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July 2, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:13:10
Hedge Your Dissent
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Hello, everyone.
It's this week's Left, Right, and White.
I am Chris Roberts, and I'm joined, of course, with... Gregory Hood.
Today we'll be talking about Chris Hedges, who is a figure who used to be quite prominent on the American left.
He has a different kind of reputation these days.
Probably best known, not just for his journalism, but his books, especially War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which was a pretty important book when it comes to analyzing what George W. Bush era leftism was.
But what he represents today is arguably far more interesting.
Yeah, and something I want to try and accomplish today is what Steve Saylor comments so often of liberal journalism that it just amounts to point and sputter of just, oh, can you believe somebody believes something so hateful?
Can you believe these evil racists think this obviously false and hateful thing?
Without actually explaining why we're wrong, or why we feel the way that we do, or why we think the way that we do, I am slightly worried that Greg and I will not be able to help ourselves and just point and sputter at some of Chris Hedges' more ridiculous claims.
I want to at least attempt to try and get inside his mind because Chris Hedges, like
a lot of talented leftists, and I think it's difficult to argue that Chris Hedges is dumb,
is that he has moments of just true insight, and he does write very well about very real
social problems in the United States, but at the same time he also believes just these
absolutely absurd things, and it's something I often struggle with when I read leftists
is how can somebody so smart who can see so clearly about issue X be so blind when it
comes to issue Y.
I don't think we can at least try and dig into that.
I mean he is a Christian minister and I think that That provides some insight in the sense that there are certain things that he just takes on faith.
And of course, as with most modern Christian ministers, the divinity of Jesus Christ is of no particular importance to them.
But certain beliefs about social norms and certain beliefs about the way society should be structured are unchallengeable and impervious yet to evidence.
There was an article he was writing, this is again when he's talking about industrial policy, and he's talking about Basically, the global dictatorship of capital.
And he's saying, oh, isn't it terrible how these workers in China are treated?
And then in the same article, he pivots over to the deindustrialization of the United States.
And, of course, one is thinking to themselves, well, the reason why we have the deindustrialization of the United States is because they moved all that production over to China.
And if you wanted to have a certain middle-class standard of living in the United States, particularly for workers, that would require a tight labor market, that would require little to no immigration, that would require nationalist economic policies.
And I remember in the same article he said something along the lines of, well, you know, equality has to be global or it doesn't mean anything, or these kind of movement must be global or it doesn't mean anything.
This is kind of a variation of the old anarchist slogan of Only if all are free.
Or what is it?
If one is unfree, none are free.
Something like that.
Something like that.
Yeah, I mean I would argue basically that for one to be free, others must be subjugated.
That's the way it always has been and that's the way it always will be.
And the idea that we can somehow have a prosperous American middle class while simultaneously having global egalitarianism is false.
because the only way you can have global egalitarianism is by destroying the middle classes of the
first world, which is exactly what's been done over the last couple of decades.
And that's exactly what the forces of capital that he claims to oppose continue to do.
Yes, for a Christian minister, he is really, really influenced by Karl Marx.
Well, most Christian ministers these days are.
I mean, he's one of the, you know, it's in one of these mainline Protestant denominations that's just been going on.
Inertia, where I don't think, you know, one in a hundred people actually believe in any supernatural claims, but they still get tax-exempt status, so it's a living.
I mean, in the case of Hedges, he does seem to believe in a higher being, and I think his religious faith gives him a real sense of hope, even when he despairs of the world around him.
Yeah, he probably does.
However, I don't think it's very... his faith doesn't seem to be...
Uniquely Christian, it's a much more kind of universalist, generic, there is a God who watches over us and it doesn't matter what you call this God when you pray.
Right.
Which is, you know, not a terribly impressive theological worldview.
The God is like some floating Rosa Luxemburg in the sky, which begs the question of why we shouldn't call on some divine fricor to deal with it as opposed to worshiping it.
Well, I don't want this podcast to just turn into a big thing on Christianity.
What's something that you like about Chris Hedges, or that you liked about his book on war?
Yeah, I mean, I think war is a force that gives us meaning.
honestly grappled about why, you know, I think Freud called religion the future of an illusion where he basically said religion is perpetual and you're never going to eradicate it.
And I think that Hedges does sort of the same thing with war with that book where he says war is something that will essentially always be with us because it drives human beings to heights of sacrifice and heights of determination and effort that nothing else can really match.
And when we talk about things like medical crises, when we talk about things like poverty and social problems...
We always revert to the war metaphor, just because nothing else will seem to do.
And even that seems sort of unconvincing, because really it's only just war that does push people all the way.
It's sort of like what Anthony Swofford wrote in Jarhead, where basically you can't make an anti-war movie.
Because even if you make an anti-war movie, it ends up becoming a pro-war movie, because nothing else just gets to the heart of people the way they are.
I mean, war is inherent to the species.
And the fact that he grappled with the real psychological issues involved and also thought to himself, you know, is there a way we can substitute something else for this void that war seems to fill?
The fact that he actually looked at this instead of just being like, oh, it's a byproduct of capitalist oppression and newspapers or something like that.
I mean, I give him credit for that.
Yeah, his book on war is a really good example of the honesty that Chris Hedges is at times really capable of.
I'd read War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.
And of course, you know, again, for all the talk about Oh, I'm the suppressed, marginal guy who's fighting capital.
It's like, yeah, that was forced reading when I went to college.
Well, and also to Hedges' credit, he did the work.
I mean, he wrote a book about war because he was a foreign war correspondent for about 20 years.
Yeah, he's seen it.
He is not one of these guys.
Actually, it reminds me a bit about George Orwell, who we talked about last week, of this is somebody who is really willing to put himself in danger to kind of examine things up close.
Right.
And Hedges does regularly do that.
Probably, you say that his war book is his most famous, which might be true, but Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is also really, really well known and often cited on the left.
And for that book, he did travel to all of the poorest parts of the United States, wherever
they may be, and did actually do interviews with these poor people, with drug addicts,
with criminals, etc.
Shades of nickel and dimes.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
But more so, I mean, because Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt was much more sprawling.
Yeah, definitely better than Nickel and Dime.
Yeah, I did think it was really interesting that he was willing to go both to Indian reservations, where alcoholism is an enormous problem, and then he'd go to Camden, where crack is a huge problem, and then he'd go to Appalachia.
Yeah, which is actually another one of the things I like most about him is Chris Hedges was one of the first journalists to really start sounding the alarm about what we now call the white death or deaths of despair.
It was really in the early 20-teens that he was talking about the world bill Billy Haraway and the problem with pills and all of this stuff.
He wasn't just cheering it on and like these people deserve to die and actually they're privileged.
No, I saw a Confederate flag in a trailer once, so we should blow up the whole neighborhood like that.
I mean, that's the tone of most journalism, whereas he's like, hey, actually, these people are poor and we need to do something about this.
There is, yeah, all of Hedges' work is just shot through with this profound, oftentimes just kind of gut-wrenching empathy.
Yeah.
Because he does nothing.
I mean, it's, it's...
I mean, it's a cliché that a lot of left-wing writers fall into, and Hedges is very guilty of it.
He only writes about depressing things.
He only examines the absolute worst possible situations.
He finds the most dispossessed people and interviews them.
I mean, reading Chris Hedges is often...
Just very, very depressing.
Y'all can read an excerpt from Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, called A World of Hillbilly Heroin, which was published on Tom Dispatch and then again in The Nation, I believe.
And his interviews with these people just collecting disability checks and just crushing up pills and getting high and watching TV all day and talking to them about You know, the small towns they grew up in back when there
had been this factory and this enormous middle class and how they saw all of that go away.
Right.
And how half of the friends that they had when they were kids have died of overdoses is just like so sad.
And you know, of course, you prefer this to someone like Kevin Williamson whose advice is just move away.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
Capitalism is good, because, like, these factories deserve to be shut down, blah blah blah.
Yeah, or Williamson went so far as to say that the communities themselves should just die, and there is this... Which, of course, he would never say about the aforementioned Camden or Indian reservations.
Right, right, right.
Hedges is uniformly empathetic about all of these people.
Correct.
But, another thing Another thing about Hedges that is true of so many other left-wing writers, like Chomsky, who we plan on eventually doing an episode on, is there's this weird thing about Hedges and Chomsky and so many others where it seems almost as if they view the virtue of a given person
entirely as how oppressed they are.
Like, the worse you have it in life, the better you must be.
And the inverse is true as well, of anybody who is doing great, anybody who's making money, anybody who's part of the middle class, is probably not a very good person, because on some level they're benefiting from the oppression of all of these other people.
Something that does... A weakness of his book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, and a lot of his other writing as well, is He has all of this empathy for these people because they're in these dire circumstances, but it's not really clear why Hedges likes them aside from the fact that they are in these dire circumstances.
It's just part of this sort of overall, like, well, nobody deserves this.
Which is all well and good, but there is still kind of like this limit to the argument of how would Hedges respond to Williamson.
When William says like, well, they should just move, you know, they should just forget about that crappy culture they've come from, those communities should die.
Hedges' response is basically, no, because that would be sad.
Right, and also if we did something on a net, and this gets into I think what's probably more relevant to us and particularly how we've responded to the rise of Donald Trump to the alt-right when that was growing, before that to the rise of the religious right under George W. Bush.
In the latter case you had kind of a cultural response to a lot of these things that are happening.
One of the things that's been discussed, and the data back this up when it comes to the white death, is that in communities where you have strong churches, You don't see the kind of social dysfunction that you see in a lot of these other cases.
A lot of what's happening is because churches have basically lost their central place in a lot of these communities, as well as the factories.
The other thing is, in terms of political movement, where that promises redemption, that promises nationalism, that promises a positive vision of going forward, of unity around, like, a redemptive myth.
I mean, that's basically what nationalism is.
He's, of course, militantly opposed to all of that.
So, and actually, we get the usual leftist treatment of how this is fascism, or how this is theocracy, or how this is a combination of all these things.
And so, he'll point out these problems, And then somebody like one of us will come along and say, hey, I have solutions to these problems.
We need to do this.
We need to do this.
Even like very mild solutions in terms of like economic policy.
Say like, OK, well, maybe what we should do is reverse deindustrialization by doing X, Y and Z. And he'll say, no, no, no, no, no.
What we actually need to do is just achieve global equality and then everything is fine.
This is what James Burnham would call a goal that is meaningless from the perspective of time and space.
I mean, you're just not saying anything.
And this is, you know, again, reverting to like, not even Christianity, but just sort
of the degraded post-Christianity that so many churches have today, where it's, you
know, we have these problems, so what should we do?
Well, the Kingdom of God will show up.
Until then, we're gonna just complain and call everything racist and unjust.
And it's like, well, you're not really helping.
So it's interesting that you bring this up, because he does explicitly, in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, he does talk about how all of these different dispossessed peoples Take a lot of comfort from religion.
I've got a quote from it for you.
There comes a moment when the pain and despair of constantly running into a huge wall, of realizing that there's no way out of poverty, crush human beings, those who best managed to resist and bring some order to their lives, almost always turned to religion.
And in that faith, many found the power to resist and even rebel.
And then he goes over some examples of in Camden, New Jersey, it was the power and cohesiveness
of the African-American church.
In the coal fields of southern West Virginia, it was the fundamentalist and evangelical
Protestant churches.
And in the produce fields of Florida, it was the Catholic mass.
And that's like a bridge out of part...
I mean, this is sort of the problem, is that, like, again, to back this up, this isn't just romantic theorizing here.
If you look at the way these institutions work, if you look at these places where these things are strong, it is a way out of poverty.
It is a way of social organization.
It is a way of breaking out of drug addiction and all these things.
I mean, if you look at what we broadly call, I don't know, conservative Christianity, Whatever your beliefs about the theological claims involved, if you're talking about a machine to basically take people from the lower middle class and turn them into middle class, or to take people out of poverty into lower middle class, I mean, this is it.
This is how you do it.
Right, and here's what I was getting at earlier.
Hedges is writing sympathetically about these churches, and that quote I just read, because these people are at the rock bottom, but once those churches actually lift these people out of poverty and do give them a sense of community, Hedges often will just turn on them.
Another big Hedges quote.
...was about American fascism, which was about the religious right of the early 2000s, George W. Bush.
And this is kind of the part where Greg and I probably will not be able to help ourselves but point and sputter, because Hedges fell into this just ridiculous left-wing belief that George W. Bush and, you know, the evangelicals throughout the South and the Midwest and the West were about to turn America into a Christian theocracy, and The thing about this is, is that all of those people that Hedges was writing about so disdainfully were examples of people who were, you know, poor, like the kind in Days of Destruction and Days of Revolt, but who got involved in these churches, which at that point he's pro, and then became middle-class suburbanites.
And at that point, he absolutely hates them, and he hates the church, and he turns basically against Christianity, and he always couches his critiques of these evangelicals of, oh, and I don't say this lightly, you know, I am a Christian myself.
And again, Hedges is not a dumb guy, so how is it possible that he fell into this bandwagon of, oh, Blackwater is going to become the Praetorian Guard of King George W. Bush, the state's going to start executing gays, we're going to invade all of the Middle East, we're going to have another wave of crusades.
It's just mind-blowing that any kind of serious journalist fell for this.
Just complete hysteria.
Or the idea that A constitutional amendment against homosexual marriage, which at that point was overwhelmingly popular, the idea that that constituted fascism, that constituted theocracy, when actually it wouldn't have even been an issue for 99.99999% of human history.
And now, of course, you look at where we are now, and, if anything, the religious right wildly underestimated what was going to happen next.
Yeah, and again, something I do like about Hedges, and a lot of people like Hedges who do have this, at least Marxian, if not outright Marxist, worldview, is they have this ability to follow the money, and that's part of the reason why a lot of their analysis is so on point.
In Chris Hedges' book, Empire of Illusion, The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, he does write very eloquently about a lot of things, like he talks about how the military-industrial complex is in part held up because when America gives out foreign aid, it's on the stipulation that they spend about half of the money, or sometimes even more, on American arms and warplanes and all of this stuff, and that's an enormous part of the problem.
And that's why we give so much foreign aid to countries that obviously don't need it, like Saudi Arabia.
Right.
And it's like, you know, he figured that out by, he noticed this because he followed the money and that is a very keen observation.
Which is always the thing to do.
And Hedges is right about that.
And Hedges, you know, he wrote a lot about the 2008 financial crash and he, I mean, he identified a lot of I mean, he was right about a lot of just this absurd, basically highfalutin digital gambling that a lot of these companies were doing and how it inevitably was going to end poorly.
So it's like, if hedges can follow the money and understand those sorts of issues, Why isn't he capable of noting that of all of these evangelicals in the United States who do want a lot of political power, that they really lack the money or connections to influential people or influential institutions to get what they want?
Or is that more than that?
That was always their problem.
There were a lot of evangelicals, there were a lot of people who did want to ban gay marriage and stuff.
But they just didn't really have any money to do it, and they didn't control any universities, they didn't control voting.
Well, they controlled some Christian universities, but of course these are like... Sure, which have no cultural power whatsoever.
No, and they're always at the risk of, you know, losing their accreditation or whatever else.
Right.
And, you know, they always have a million pieces against them, and if you graduate from them, you're never going to get a job in like a normal company or anything like that.
And, you know, this is one of the things, if you talk about the people involved, during the height of the, oh, George W. Bush is going to turn America into a Christian theocracy and the GOP has become a theocratic party, the head of the RNC was Ken Nelman, who was a gay Jew.
That's right.
But somehow he was going to, like, lead us into Christian theocracy somehow.
And then, oh, corporate power... Gay Jews for Christian theocracy.
Right.
Corporate power determines everything.
And the oligarchs are in charge and they're going to push through all these things.
Which Hedges absolutely believes.
He absolutely believes.
He's constantly talking about this.
But somehow the idea that George W. Bush is going to campaign in 2004 on these religious issues to get these people to vote for him and then immediately turn around.
You never hear a word about this stuff ever again.
And instead he tries to screw around with Social Security.
Like who could have seen that coming?
And here's the thing is that He'll notice that corporate power and the oligarchs are doing these things.
But then if somebody comes along and says, okay, well maybe all these evangelicals or what happened in the Trump campaign, maybe these nationalists and these populists who are clearly the people, the rank and file of these movements, maybe they should get what they want.
Instead of all the CEOs, then all of a sudden Hedges turns into, well this is fascism, well this is theocracy.
You know, people getting what they actually want becomes fascism.
When people say authoritarianism today, what they really mean is normal people being able to discuss ideas without media supervision.
When people say anti-democratic movements, what they mean is ordinary people being able to vote in their policy preferences, as opposed to elites getting to impose stuff from the top down and judges making up some random rationality and saying, like, oh, this is the law now because I said so.
Right.
And again, this gets back to what I was saying earlier, for all of Hedges' empathy for the residents of the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation, and the ghettos of Camden, and the hills of Appalachia...
If those people got what they wanted politically, Hedges would absolutely hate it.
Even if we excluded the Appalachians, again, the people who live in Indian reservations and ghettos in American cities are not nearly as progressive as Chris Hedges.
Chris Hedges also does this, another typical left-wing fallacy, I'm sorry I keep repeating that, but Hedges is very emblematic of a lot of issues with contemporary left-wing thought of He positions himself as this intellectual who can talk to the elite on behalf of
Proletariats and Lumpenproletariats.
I'm a Tribune of the Probs.
Right, and to his credit, more than others who also try and have that status, he does go to these impoverished areas and he does talk to people.
He is a real journalist.
Yeah, he doesn't actually just go on Twitter and look at a guy and be like, ah, a cartoon frog called me a name, this is the Fourth Reich.
Right, so he just does do that work, but Something that's interesting about lower class people and extremely poor people is they're not uniformly socialist by any means.
There is this left-wing myth that if all of these people started voting, if they all joined a union, if they all got organized, You know, poor people are like all other people in that they have a variety of opinions when it comes to foreign policy and gays and abortion and all of these things.
And I don't want to just flip the coin to the other side and say, oh, all of these poor people are hardcore nationalists.
That's also not true.
Something that kind of proved It kind of proves what I'm saying is actually the 2020 election, when millions of people voted for the first time, there was an enormous surge in participation in the election.
And still, almost all of them picked one of the two parties that everybody else picks.
You know, we had like 10 million new voters or something like that.
and they're almost exactly split half and half the way the rest of the country is.
And plenty of those new voters, you know, we're poor people, some of them are rich people,
yada yada yada. But there isn't, you know, everybody on Indian reservations and everybody
in ghettos and everybody in tar paper shacks isn't just like a hardcore believer in establishing a
universal basic income and socialized medicine and all of this stuff.
Yeah, and the class identity that Orwell talked so much about last week.
I mean the idea of being a traitor to your class, the idea of having class identity, the idea of having class identity that transcends regional identity or national identity or racial identity.
This has clearly been lost and he still seems to have, as I think I would say more old-fashioned leftist hedges, he still seems to have residual hang-ups about this where he'll seem to assume a sort of universal class consciousness that maybe doesn't exist but should exist and could exist if we do X, Y, and Z. And it's like, well, No, it's just not.
I mean, again, those aforementioned people on the Lakota Reservation and in Camden and in Appalachia, okay, let's get them in a room together and talk about what they believe.
And really, the only way you can get those people to have a common front is by saying, okay, all those markers of your cultural and religious identities, those don't actually matter.
What you need to do is line up behind this economic program that will maybe get you a little bit more money.
Oh, and by the way, once you get a little bit more money and once you become something of lower-middle class, then you're scum, because now you're participating in the system that I hate.
Right.
It's at that point, once their class status is elevated, it's at that point that hedges would just furiously denounce them for not believing in gender-neutral bathrooms or for supporting various wars that America fights.
I mean, a lot of lower-income people are actually all over the wars.
And they might, you could argue, I've heard, you know, kind of the conspiracy theory of the reason white lower-class communities are treated with such utter contempt and borderline hatred by the powers that be is because it forces them only one way out which is essentially join the military because that's the one thing you can do where you'll get health care where you'll get money to pay for college and all this kind of stuff and you could argue that a lot of these people and this is probably true throughout history a lot of people who have served in militaries have done this because this is their road out of course now
They don't even want white people joining the military at all, unless you subscribe to certain political beliefs.
So even that idea has kind of taken a hit because they don't even want you to have that ladder out.
Well, and at the risk of belaboring a point, should one of these residents of Appalachia who are so downtrodden who had just does have genuine empathy for I don't I don't I'm not accusing him of being insincere.
The trouble is the flip.
So Hedges would really empathize for some poor white kid in Southern West Virginia because he's got it rough, which is true, and it's good that Hedges sympathizes.
But if that kid, even as a white guy, did manage to join the military and then was successful in the military and then decided to stay in the military for the rest of his life and became Very pro-American military, and the military became an enormous part of his identity.
Well, at that point, for Hedges, this guy is just a rube of the capitalist, oligarchical class that wants to fight all of these wars.
Especially if he uses his money to go to college, he meets a girl, he gets married, he has a family, he goes to church, he becomes a pillar of, you know, he becomes like the J.D.
Vance, right?
I mean, this is the rage you saw against him where they made the movie about it, and The narrative surrounding that... I mean, I've yet to see the movie.
I've read the book, of course, but the narrative surrounding that movie was not, this is a bad movie.
The narrative surrounding the movie was, this movie should not be allowed to exist because it portrays the idea that white people can be victims, which A, is fascist somehow, and B, also that you can climb out of it, which is also bad because we want them to be used as ways to point out how evil America is or how evil
capitalism is or how evil nationalism is.
We don't actually want to help these people. I mean, they might use them as a rhetorical thing
once in a while, but they don't actually want to solve their problems because if they solve
their problems, they would cease to be useful. Okay, so I've got a great quote from Hedges
from a column he wrote shortly before the 2016 election called The Revenge of the Lower Classes
and the rise of American fascism.
And this actually shows that... So many articles, the rise of American fascism.
Right, just like Bush was the rise of fascism which then nothing came of apparently even though he was president for 8 years and then there was Obama for 8 years and now we have the rise of fascism again.
It's amazing.
This joke isn't funny anymore.
But he's got this great passage that actually perfectly demonstrates the flip that I'm talking about.
And my printer was misbehaving, so we're going to get kind of a rough start here.
But bear with me.
Elites, many from East Coast Ivy League schools, spoke the language of values, civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class, while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters.
This game has ended.
So far, so good.
There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families, and their communities.
They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both political parties.
Hey, great.
So far, so good.
10 out of 10.
Next sentence.
Lower class whites are embracing an American fascism.
So this is getting weird.
Next paragraph.
And for all of you leftists lurking here, I'm quoting Chris Hedges as I read this.
I am not saying this.
This is a Chris Hedges quote for this entire paragraph.
These Americans want a kind of freedom, a freedom to hate.
They want the freedom to use words like nigger, kike, spick, chink, raghead, and fag.
They want the freedom to idealize violence and the gun culture.
They want the freedom to have enemies, to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers, African Americans, homosexuals, and anyone who dares criticize their crypto-fascism.
They want the freedom to celebrate historical movements and figures that the college-educated
elites condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy.
They want the freedom to ridicule and dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science, and culture.
They want the freedom to silence those who have been telling them how to behave.
And they want the freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism, and white
patriarchy. These are the core sentiments of fascism.
These sentiments are engendered by the collapse of the liberal state.
So that's weird.
Watched a little longer here, though.
The Democrats are playing a very dangerous game by anointing Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate.
She epitomizes the double-dealing of the college-educated elites, those who speak the feel-your-pain language of ordinary men and women who hold up the Bible of political correctness while selling out the poor and the working class to corporate power.
Again, that part is true.
And it's so, there is this, like, what, I mean, what would you call it?
This kind of double consciousness?
That's not exactly the term I'm looking for, but there is this just bizarre cognitive dissonance of the white working class has been screwed for so long.
All of these liberal elites pretend to have their backs, but they don't.
They're all just corporate sellouts and that's terrible.
However, also apparently the white working class is, is terrible and they want, what they really want is the freedom to physically assault muslims like that's what was that's what's lurking in the woods and again hedges has already said what motivates them is a hatred for this duplicitous liberal corporate class and then immediately says what motivates them is they they want they want the freedom to assault muslims undocumented workers african-americans homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their crypto fascism and it's like
Well, which is it?
A. And B. You know, this idea that poor people in West Virginia, I mean, what they really want is the freedom to beat up Muslims and gays.
Like, that's really what motivates them.
And that's the ideology that justifies all the corporate elite and political correctness that he claims to say is holding them down.
I mean, if you really believe That the white working class are these snarling beasts who if the boot is taken off their neck for more than 10 seconds will just immediately march into the streets going nuts and beating up everybody in sight.
That justifies a left-wing police state and that of course is precisely what we've been hearing since January 6th where a bunch of people wander into the Capitol building and suddenly we have Supposedly serious people saying this is worse than 9-11 and we need to have the NSA and the FBI going crazy arresting everybody because otherwise there's going to be a dictatorship of these fanatics.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, if you look at who's committing crime now, if you look at the hard facts, Of who is committing the crime, who the crime is being committed against, what's actually happening in the cities.
It's not the white working class that are doing these things.
And that's always been one of the big arguments against the whole, well, it's not about race, it's about poverty.
It's like, well, if you look at the crime rates in these, you know, poor white areas, it's not even comparable to what's happening in these other areas.
And the other thing is, in At the risk of putting words in Hedge's mouth, I think what he would say, and what most leftists kind of say or would assume, would be something along these lines.
You have a hypocritical corporate elite which sold out the white working class and destroyed basically their ability to have a normal life, to have a normal family, to own houses, to do all these things.
Therefore, they have responded with kind of culturally retrograde beliefs.
You know, the Obama quote about clinging to their guns and religion, essentially.
They're rallying to this mythologized past of the lost cause of the Confederacy.
They revert to toxic masculinity.
They try to find value in a culture that rejects them by trying to bring up these older values of honor, which really have no place in the American culture of today.
But these values are bad.
What the progressives need to do is not ignore these people, but nor give in to these values.
Instead, what they need to offer them is a program of economic liberation.
And if they do that, then all these values that we don't like will somehow fade
away because they're not real anyway.
They're actually just a response to what's being done to them economically.
This gets back to the... and again, I hope I'm not putting words in his mouth here. I don't think I am.
No, I think you are on point.
Yeah, and I think this is what he would sincerely believe, and this is what I think a lot of progressives sincerely
believe, including non-white progressives who will talk with empathy,
or at least, you know, pretend to, with what's happening with the white working class, and
they'll say something along the lines of, okay, these people benefit from various welfare programs,
they benefit from...
they would benefit from government health care, they would benefit from infrastructure,
they would benefit from all these things.
So therefore, we need to offer them these things, and if we do that, then all these cultural things we don't like about them, including racism, blah blah blah, will just fade away.
Of course, the problem is...
If they actually benefited from these things.
I mean, again, if you look at the South and how it benefited from many New Deal programs, that didn't make those values go away.
That's right.
If anything, it just strengthened a lot of these guys.
And it didn't make Northern elites smile upon these people.
All of a sudden, once they started moving up in the world, they just became more of a threat.
And also the fact that Oh, well, we're going to have this program of economic liberation.
Well, there's no reason that should come from the left.
It can also come from the populist right.
Furthermore, I would say it can only come from the populist right, because if it's going to mean anything, it has to be coupled with a program of re-industrialization.
It has to come with economic nationalism.
It has to come with a crackdown on immigration, because otherwise you can pass whatever laws you want.
But if you have a loose labor market, you're going to have cheap wages just because that's how it works.
And whatever laws you do pass, people are just going to get paid under the table to avoid them if you can get away with doing that.
You're going to have to have certain policies that encourage affordable family formation.
You're going to have to have certain policies that are going to reinforce social structures like the family and the nuclear family.
Because that's the best way to get people out of poverty.
You're going to have these policies from the right.
And of course, the leftists throw these things out as a matter of course.
And so, you know, even this program of economic liberation that they claim to offer the white working class is just an illusion.
It's not real.
They don't actually want to do it.
And again, as you've pointed out, if they actually did do it immediately, they would hate these people.
Yeah, I... If you actually want to help the white Working class, or for that matter the working class of any race, it's going to come from a nationalist movement.
Because even if you talk about what are problems that people face today, guess what one of them is?
Crime.
What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez say?
Oh, it's hysteria.
It's not really happening.
Well guess what?
She's not the one who doesn't She's not the one who's operating a shop that can't work anymore because it's plagued by crime.
Yes, Amazon is a problem.
I'll give you that.
Sure.
They won't carry, but they also won't carry our books.
So don't give me this nonsense that Amazon is somehow on the forces of like nationalism and white identity when we can't even sell a book on there.
Yeah.
They're on your side.
Well, this is something, yeah, that...
And let's not pretend that crime is something that really bothers Jeff Bezos.
It bothers blacks and Hispanics who live in these communities, and it bothers the unfortunate whites who blunder into these areas and get set upon like Sherman McCoy or something.
Yeah, well, yeah, crime is...
Crime is a poverty-based issue, but not in the way leftists claim it is.
Exactly.
The victims of crime tend to be poor and middle class.
It's actually not something that the elites or the super rich really have to worry about because they have private security, they live in gated communities, they live in really safe places.
you know, bucolic little towns or, you know, immaculate upper crust neighborhoods and big cities.
They're all white nationalists in terms of how they actually behave.
Etc. Yeah. And Hedges, once again, being pretty representative of so many really like radical
leftists, especially he's, he would be willing to grant you that, you know, crime. I don't think
Hedges would go so far as AOC does.
I mean, like, oh, you're just being hysterical.
I think he would feel a real level of empathy for victims of crime and would agree that, you know, less crime is better.
We need fewer crimes committed.
We need fewer victims.
But you'd never be able to really pin him down on how to solve this issue.
You'd never be able to pin him down on like, well, what are we going to do to reduce crime?
He would always pivot to this sort of pie in the sky of, well, we're going to educate everybody.
We're going to give everybody a good job.
It's always education.
You know, all this stuff.
And it's like, Even if that were true, it would take so long for the effects of this great education and this great jobs program to reduce crime.
You'd be talking about a whole generation, maybe two whole generations before any of that really impacted street-level crime.
Until then, you'd need to be putting people in prison.
You'd need to be letting cops shoot violent offenders when they saw fit.
No, no, no.
We have community justice.
Yeah, and all of this stuff and it is, it is, again, I am frustrated because I find this so irritating because I think Hedges is so sincere in his compassion for so many of these people, and I think he does do a good job of writing about a lot of these issues before anybody else does.
For example, writing about hillbilly heroin in 2011, 2012, nobody else was doing that back then.
Hedges was the one to go there, and even in this article that I read from The Revenge of the Lower Classes and The Rise of American Fascism, Even in that condemnation of the white working class, he's still willing to say they do have a right to feel aggrieved.
And so few other intellectuals are willing to do that.
And I think that's so great.
But you just can't.
But Hedges is just never willing to support any kind of policy
that would have any downside, which is true of every policy, except for these utopic left-wing
ideas that aren't really policies.
It's just, oh, we're just going to give everybody a good job.
Right.
Once the left sees its control, we will just give jobs to everybody,
and everybody will be happy with this good job that we have given them.
It's like, you've got to do better than that, man.
You gotta step up here!
You know, for all the, uh, real Marxism has never been tried, I mean,
I'm gonna come at it from a different angle. Whenever you do
have an actual Marxist regime, very quickly, they start putting in policies
that, if we go by traditional left-right
things, tend to look pretty right-wing authoritarian
when it comes to dealing with crime, when it comes to dealing with social dysfunction.
That's the funny thing about Cuba.
Cuba actually has a really aggressive law and order policy in a lot of ways, not only with the Muriel boatlift in the 80s when they just sent The dregs of their society to the U.S.
who became our problem.
That's just really imprisoned people for very very long periods of time for committing crimes in Cuba.
I think that's actually a big part of the reason why their society is so stable is because they do that.
Much like how in America crime just plummeted in the 90s after we started just mass incarcerating all of these people.
Yeah.
Oh well, then there was less crime.
Yeah, who could have imagined?
It worked!
It did what it was supposed to do!
This is a great policy!
It's because the narrative surrounding crime changes and these Marxist things because, again, there's a... if you commit a crime now, and this is sort of taken for granted by, I think, many non-whites and certainly the intellectuals that support this kind of violence against property owners and things like that, it's not really crime, right?
Because property is theft.
I mean, what you're doing is you're reclaiming value that was taken from you from an illegitimate system.
If they're in charge and somebody does something, that's serious because you're committing a crime against the people.
You're committing a crime against the revolution.
You're committing a crime against the oppressed.
So that's something that actually has to be dealt with harshly.
And I think that's why they kind of roll their eyes at what's happening now.
It's really of no moral significance of anything.
It's just sort of the voice of the dispossessed crying out for vengeance.
But, you know, January 6th, which is A blip compared to what's happening in Chicago every weekend.
You know, that's the most serious event in history because that was blasphemy against the state cult of whatever.
I mean, that's another thing is that if you're saying, why does he have this blind spot?
Why do so many of these more honest, how we say, or empathetic leftists have this blind spot?
I would argue it's because they fundamentally come at it from a religious viewpoint.
And so, you know, if you're talking to somebody of faith, You're not going to argue them out of their faith.
At least you're not going to do it all at once.
And there's study after study after study back in the South.
This also applies to us as white advocates.
You're not going to argue people out of racial egalitarianism in one go.
Because if you challenge somebody's most deepest held beliefs, what they tend to do is they tend to fall back on them and defend them even more aggressively.
And if you present new evidence, they'll actually reinterpret that evidence to back up the previously held beliefs.
So it's very rare that you'll get, you know, somebody will read one essay and be like, oh, I was wrong about all this stuff.
Therefore, I'm this now.
I mean, it takes a whole changing incentives and different experiences and doing all these things to really move people in a certain direction.
And so, If you're saying, look, why can't he see these obvious things?
It's because to challenge something that fundamental would be tantamount to challenging his very identity.
And who's going to do that?
Yeah.
I mean, if you've built your whole life on the idea that, I mean, if just to take one example, that God is real and he has a personal interest in what you're doing and then you're dying and somebody comes along and says, by the way, did you know that God isn't real?
And furthermore, that science says that all your beliefs in a Yes, I don't expect to make a white advocate out of Chris Hedges.
Like people aren't gonna respond well to that and trying to win over
Chris Hedges of all people to what identity is not gonna go over either because
You know, this is these beliefs are core to who? Yes I don't I don't expect to make a white advocate out of
Chris Hedges No, but I mean, I don't even expect him to when he's
married to an Asian woman. Yeah, I I don't even expect him to
Be able to empathize with that or even understand it other than this is just misguided rage
against elite betrayal and I can fix it with a new welfare program.
Yeah.
I mean, that's their answer to everything.
It is, though.
Again, for somebody... I mean, this is sort of the... I hate to use a conservative-ink kind of slogan, but I think it was... Was it Obama who said... I don't think it was, actually.
It was somebody who said, government is the one thing we all belong to.
And this was sort of the idea of the nation as defined by a passport.
And of course, Republicans, you know, they complained about it, but only from the thing that, you know, government is bad.
They didn't actually have a real rebuttal to this in terms of what the nation actually is.
I mean, at the end of the day, they think it's just a passport too.
And this is the idea that We're going to have civic unity.
We're going to have democracy by working together with these social programs and by having a really, really, really big DMV.
That's how we get national unity.
That's how we get rid of these cultural conflicts.
If we just kind of shuffle enough paperwork around and have enough money for various people, all these conflicts will go away.
Oh, and by the way, if any of these programs work as intended, it's going to create a new class of oppressors who we'll get to write articles about for the rest of their lives.
Yeah.
I mean, Saul Alinsky was very explicit about this when he talked about organizing in Chicago, and he basically said, you know, the ethnic whites, the Poles, the Italians, the Irish, and people like that, who were seen as sort of the Proletariat, the exploited people, they organized in the meatpacking plants and things like that.
They took over these neighborhoods.
They built political power.
They built middle-class communities.
And then they became the oppressors and the reactionary forces.
And now he had to mobilize against them.
And he says this, you know, explicitly.
I'm not putting words in his mouth.
Right.
There's that flip.
There's the exact thing.
And he says essentially that Social reform, progressivism, whatever you want to call it.
I mean, this is why I would define the left's fundamental principle, not so much as just equality, but entropy.
That, you know, in a spiritual sense, I guess, it's sort of this endless quest to constantly be turning over hierarchy, to constantly be turning over any power relations to But what that really means is constantly undoing whatever accomplishments you had before.
And so you can't actually win.
You can't actually hold power.
You can't actually say, like, we did it.
There is always going to be a new grievance that has to be met.
There's always going to be a new class of exploitation that has to be confronted, even if it's the exact same people that you helped out before.
And so even if you create a, you know, nice neighborhood, Through various social reform policies.
Well, the very next thing you're going to do is have to destroy it and import a bunch of people from the third world so they can throw up some section.
Right?
So you can ruin it.
And then when all these new problems develop, then you have a new reason to exist and be like, Oh, look how terrible these things are.
I mean, this is sort of the, one of the big differences between us and them is we're always painted at these as the extremists, but we can point to countless situations, not just in world history, but even in this country.
In the relatively recent past, or maybe even in some places today, where it's like, well, what do you actually want?
Or rather, what will you be satisfied with?
And you can just be like, yeah, that, pretty much.
Yeah, my go-to is Switzerland.
Yeah, I mean, like, if you were happy with Switzerland.
Yeah, sure, fine.
Okay, so something else I did want to talk about, and this is really the first kind of topic that Hedges wrote about that got me really interested in Hedges, more so even than his book on war, which is what he talks about in his book, especially The Empire of Illusion, but just generally the Society of Spectacle, which is a really important point and concept.
Yeah, and he, again, Hedges is really at his best when he writes about this stuff.
Let me give you all some quotes here.
We try to see ourselves moving through our life as a camera would see us, mindful of how we would hold ourselves, how we dress, what we say.
We invent movies that play inside our heads.
We imagine ourselves the main characters.
We imagine how an audience would react to each event in the movie of our life.
This, writes Gabler, Is the power and invasiveness of celebrity culture.
Celebrity culture has taught us to generate, almost unconsciously, interior personal screenplays in the mold of Hollywood, television, and even commercials.
We have learned ways of speaking and thinking that disfigure the way we relate to the world.
He goes on for a while, a few paragraphs down, he writes, We all have gods, Martin Luther said.
It is just a question of which ones.
In an American society, our gods are celebrities.
Religious belief and practice are commonly transferred to the adoration of celebrities.
Our culture builds temples to celebrities the way Romans did for divine emperors, ancestors, and household gods.
We are a de facto polytheistic society.
Which I actually thought was just a really, really insightful comment.
I pretty much could have written that myself with one or two minor exceptions, but yeah, I mean there's no...
I have nothing really significant to add.
Well, that's a sign of a really good writer, when you just quote him and say, I can't do better than that.
The thing is, everyone's going to have, every society has a mythic underpinning.
People in the past took for granted that the gods existed, so the wind blew They would interpret that as their God speaking to them or giving them a message, whereas somebody who's not in that mythic mindset would just be like, oh, the wind's blowing.
But as he points out, I mean, now we do really believe that we're in a movie all the time.
I mean, what was the most common thing on September 11th?
It was like, oh, it was like a movie.
I mean, even when you have the most elemental things of life and death, people still...
Put that distance between themselves and what's actually happening.
And they have to say, oh, it's like a movie.
I'm in a disaster movie.
What would this person do in this situation and everything else?
You also see this in the way that certain celebrities or something will be referred to as, you know, I see this with like De Niro or something when he criticizes like Donald Trump.
It's like, oh, he's such a badass and it's like, no, he's an actor.
Like, he's a divorce actor who makes crappy movies at the twilight of his life, in his own words, because, you know, he needs money to pay his, like, divorce settlement.
I mean, like, that's what he is.
And so, but that doesn't matter, because if you say, well, what is he?
I mean, you're thinking of the Signing Goodfellas when he's, you know, thinking about that hit and smoking the cigarette and looking cool, because that's what people think is the reality.
I think the idea of building temples to gods might be a bit much just because so much of it is unconscious worship.
As opposed to conscious.
And also everybody thinks they can achieve a papyosus.
He's actually, he's got a reply to that.
Maybe I should have kept reading earlier.
He writes, We engage in the same kind of primitive beliefs as older polytheistic cultures.
In celebrity culture, the object is to get as close as possible to the celebrity.
Relics of celebrities are coveted as magical talismans.
Those who can touch the celebrity or own a relic of the celebrity hope for a transference of celebrity power.
They hope for magic.
The personal possessions of celebrities, from John F. Kennedy's gold golf clubs, to the dresses worn by Princess Diana, to $40 swatch watches once owned by Andy Warhol, are cherished like relics of the dead among ancient cults
in Africa, Asia, yada yada yada.
Surprisingly, he doesn't bring up the reliquaries of medieval Catholicism, which I would think would
be the more obvious comparison. His point, I mean, I think actually his Christianity is showing here
He wouldn't want to dunk on Christianity quite that badly.
He's dunking on polytheism here.
His writings, I wouldn't actually recommend his book, The Empire of Illusion, but you can find excerpts of it online from the chapters where he writes about reality TV and Jerry Springer and pornography, and those selections And the effect they have on our society as a whole really are worth reading.
Something that I thought about when I was rereading this was actually when I was a teenager Basically all I really did was was party.
I just you know skip school and did a lot of drugs and drank a lot and Something you would often hear people talk about at these like house parties or when we were you know up to no good down by the rivers And this was right when reality TV was like blowing up as people would say man There should be a reality TV show about us right now like and there was there was this level of narcissism I'm just like trying to imitate the narcissism of TV to almost everything we did because like which and the idea that there should have been a reality TV show about us was so absurd right but we were so wrapped up in our own tiny little world we thought we were so cool that we were 15 year olds you know smoking weed out past curfew that it's like oh man they got to make a reality TV show of us you know we have so much fun
Fine.
We want to invite the world to have all of this fun with us.
The world secretly wants to be getting high with us down by the river.
Well I mean that's basically what a lot of the other reality TV shows were.
Right.
And of course a lot of them had started that way.
And we just thought we also thought we deserved that.
We thought we were equally deserving as the people on Cribs or you know.
Whatever yeah.
Like Big Brother.
I was thinking like Johnny Knoxville or something like that.
Like oh I'm gonna drive you know a stupid bike into a bush or something and therefore I'm a celebrity.
Yeah my friends and I in middle school actually We consciously tried to imitate Jackass.
We didn't have the resources of that TV show by any means, but we did spend this one summer just trying to come up with stupid stunts that would likely result in us getting hurt, because that would be like Jackass, and we all just loved that show so much.
Well, I mean you also...
It just is really honest, and I hate that there isn't, at least to my knowledge, a right-winger
who hasn't written about a lot of these issues without delving way too far into, oh, and
the solution is traditional Catholicism, or the solution is we should all become evangelicals.
Yeah, we just rewind.
We just rewind history.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hedges gives this just damning diagnosis of all of this while maintaining kind of neutral.
You can kind of have any sort of theological belief and read what he's writing about and be like, yeah, this is really gross.
Right.
Well, I give a positive review to History Has Begun, which is a book That was published relatively recently where he basically, the author, has a more optimistic belief in this stuff where he essentially says that within certain limits we can sort of create our own experiences and create our own narratives and that's the way America can be held together.
And of course the idea of living in a society of spectacle where the meta-reality overcomes the real reality was obviously, and I'm paraphrasing him here but a lot of other people made the same observation, It was obviously seen with the Capitol Ride on January 6th, where people involved, a lot of them, thought they were engaging in this grand struggle to remake the Republic, that they had this war that gave meaning, right?
A political war that gave meaning, and when they took the floor to the Capitol, they had achieved some kind of victory.
And then, right afterward, it became apparent that reality was going to reassert itself and, oh wait, nothing actually here was achieved.
But that didn't stop them from posting pictures of themselves on Instagram and Facebook and everything else.
Now, of course, the difference is that BLM did the exact same thing.
But that actually did become, quote, real, because mass media promoted these images and promoted this thing as a heroic struggle, and so therefore it became a heroic struggle.
There's a particularly, like, cringeworthy subset of photography where you'll see, like, a bunch of police just standing there doing nothing, and then, like, a black woman will walk up to them, and someone will take, like, a picture, and they'll be like, oh, it's so heroic and brave, she's walking, like, they're gonna, like, just You know, fire a buckshot at her or something.
She's running the risk of dying or something.
Give me a break.
And of course, the difference is that, you know, if you have a white working class person engaging in some sort of political protest and the police beat them or something, you know, the same reporters and photographers are cheering it on or saying this protest was a threat to democracy.
The idea that media has created not just, it's not an alternate reality, it's the ultimate reality.
It's the real reality.
And that we all want to participate in this is obviously something that powers most of social media where you post stuff on your Facebook account and especially on your Instagram account to create a certain image and be a little celebrity of your own and show everyone how cool and sexy and rich you are and maybe if it takes off you actually get to be a real celebrity because that's how like these influencers get money, right?
And so If you're trying to take down capitalism, if you're trying to take down materialism, you really... This is where Marxism actually has a bit of validity as a tool of analysis.
I mean, you really do see the evil of this, the commodification of everything.
Yeah, especially now with the commodification of experience.
Not just labor or something, but the commodification of lifestyles themselves.
And you hear these really tragic stories of these young women who spend $200,000 and put themselves in debt they'll never get out of to make themselves look rich to portray a certain lifestyle because If they pull that off on Instagram, maybe the reality will follow.
Right, they're trying to fake it until you make it.
Right.
And of course, that actually works for some people.
And so therefore, you always have the incentive for somebody else to do it.
Yeah, the insidiousness of this is that sometimes it does work, which is why all of these people... It's like the insidiousness of the lottery.
Unlike in 1994, somebody does win the lottery.
And so, in theory, I mean, that could be you, right?
And you see the same thing with stocks, you see the same thing with cryptocurrencies, you see the same thing with a lot of these.
The temptations of let's just call it hyper capitalism or late stage capitalism where there's the promise of an escape and the promise of unbelievable prosperity and fashion and as he writes a certain magic and sacred power.
If you can pull it off, but of course for everyone who pulls it off, you just get thousands and thousands and thousands of people just broken by the side of the road.
Yeah.
And he says, okay, well, I mean, he doesn't really propose a solution.
I mean, I would propose a solution, which is that you just need a different founding myth and you need a different mythic framework for how society should be structured.
Yeah.
But of course, you know, he would fight my version of that with his dying breath.
Sure.
Setting aside crypto and everything, what Hedges is really getting at is that we live in a culture where more people are striving to be celebrities than are striving to just be good, or to be honorable, or to be honest, or to be kind.
All of these things have now taken a far back or third or even fourth seat to Just like being the next Kim Kardashian and he writes about the other side of this as well.
Degradation as entertainment is the squalid underside to the glamour of celebrity culture.
If only that were me, we sigh as we gaze at the wealthy, glimmering stars on the red carpet.
But we are as transfixed by the inverse of celebrity culture, by the spectacle of humiliation and debasement that comprise tabloid television shows such as the Jerry Springer Show and the Howard Stern Show, We secretly exalt, at least that's not me.
It is the glee of cruelty with impunity, the same impulse that drove crowds to the Roman Coliseums, to the pillory in the stocks, to public hangings, and to traveling freak shows.
And again, this is pretty obvious to how they treat dissenters today.
I mean, on the far right, I mean, I saw a thing on Twitter yesterday where it was some, like, I mean, it was literally some old woman who blundered into the Capitol, and they're, like, posting a picture everywhere and everything else as if this You know, wizened old woman is like a threat to democracy, but like, they can do it and they can be cruel to her, so they're going to do it.
But I'll say, Hedge's diagnosis of this, and he's not the absolute only person to have written about this, but I found a lot of value in Hedge's writing about I mean, yeah, what you're talking about, it becomes more real than reality.
Yeah, history has begun, I guess, would be the more optimistic take on a lot of this.
Yeah, hedges can't muster an ounce of optimism about anything.
Well, there's also kind of a flip on this when it comes to celebrity culture where people will sigh and say, if only that was me, but we also rejoice in the downfall, right?
I mean, who, you see the They celebrate the celebrity, but then there's also this contempt of them, and so then when they inevitably overdose or their career falls apart because they have a bunch of bad movies and they put themselves too far in debt, people get off on that too.
And, I mean, to me it's just sort of the larger question becomes that of, which I think ultimately comes down to everything now, is the question of media power as the determinant of value and as the determinant of morality.
I mean, you brought up people don't seek to be good anymore.
What constitutes being good?
Even, again, to most people who identify as Christians, it's certainly not the Bible in terms of how you should behave.
And I think that one of the biggest problems, again, as you pointed out, is the loss of honor.
I mean, most cultures throughout history were honor-based cultures, where the idea was that you were responsible for the honor of yourself, your family, your clan.
And if somebody took up arms against you, or embarrassed you, or humiliated you, you had a certain responsibility to take it upon yourself to avenge it.
Now, of course, this is something that can hold societies back.
This is how you get, you know, honor killings.
This is how you get the honor cultures.
Everything in moderation, right?
Yeah, and again, we're white advocates.
We believe that race is real.
We believe even that culture, to some extent, is undetermined and has transferred through biology.
But let's look at what's widely considered one of the least clan-based societies.
So, let's say the Nordic peoples.
Let's say the people in Iceland.
If you read the Icelandic sagas, I mean, a lot of it is pretty tedious accounts of these, like, family feuds that come on for, like, centuries because some guy did something.
And so, you know, I'm not trying to say honor-based culture was some grand thing and that's what we need to go back to so we can, you know, I can kill some guy because his ancestor insulted mine 60 years ago.
After that, you have, of course, the rights-based culture, which is that we have certain... you have a certain dignity, but basically you appeal to the state.
If somebody wrongs you, you don't take... you know, it's not pistols at dawn.
But now we have the victim-based morality, which presupposes both the state that's going to intervene on behalf of the oppressed, and also a media that's going to champion and create sympathy for people.
And this is another side to celebrity culture, I would say, the argument determining the most important side of celebrity culture now, which is basically the victim as celebrity.
And even those who have power, who had the most power in traditional institutions, let's think of like Prince Harry.
Where to have power now he actually has to pretend to be or maybe really believes himself to be a victim.
He and his wife who are titled aristocracy are actually victims of racism.
and oppression and hierarchy and this works. There was a poll that indicated this was relatively
recent in the UK. It showed overwhelming support for the monarchy as an institution, overwhelming
support for Prince William and everything else. But if you looked at the younger generations,
yeah, they bought the whole narrative about Prince Harry and everything else.
Like if they could choose the king that's who would be the king. Well oppression makes for a great a great spectacle,
right?
Yeah, oppression is the greatest. Yeah, it's almost impossible for the two not to work
I mean, I always think of the the person I don't even know what
Sex it was perhaps that person doesn't either Where's a new one now who knows but the you know, the
person who did the no scream when Trump was inaugurated And of course the thing that a lot of people miss is the subtle look around to make sure everybody's watching before you get the gut-wrenching scream.
If somebody has an emotional breakdown and there's no webcam nearby, did it even happen?
I mean, and this is one of the things that Jared Taylor has always kind of reminded me of is that, you know, our opponents, they really do believe what they're saying.
I mean, that their arguments are made in good faith.
I think this is certainly true of Hedges.
I would simply add that for a lot of them, maybe they really do believe what they're saying.
Maybe they do really feel what they claim they're feeling, but it's only coming through this idea of Media spectacle and the idea of other people are watching so therefore I'm going to behave this way.
I mean what did Christ say in the New Testament?
You know if you're fasting you don't like make a big show of it right?
You're supposed to do it for its own sake because God will see it or maybe there's a certain value in and of itself.
But that is completely opposed to the modern outlook, where basically there's no point in doing anything unless it can be seen.
And unless you can somehow generate financial or social power from it.
And this is why we get the most powerful people in society claiming to be victims.
Making literal poses before guys who don't have much power at all, like random police officers, and saying like, oh actually I'm like the true oppressed class here.
Hedges is worth reading.
I mean, I think that his, it's just, you know, that religious blind spot, and when I say religious, I don't, I'm not faulting as Christianity, I'm faulting as egalitarianism, which I would say is the true faith.
Yeah.
One with, and it makes, you know, there's far more evidence to believe that God created the world in seven days than to believe that all human groups are equal.
Yes, yeah.
And that equality can never be achieved.
One hundred and ten percent.
Yeah.
And yet that is far more unchallengeable to most people.
And when you say, well, how is it that a guy who's clearly smart can't see the obvious things?
It's because he perceives reality in a fundamentally different way than we do.
And that almost makes it impossible to have any kind of a common discussion.
All we can do is just take what value there is to be gained from his writing and go on.
But in terms of solutions, we've got them.
And not only do they not have solutions, they can't have solutions.
And if they had solutions, they would immediately work to deconstruct them, immediately after imposing them.
Yeah, for all of you looking for recommendations, which I have to assume is at least in part the reason why a lot of you listen to this show, more than anything I would try and dig up the excerpts online or just essays online that Hedges has written about reality television, celebrity culture, and pornography.
Because when you, after you read those, you will feel a lot more guilty when you indulge in porn and reality TV and all these things.
And that's good.
You should feel guilty when you indulge them.
We all should feel guilty, and the more guilty we feel, the less we'll do it.
And Hedges is really good at making you feel bad about enjoying Howard Stern or something.
Good minister after.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, the commodification.
Hopefully do something more productive.
Right, and the commodification of everyday life and everyday experience is one of the biggest problems that we face.
I mean, this is ultimately why, as a traditionalist, you know, you have to break this stuff away, where You know, Marx famously wrote where he said that capitalism turns everything, everything that was once solid turns into air, right?
And he's talking about established social relations.
And he sounds a lot like Burke, where he says, you know, the proud submission that once made life worth living and everything else.
And there's there's a right wing take on what Capitalism does.
I don't even want to say capitalism.
Let's just say materialism.
Yeah.
And commodification does.
And to me, that's much more convincing and also has a greater possibility of taking action than The left's answer than Hedge's answer, which is basically just to complain about it, but not really have any solutions other than, here's some guilt, and somehow this guilt translates into you giving money to a non-profit, which will just make things worse.
Alright, well I think we'll close there.
Thanks everyone, and we'll see you again next week.
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