feel like there must be another way of funding schools, right?
Well, the question... There's gotta be a better way, surely.
The question is...
You know, what is the intent of the schools?
And this is something which I think both these dystopias get into.
You have these institutions, one thing they got right, but maybe not in the way they themselves anticipate, is that education and political indoctrination, and political indoctrination exists in every society in some form to a greater or lesser extent.
There, you're trying to mold the citizen to be a servant of the state.
Whereas now, I think the education system in this country, and you especially see this with them pushing critical race theory and things like that, it's almost like you're trying to make people who won't be effective servants of the state, or even people who necessarily just follow the state ideology, but people who come out just sort of helpless and dependent on the state.
I mean, at this point over the last year, just going through the statistics, And this is right before we were about to see a big push to ban homeschooling.
But over the last year, for obvious reasons, you saw a tremendous surge in homeschooling, including in communities that would generally be opposed to it, normally.
A lot of progressives are behind it now.
And a lot of people are learning that these state education systems just aren't very good at what they do.
And so, it raises the question, why do we need to keep supporting it?
Why do we have to have lotteries?
Why do we have to put these things up?
And I think a lot of it is because If white people are generally left to their own devices, we're basically fine.
It's just that the state burdens us rather than seeking to control us directly.
It just makes it impossible for us to do the things we'd be capable of doing if these people would just get out of our way.
Well, and the free market increasingly does not provide us with relief, right?
That was the old school kind of solution of like, well, if the state has got you down, find a market solution.
And that is becoming More and more difficult to believe in as a viable option for a whole number of reasons.
I really need to go through the whole list.
Not really addressing where power comes from.
Again, as you say, they were identifying it purely with the state, but I think power is power, and that the public-private distinction is almost redundant.
And also, like, was there ever... Redundant is overstating it, but it's not just this extremely simple binary.
Yeah, there's no clean break between the two.
And that's something that Raspall notes.
Yes, exactly.
And Daniel St.
Cyr really captures it.
And again, if you guys I really want to get into the weeds of why Greg and I aren't super into this state versus non-state distinction.
I recommend going back and listening to our episodes, especially on James Burnham, but also Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried.
We've got to think beyond this just state, not state thing.
I mean, if the super powerful states in 1984 and a brave new world fell, would the free market automatically then create better societies?
Right.
Well, better is contextual.
I mean, the societies that these novels portray are pretty dystopian.
Like, a free market would probably create something better, but not necessarily something good by any means.
Right.
And these things create their own problems.
And it sounds like we're harping on this issue, but I think the perhaps deliberate Misunderstanding of the public-private distinction and the nature of power is really what holds the American right back more than any other single factor.
Other than, of course, the refusal to address race.
Yeah, well, and so Greg and I are obsessed with this because he and I spent not a small amount of time in the mainstream conservative movement.
I would like to take this opportunity to say that I had a deep, close, personal relationship with every single leader of the Republican Party and the conservative movement and am therefore tied to all of them.
Perfect.
Done.
Done.
Get to work, journos.
Anyway, I think those are maybe our hot takes on 1984 and A Brave New World, which again, are worth reading, but those limitations are very real, and those limitations are under-addressed.
We're always obsessed with what they got right, but what they got wrong is equally important.
It's equally worth talking about what they missed.
I want to take this moment to say that we will be returning to the idea of examining individual thinkers and we're going to be coming at some of these left-wing figures and Orwell will certainly be on this list.
I think it's a real shame that he's remembered just for 1984 and Animal Farm.
I think his political writing, his non-fiction writing, and also his experiences in the Spanish Civil War are very Well, and even some of his other novels, his first one, which is a word that I can't pronounce, unfortunately, it's like, Keep the Aspideistra Flying, is really moving and is a really, really powerful work that nobody cares about, maybe because I'm not the only one who can't pronounce the
I love it. Maybe everybody's just too embarrassed to talk about it.
But at any rate, moving right along here, something Lipton Matthews asked me to talk
about on the show, Lipton Matthews being our occasional black, kind of eccentric,
libertarian, race realist contributor. I thought he did a pretty good interview
with me. Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
And I want to take, again, say thank you if he's listening for having me on his program.
Which he probably is, and he's probably annoyed that I called him an eccentric libertarian race realist.
I'm sure he has some other label for himself.
Anyway, y'all can email him if you want to get the exact phraseology right.
He wanted us to talk about colonialism, especially since it seems to have benefited those who were colonized.
I'll give my little piece on this and pass it to Greg who might entirely disagree.
Colonialism is not really my thing, because I was born decades after it was over.
The question of whether or not people who were colonized should be grateful or not grateful for having been colonized, I leave entirely up to them.
That is their history and it is not mine.
That's for people in Jamaica and South Africa and Vietnam, but not Thailand, to discuss amongst themselves.
And, you know, that's maybe an interesting historical question, but it's not something I've ever felt a very close connection to, because, you know, as I tried to tell my college professors, you know, look, I didn't do any of that, one way or the other.
If it was good, if it was bad, it still had nothing to do with me.
I'm not interested in restarting colonialism.
You know, I'm like a white, third-worldist nationalist.
You know, I want to go and create an ethnostate.
Well, a couple things.
One, thinking about Orwell and the use of language.
What do you got?
Well, a couple things.
One, thinking about Orwell and the use of language, we need to be very precise about
what we're talking about here.
Today, when we talk about colonialism and people say, what is colonial?
At this point, it just means white.
I mean, the first real anti-colonial rebellion in modern history that succeeded was the American Revolution.
But you'll have people seriously, nobody thinks today like, oh, the USA, the original anti-colonial state.
It's no, America's a colonial power or something like that.
And even though at the time people in both Latin America, you know, Simón Bolívar, and even in Haiti took inspiration from the American Revolution, but it's not really remembered that way today.
The second point, and I know Jared Taylor has spoken quite a bit about this, about how a lot of the infrastructure that was set up in these third world countries is often the only infrastructure that still remains.
This is true of British, French, and even Italian colonies, and German.
German is interesting because the German government recently had to say that they had committed genocide in their African colonial projects, so you can add that tab.
To all the other ones they have to pay out, to all the groups they've supposedly victimized throughout history.
And there's a real argument to be made here about whether it benefited these peoples or not.
Now the reason it was justified, and this is especially true with Anglo-Saxons, with Americans and the Brits especially, is we are doing this to bring these people up to a certain level, a certain point of responsible self-government, and then we're going to let them go.
And I think...
If you're doing... and I think they really sincerely believe in this.
This is what President McKinley said about the Philippines.
This is what Albert J. Beveridge... We were just talking about George Orwell.
George Orwell wrote that the UK should wait a while before letting go of all of its colonies to make sure that the colonies were all set and equipped to self-governing.
It was a very bad idea to just pull out immediately.
And he was hardly an imperialist.
We've all read about his experience in Burma and everything else.
I mean, this is...
It's still debatable whether giving India independence in the way it did was ultimately a good thing.
I mean, one of the things you don't really hear much about is how millions of people died because of the partition between India and Pakistan and the kind of chaotic way that was executed.
But there's another way to think about this and actually one book that I'm reading right now is Empire Eternal by Sinclair Jenkins in defense of imperialism.
I won't comment on it because I haven't finished it yet.
But the point is that people who were creating these empires and people who fought to sustain them even after World War II weren't doing it just to maintain the good of the people they were governing.
It was because they were defending something That they thought they benefited from.
And there are different models of imperialism and empire.
If we look at French Algeria, for example, that was part of France.
That was not a colony.
That was part of the metropole.
And France, you know, part of the Republic was lost when de Gaulle gave that away.
Now, I wrote an article on Amran why I think he was ultimately justified for giving that away, but it didn't work.
I think in retrospect it would have been better had they kept the French settlers in the north.
De Gaulle had scoffed at it as like a kind of French Israel, but maybe that would have been the correct choice.
I think that I'm gonna have to disagree with you here on the question of Empire as somebody who says that Empire is both good and also Something that's always going to be there.
Strong powers, again Burnham, right?
Strong powers are extending their territory.
They're constantly trying to expand their reach.
They're constantly building the people, building the resources, trying to go ever outward.
Contracting powers are trying to hunker down and ultimately that doesn't work.
But we do have to think about the different kinds of empires and I think the real problem with the British Empire and what we would call I guess the American Empire now, the American informal empire mostly, is that we don't get anything out of it.
I mean when President Trump very crudely said during the 2016 campaign, well why don't we just like take the oil and you know have beachfront resorts or something in Iraq?
Everyone laughed, but that actually makes more sense than anything.
That would have been better than what we did.
Right.
I mean, the thing is, you can't say the war in Iraq was for oil.
The biggest country in the world producing oil is the United States of America.
It's not about the oil.
There are other interests being served, and you can argue about what those are, but I think a lot of people really do believe that we have some sort of inherent mission to spread
democracy or a certain form of government.
And this is not a new idea.
This is the exact same thing that the Brits and Americans were saying a hundred years
ago.
Yeah, that's right.
And an empire waged for the benefit of the people you're subjugating is doomed to failure
because they're not going to give you any credit for what you're doing and you're also
morally undermining yourself.
And I think this is a truth that we really need to take into ourselves and this goes for Republicans who are constantly trying to be, you know, the real liberals or the real egalitarians.
Most people will prefer bad government by their own and good government by someone else.
You can't tell me that people in Zimbabwe are better off now than they were when it was Rhodesia.
But does anyone seriously believe that if there was a free and fair vote, they would vote to bring back the white rule?
Of course not!
And it would be degrading for them to do so.
I know this can be counterintuitive, but the quality of government isn't always exactly the point.
And this works on an individual level as well.
Look, my bedroom is really, really messy.
It's a problem how messy my bedroom is.
Man, nobody is allowed to just bust into my bedroom and, like, clean it just because.
And if somebody does that... I hate to tell you, but Jordan Peterson's right now.
Jordan Peterson's right there.
I'm making your bed.
This was all a plot to, like, get you out of the house, to get him over there.
Yeah, I'm not going to appreciate it.
I'm going to be, you know, I'm not going to be grateful.
I'm going to be like those Iraqis who just...
There is something we should talk about here, though, is that even in the regimes that are, oh, they're so evil and we have to beat our chest about it forever, as so has Camp of the Saints, you always have non-whites fighting to maintain these white empires.
There are some who sincerely believe in it.
There were plenty of blacks who fought for Rhodesia.
Mugabe's most brutal extermination campaigns were not directed against the whites, at least not initially, but against blacks who had fought for the other side or who were not a part of his initial coalition.
Certainly a lot of blacks fought for the old South African regime.
And certainly you had a number of non-whites fighting for the old Portuguese and Spanish regimes.
And look, that is what it is.
It's just you can't lean upon that.
All of those individuals People are welcome to make their own choices, obviously.
They're not looking for permission from me one way or the other.
Also, I'm kind of like a lefty here.
I don't really think it's my place to tell them whose side they should be on or what government they should like.
I'm kind of a live and let live nationalist.
These people can decide for themselves.
They're adults and it's up to them.
Me, personally, I don't think it's worth our resources to try and create an empire, and I'm not an empire guy.
I don't know.
I would just say that I think the only kind of empires that last are empires that are built upon some sort of a common cultural, racial, ethnic, religious foundation.
That doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be ethnically homogenous.
If it was ethnically homogenous, we probably wouldn't call it an empire.
We would just call it a nation.
I just wonder whether, in the world of today, a small nation can really survive without a larger empire protecting it.
I think that the civilization state seems to be the model that's going to work going into the future, and that's why powers like China are rising, and things like the West, which are these, you know, a racial jungle, to use Joe Biden's term, tend to be on the decline.
Well, let's move on to something at least somewhat related.
A lot of people wanted us to talk about a number of different black thinkers, ranging from contemporary woke ones like Kendi, Ibrahim X. Kendi, and also kind of the classics like Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and To my surprise, and dare I say dismay, a lot of people wanted us to talk not just about Tariq Nasheed, but specifically about Tariq Nasheed's new documentary.
No, I'm not watching it.
I'm not watching it.
I don't care what you say.
I'm not watching this.
Let me do a spiel here, man.
Let me do a spiel here.
Okay.
So, a few things.
Related to my comments about colonialism and empire, you know, I don't find black thinkers very interesting as a rule of thumb.
Look, they can think whatever they want to think and they can come up with these ideologies and found nationalist groups or movements or whatever.
Who am I to tell them which ones are good and which ones are bad?
I don't care.
That's like their own thing.
But what I will say is that most of these people and most of these organizations are not very interesting because most of these guys are not terribly bright and they believe really, really ludicrous things.
My reputation on Amaranth for writing a lot about the left and engaging leftist ideas very seriously, and that is because I, rightly or wrongly, find that leftists have interesting things to say and oftentimes have very interesting perspectives on a number of issues.
I do not find that to be true of blacks.
Almost ever.
Especially these people like, you know, Kendi, who's either insane or a grifter.
The thing with Kendi is whether he believes this stuff or not, like, there's nothing there.
Yeah.
There's nothing.
And I don't want to do an episode or write an essay just talking about how dumb all of this stuff is.
The existence of Ibram Kendi is simply proof of the decline.
His theory itself is just self-refuting.
Like, the fact that we know who he is disproves everything he's ever said.
And I've tortured myself and read it, and it was a complete waste of time.
Which of his books did you read?
I went through all the articles that he was putting out, I listened to a bunch of the talks, and now I'm blanking on the title.
How to Be an Anti-Racist?
Oh, yeah, I did that one, but there was another one beyond How to Be an Anti-Racist.
The point is, I just, the premise is simply that, I mean this is the fundamental premise, the fundamental lie of American race relations.
If you take the assumption that every single racial disparity cannot possibly be explained by genetic or even cultural differences, then really the only explanation you have left is white racism.
So basically what you're trying to do is just, it's just this long attempt to force like a square-shaped peg into a circle and it just doesn't work.
And I think that's why a lot of these guys delve into the most ludicrous conspiracy theories imaginable.
Which brings us to Tariq Nasheed.
Right, we'll get to him in a second, but even before that, you know, Nation of Islam and a lot of these black nationalists, you know, they're theological presuppositions about how white people were created by a mad scientist or how Blacks are a forgotten lost tribe of Israel or all of this stuff.
That still makes more sense than believing that the test results are gonna be the same.
Well, maybe so but it's still just not and it's still I still just find it really interesting because it's like Wrong and there's not a lot to say about it beyond the fact that it's wrong.
So specifically moving on to Tariq Nasheed Who believes that a lot of black crime is committed by white supremacists who wear kind of like elaborate blackface or these sort of masks.
Yeah, ultra-realistic masks.
Yeah, which again, like, I'm not talking about why that's wrong because that's obviously insane.
He, Tariq Nasheed, has this new quote-unquote documentary called Buckbreaking, which Incredibly a lot of people are talking about, so... I think Scott Greer just did a podcast on it, actually.
Really?
Yeah, you might want to listen to that.
Hilarious.
If you want to deep dive, I guess that's what you can do, but in brief... Unfortunate phrasing.
In brief...
The phrase buck-breaking is apparently in reference to slavery times in which, allegedly, white owners of black male slaves would express their dominance by sodomizing them, and that way they would show their slaves who was truly boss.
So, Tariq and Sheed have said that in our times, the times in which we live today, the new equivalent of buck-breaking is pushing LGBTQ trans ideology upon the black community as part of a conscious effort to reduce the black population because all of these sexual minorities do not breed.
Now, this is just not true.
There's no reason To believe that this is true.
I don't even know how to begin to explain why it is not true.
And I'm sure if I watched this documentary Tariq Nasheed would explain all kinds of just draw these kinds of bizarre connections or make these outrageous claims and like This is just ridiculous.
Tariq Nasheed is dumb.
He is not a smart guy.
He is not a historian.
He is not a sociologist.
Greg and I and Mr. Taylor, we on some level have to pay attention to these people.
Mr. Taylor did a video on Ibrahim Kendi.
He debated Nasheed.
Oh, really?
I didn't even know that.
I mean, we're kind of forced to keep up with these guys and engage with them because they're very popular and they have a lot of influence.
Well, they have a lot of influence because powerful institutions are pushing it.
Right.
They don't have a lot of influence because they're bright or because the arguments they make are compelling.
Their arguments are ridiculous.
I mean, you could not deceive a child with the things that they say.
And you don't deceive a child.
That's why children are always getting in trouble for asking obvious questions.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
The one, if there is an exception to all of the things I just said, it would probably be Marcus Garvey, who did in fact put his money where his mouth was and did start taking blacks out of the United States and back to Africa.
To create an empire.
Because he thought that was the solution.
That, you know, somebody who's literally doing that, not talking about doing it, but raising money and doing that the way Marcus Garvey did, like, that's somebody I can respect and that's somebody I can envision working with on some level.
And his flag, I think he was the one who created what is now seen as the black nationalist flag today, you know, the red, black, and green.
Marcus Garvey, I've got a collection of his speeches, I have not finished it, he's on the to-do list.
I have a lot of respect for Garvey and I think that probably the United States government's biggest Let's take a look at the context here.
big mistakes over the last couple centuries was railroading the guy
instead of helping him out. You could have had... I mean, keep in mind, let's
take a look at the context here. This was during the time of colonial empires and
America did not really have a colonial empire unless you count the sort of
informal influence over Liberia.
Marcus Garvey was around in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Right.
So you could have had, you know, a kind of American protectorate or at least an alliance there and serve, you know, two ends with one tactic by backing them.
But instead...
They decided to take him out and railroad him on financial charges, and I think that was probably a complete disaster, because Marcus Garvey said what he will about him.
He was not trying to grift off white people.
He was not a dependent.
I mean, his thing was, up you mighty race, you can do what you will.
I'm not going to argue with that.
But as much credit as we're giving Garvey, it is also worth noting that Garvey was not the first man to come up with the idea of repatriating American blacks.
To Africa, a lot of founding fathers and early American statesmen thought that was a very, very good idea.
Might be one of the first among Blacks, though.
It was called the American Colonization Society.
Right.
And a lot of leading lights in the late 1700s and early 1800s were all for this idea.
So, look, it's good that Garvey believed in it, and it's great that Garvey put his money where his mouth was, but even then, it's not like he was super innovative.
I mean, he was innovative in actually doing it.
He was important because And this gets into some of the other stuff too.
I'm going to take on a lot of the guys you just mentioned.
The reason Marcus Garvey is important is because you had...
A feeling of racial humiliation among blacks.
I think that's something today's whites, racially aware whites, can sympathize with.
If not, you know, we can't fully put ourselves in that mindset, but I think we can understand it a little bit.
And here's this guy saying, not only are we the equals of people, but we can create something truly great, truly noble, and here's this exhilarating vision I have for all of you.
That's why people rallied to him, and that's why people thought this was a good idea, not just because they had the Sorelian myth of some African empire run by Africans, but also because he was saying blacks should have A group consciousness and work together for their own racial benefit worldwide and that was something that was very attractive and that's why he created a lot of movements that endure today and a lot of symbols that endure today.
In another weird way, I think guys like Tariq Nasheed or the founders in the Nation of Islam and the various Afro-centrists and your black Israelites and everything else, these are just far And I would even lump Kendi in this, frankly.
I just don't think he's that intelligent.
There's not much of an argument to rebut, just because the argument itself is built on a premise that's easily refuted.
It's just a way of trying to assuage a feeling of racial humiliation, because when Garvey was acting, You're talking about a point in time where blacks are very obviously being subjugated by European colonial empires.
This is a fact.
This is how it was.
Africans were not governing themselves.
Now you're in an environment where African states are independent.
African populations in not just the United States but Canada and even in Europe to some extent are not just equals but are protected class and have additional benefits and yet if we look at the hard facts it's just continued failure and so we have to keep coming up with more and more elaborate myths and rationalizations and almost religions To explain this failure.
And conspiracy theories.
Yeah, and to basically give them a reason for pride when the facts keep showing that there's not much to be proud of over the last century or so.
If you look at Malcolm X, for example, I wrote a pretty extensive thing of Malcolm X called, I think, Malcolm X Model for White Advocates?
And this was based on Marable Manning's biography of Malcolm X. Marable Manning was a member, he was a full leftist, I think he was a member of the Movement for a Democratic Society, which was sort of the adult version of SDS.
And he wrote a book about Malcolm X and it's rather disappointing if you have the kind of heroic image of Malcolm X that you got from Spike Lee's movie.
He gets in there and basically says like none of this was true.
He was not, you know, some upright moral leader.
Both his wife, he cheated on his wife and his wife cheated on him.
Ossie Davis famously lionized him as the model of our African manhood.
A lot of these guys, again, are all philanderers.
Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, all the Nation of Islam guys.
And this is important because the story that we're told is that Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam because he was so disgusted with what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad was doing.
This is not me making the argument.
Which was sleeping with 14 year olds.
Yeah, right. But in this case, it doesn't seem that that was the real explanation.
And this is not me making the argument.
This is a black scholar who's very sympathetic to Malcolm X's political aims,
just saying this is how the man lived his life.
Ossie Davis, when he died, famously called Malcolm X our living black manhood.
One of these bizarre phrases they used.
Well, the fact is, he couldn't sexually satisfy his wife, wrote pleading letters to the Nation of Islam asking for advice about the problem, and then when they had the break, they published the letters in their newspapers, basically to humiliate the guy.
So, I mean, this is how, like, sorted and weird these things go.
Right, so, initially I said, like, I don't want to talk about all this stuff because it's, like, weird and dumb and gross.
Well, Greg has now talked about it, and in fact, here we are.
No, no, it's very, it's important to understand this.
It's all very sorted.
It's important to understand this because the myths that were presented about a lot of these leaders Fall apart with just the slightest scrutiny, and it's not scrutiny from us It's scrutiny from progressives or people who knew them or black scholars who may sympathize entirely with what they were doing politically but you just you know take a peek underneath the the sheet there and it all falls apart and
And I think that's why a lot of these leaders really aren't worth examining beyond, you know, what political ends they serve today.
The ideas just really aren't that important.
And a lot of this, and again, at the end of the day, Malcolm X, what did he end up doing?
Oh, black nationalism, self-determination?
No, at the end of the day he was just Whining for money from white people.
That's where all these movements end up.
There's a lot of false equivalency saying like, oh well they're black advocates and we're white advocates so we have a lot in common.
No, absolutely not.
And that's really not true.
The only one you can even come close to saying that about is Marcus Garvey.
Yeah, who's the exception that proves the rule.
Right, and also like more than a century Yeah, yeah, it's been over a hundred years.
That's right.
You know, we really do not live our lives the way they do.
We do not believe in these ridiculous conspiracy theories.
We do not have just absurd religious beliefs.
I just...
I've never really understood that attraction or that sort of horseshoe theory of, oh, well they're kind of like us, maybe we should work together.
That's never really worked.
With the exception of Garvey to some extent.
Suffice to say, I guess I'm a bit more understanding of, how should I put this, certain religious beliefs and things that people may have, but I think it's important to understand that the reason these myths develop Among blacks particularly as it's a way to assuage wounded pride and the quote that always comes to mind is what Joe Sobern says when he said Western man towers over the rest of the world in such a way that is almost inexpressible and This can't help but manifest in other people's in the form of resentment
And I think even among those groups that are arguably more successful than us right now, specifically the Chinese, this is payback for the humiliation that the Middle Kingdom suffered at the hands of the European powers.
At least that's the way they see it.
It's just the difference is the Chinese do this by building factories and powerful armies and Africans do this by coming up with myths that UFOs are raping them and therefore the PTA need to subsidize your ridiculous theories.
Enough said on that.
I'm going to bring up two topics that were recommended a lot, and I'm going to briefly explain why we're not going there.
Those two things being crime and the science of race realism.
Those are two very valuable and interesting topics, but they really do not lend themselves to discussion on a podcast because you've got to go over data and tables and charts and all those things.
Very important when you're talking about these sorts of things.
We're not leftists.
We're not just gonna make claims and just say, oh, it's just the science, and the science is whatever it was.
Some guy says, we're not gonna lean on credentialism or whatever else.
We're gonna say, look, here are the sources.
This is where we're getting this from.
Interestingly enough, you know who actually just contacted me, I got a letter in the mail, the National Crime Victimization Survey.
So if you're wondering, that's the thing where you get the data for who gets, you know, Victimized by what race and whatever else that's how the federal government does these things Again if if we're making
A podcast, we can't say, well, according to footnote 14 or whatever else, it's just, you gotta do the reading, we put it on the website, it's there for you guys.
And there's lots of stuff on the website on both of those topics and I encourage you all to explore it and to look at the data and to look at the charts and the tables and the graphs, but we just can't really just talk about that just in an audio clip.
So, sorry for the folks who wanted us to just discuss those things, but really, there's Tons of it.
And we have it systematically organized in such a way that you can see the sources and show that we're not just making unverified claims here.
Yeah, that's right.
So then there's the perennial recommendation, which is something that people ask me about
all the time, even when I'm not soliciting topics for a podcast, which is people want
advice on a number of different questions on just kind of like a personal, you know,
on a level of where the personal meets the ideological.
One of the bigger ones I've asked a lot is, you know, how can I convince my friends and
family, you know, that I am right, that we are right, that these issues matter.
And people often actually call the American Renaissance office line with that same question, and my answer surprises absolutely every single person, which is...
Don't try too hard.
Friends and family and community and colleagues, these are important relationships.
And don't push the envelope too far, because you do risk damaging those relationships.
And I really wouldn't recommend putting those relationships at risk.
Just in the name of trying really, really hard to convince them of something that they don't want to be convinced of or that they're just not that interested in looking into, you know, you just don't want to be that guy who's just demanding that his cousin read The Bell Curve or absolutely bombarding their sibling with emails about black-on-white crime stories and stuff, you know.
These things can be really, really... that kind of tactic can be really counterproductive.
I know it's not fun to have friends, or spouses, or partners, or whatever the case may be, who disagree with you about this stuff, but oftentimes less is more.
Be confident that you are right and that we are right because we are, and be patient in letting those around you kind of come around to these ideas You know, on their own timeline, in their own way, and for their own reasons.
You know, don't just bombard them all the time with why you are right.
There can be a real temptation to do that, especially when you first kind of discovered the truth about race relations in America.
But I really encourage patience in a really big way.
I have a couple points I want to make on this, several in fact.
First lecture I actually ever heard about politics, and this had nothing to do with race, but the man who was instructing said, how many people in the classroom have friends and family members who believe things diametrically opposed to what you believe?
And of course there were many hands that went up, and he said, Given that you can't convince the people closest to you of the things that are most important to you, how do you think you're going to convince the entire country with a direct mail campaign or a video or whatever else?
I think that the numbers are there in terms of getting to what I would define as victory, but It's more about getting our existing people to do more than it is to convince more people.
I think that over the last few years we've largely won the battle of ideas in terms of reaching the people who can be reached.
It's just that's why they're trying to suppress it so much.
American Renaissance puts out a lot of stuff with red pills, with data, with videos.
White Identity book by Jared Taylor.
Now you also have some books by guys like Charles Murray and some other academics and writers and journalists coming out that make a lot of important points for people that are maybe a bit Still wedded to the conservative movement and might be more welcoming to hearing it from that quarter.
Certainly a lot of anonymous people out there are making memes that make these points in an excellent way, being shared on message boards and on Twitter and on Gab and on everything else.
We are going to do more of that.
I'm not going to say that we're going to stop doing that, but the resources are there.
I would simply advise that if you're trying to get someone to come on board with this stuff, you need to let them Either make their own decision or let them think they made their own decision.
Ask a question that leads to a certain conclusion rather than simply making a point.
Because if you're trying to just impose your will on theirs, a lot of times people will resist.
Yeah, it's just instinctual to push back against it.
Right.
But if they say something about... The classic one is, well, if America is a white supremacist country, why do Asians do better than whites?
Right, something like that.
I mean, you just want to ask the question and not provide the answer and let them seek out the resources.
But I think ultimately it is more important for us to be getting the people who are already reading and the people who are already on board mobilized and figuring out ways for them to act openly and give more without sacrificing their lives, their families, their finances.
It's funny you mention that.
A lot of people also asked that kind of thing.
And again, that's another question I get a lot.
Not in relation to this podcast of what can I do?
What should I do?
How can I fight back?
A lot of people often say that they like American Renaissance, but they don't read it that much because they find it too depressing.
Yeah, I think I addressed this in one of the recent things I wrote.
I mean the fact is sometimes we have to publish bad news.
Sometimes.
Yeah, but I mean I've always said and I always try to convey this message like we're going to win.
We are going to win.
This is not, it's not just me having empty faith.
This is faith but also backed by reason and you should also internalize that because It's not just that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, it's not just because I think it's rationally true, but it has to become something core to your identity, because otherwise you're not going to act.
This can't be a hobby, it has to be a calling, if you really believe it.
Now in terms of what you can do, a lot of that depends on where you are, how old you are, what resources you have at your command, what people are around you.
I'll give a couple very brief things.
First, If you're young and starting out, decide what you want to do before you start getting involved with any kind of dissonant politics.
So for example, if you're looking to join the military, just join the military.
Don't do anything else.
Because if you get dishonorably discharged or something like that because you were on a web page or some group or something like that, that's just going to hurt you and it's not going to really serve anybody's benefit.
If you're somebody older who, you know, maybe you didn't know this stuff five years ago, but now you're in a career where you really can't afford to be doxxed or you really can't afford to have a community effort against you because it could cost you a job in a specialized field, Frankly, the best thing you can probably do is probably just donate.
Because you're in a position of relative economic privilege but social weakness.
And so you should use your strength and not your weakness.
And I've spoken with donors before who've actually been apologetic to me and they wish they could do more than, they'll say, just donate.
And it's like, that's not just... You guys are part of the team.
We don't exist without you.
And it's not...
Donations are not the smallest thing they could do, they're one of the greatest things they could do.
And it's also, I mean, just take a step back.
If everybody who read, jeez, if like 10% of the people who read the webpage every day sent in a dollar a week, we would have won.
The most ridiculous outlandish, you know, I'd be emperor of the world.
It would be that simple.
It is unbelievable how much we're able to do and how much we're able to affect the national conversation given the paucity of resources.
I mean, Jeff Bezos' ex-wife just gave $2.7 billion, billion with a B, to various racial groups and everything else because she had the good fortune to be married to a guy and get divorced.
But those billions of dollars are not, I mean other than enriching a bunch of black activists to move to white neighborhoods, like it's not going to do more than what's already happening.
Whereas you know one of ours is really worth a thousand of theirs, it's just they have ten thousand for every one of ours.
So donating is not something small.
I've talked in the past about this idea of a white tithe.
I think If people approach this in the same way, if you really believe it, approach it in the same way that somebody would have approached church not long ago, and the way many Christians today still approach church.
Now, one last thing.
If you're in a position where you're somewhere in the middle there, you've got a group of friends, you've got people, you may not have enough money that, I mean any amount counts, literally a dollar a week would, if everybody did that, would be fine.
But let's say, you know, financial is not really where your strength is.
Form a group with the explicit purpose of building up economic, physical, and just sort of Mutual support, what the leftists would call mutual aid groups, with your friends.
And you can start talking about these ideas in such a way, offline, where you start to educate yourself on these things.
This podcast, we're hoping, is going to be part of that because we're going to be going through ideas and thinkers and philosophies in a systematic way, building towards something.
Which I would call Identitarianism as a philosophy, as a worldview, as a theory of history.
And this is not something that needs to be discussed online.
This is not something that needs a logo.
This is not something that even needs a name.
I think that The people who are strongest right now are the people who can't be pinned down.
And if you try to put up a banner and try to rally the people to you, you're just going to get nuked from orbit, so to speak.
I mean, those of us who are already out here doing this stuff, we're out here.
I mean, we've got you.
But if you're talking about how do you build support networks behind the scenes, the best way to do it is, frankly, offline and IRL.
Yeah, I'll say, true to form, that's like the very grandiose Greg Hood take, and we'll do a more pedestrian Chris Roberts take to kind of complement it.
I'd say the best thing you can do is to just be a good person who's involved in your surroundings.
You know, if you don't think you have it in you to kind of create this big group that Greg just talked about or something like that.
It could even be three or four people.
Even still, you know, just doing stuff like, you know, getting involved in neighborhood level organizations that just already exist.
You know, going to the gym, getting involved in like community sports teams, you know, You work somewhere with a union, you know, to join the union, you know, to go to church, to meet the people who go to church in your neighborhood, to talk to your neighbors, all of these things, you know, to put yourself in a position where you're well-liked and respected by a lot of people and where a lot of people know that you can contribute goodness to their lives.
If people already know that about you, you're in a much better position to receive help from them should you ever need it.
Yeah.
Should your reputation ever be tarnished.
And you're in a much better position to convince them, you know, addressing that earlier question.
You know, one of the bigger problems we have is that we've got lots of relatively isolated people who believe the right things, who are just kind of scattered across the country and even across the world, you know, just sort of alone doing what a lot of modern people do, which is just, you know, sitting in their apartment, you know, watching Netflix or something, you know.
I mean, even just for the sake of your own, you know, personal health, regardless of ideology or convincing people or winning, you know, it's good to go outside.
It's good to talk to your neighbors.
It's good to be involved in the stuff in your community.
And I really recommend that, you know, very, very strongly.
And we're seeing examples of this happen right now, where you see groups of parents taking up against critical race theory being taught in the schools and winning significant victories at the school board level.
Yeah, that's what Jared Taylor always talks about.
Running for office on a local level, if you're feeling ambitious, just on like a conservative platform, an anti-critical race theory platform.
These aren't like crazy outlets.
These are things that people are doing right now.
Ordinary people are doing right now, and they're doing it without a great deal of preparation.
They're doing it without a great deal of knowledge, but they're out there doing it.
There are places you can go where you can seek out such knowledge about how to operate effectively in politics.
And one book recommendation I would give is Dedication and Leadership by Douglas Hyde, which talks a lot about being the best in whatever field you're in, because it maximizes your political effectiveness later.
This is what the communists would always tell like their cadre leaders.
And it also talks about, you know, what we were referring to before, how you get people to, you guide people to a conclusion.
You don't force them to it.
Right.
And as a result, they become more committed to it.
And as far as, you know, the extent of these groups, I mean, just start with three or four people and branch out from there.
And you'll be surprised about how many people there are out there.
Yeah, well actually I think that's a pretty good place to close on.
I know there was no possible way we were going to address every recommendation and every topic, but we will probably eventually do another one of these episodes.
So don't take it too personally if we didn't talk about what you wanted us to talk about.
We'll further annoy you with that in the future as we continue to discuss.
Yeah, a whole wide range, a whole wide array of things.
So thanks everyone.
Yeah, thanks for joining us and we'll be back next week talking about some of these thinkers from the left and we'll go from there.
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