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July 16, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:06:53
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All right.
Hello, everyone.
It is this week's Left, Right, and White.
I am Chris Roberts, and I'm joined, of course, by... Gregory Hood.
And we're getting into some leftover left-wing thinkers that some of you guys have suggested and some of the people we wanted to address briefly.
Some of these guys we are going to return to.
Some of them, I think, deserve a full segment, if not, like, many full segments.
Right.
But there are some of these guys, frankly, who don't deserve that, and we must address Yeah, so our initial idea with this was we'd done three episodes in a row about important leftists, George Orwell, Chris Hedges, and Noam Chomsky.
We wanted to do a fourth one to just kind of cover a few related matters.
And we did request of y'all recommendations for lefties worth talking about.
And that got some negative responses, actually, which I wanted to kind of address before we really get going here.
And so Charles, who is a frequent commenter and a good supporter of American Renaissance, asked, Why is Chris Roberts so interested in the left?
Can anyone name one contemporary leftist who has good views on race and immigration?
The left is our enemy.
The question is not to flirt with or understand the left.
It is to defeat it.
So that is a fair question, and those are some fair points.
And honestly, Greg and I probably should have addressed this a few episodes ago.
But I want to kind of take that on as a sort of a general statement, because I know Charles isn't the only one who feels this way.
So there are a lot of answers to the question.
The foremost answer is that plenty of leftists do have valuable things to say.
Charles is correct that basically no leftists have good opinions on race and immigration.
But race and immigration aren't everything.
Granted, those are the most important issues of our time.
That's why Greg and I work for American Renaissance.
But they aren't absolutely everything.
For example, totalitarianism is worth understanding, which isn't directly related to immigration or race.
And if George Orwell, a democratic socialist, has valuable things to say about totalitarianism, why not listen?
You know, along with the demographic displacement and crime, another problem whites face is that we are all steeped in a vapid and narcissistic culture that offers infinite amounts of toxic reality, quote-unquote TV, and horrifying pornography at the touch of a button.
Chris Hedges, a radical leftist, has written about this problem with great insight.
The fact that he's a hardcore lefty doesn't preclude him from having useful analysis of real problems, even if he doesn't have useful analysis of every problem.
I mean, just like almost nobody is right about everything, I find that very few people are wrong about everything.
One example of this, and what I'm talking about doesn't just apply to the left, y'all can actually consider Peter Brimelow.
So his writings on immigration, demographics, and racial politics are influence on me and he's been a huge influence on Greg as
well.
However, he's also an unreconstructed cold warrior.
He credits the American conservative movement with beating back global communism
and believes Ronald Reagan was largely responsible for the fall of the Soviet
Union, making him one of, if not the absolute best president in American history.
I disagree with Mr.
Brimlow about all of that, as Greg does.
I mean, I'm fundamentally a creature of the conservative movement, so I
I wouldn't go quite that far.
I mean, I think that as far as the Cold War is its own thing, suffice to say that I think what Ronald Reagan will be remembered for by Chinese historians in a century is the immigration and the state, not anything to do with the Cold War.
Right.
So, I disagree with Mr. Brimel on those things, but his wrongness on that subject doesn't negate how important his body of work, especially from the 1990s onward, is.
My point is just that That same logic applies to a lot of leftist intellectuals.
Noam Chomsky is useless on immigration and race.
No question.
Absolutely.
No debate there.
I fully concede that point.
But his analysis of media hegemony is spot on.
Yeah, you gotta read Chomsky on media.
No getting around that.
It's not a contradiction to believe both of those things, that Chomsky is right about media and wrong about immigration.
The thing about it is lefties often complain about cultural appropriation, the idea that non-whites, usually blacks, create some cool cultural thing like jazz or what have you, and then whites steal this culture from blacks and make it their own.
Much like we stole mathematics from them three millennia ago.
So you can actually kind of consider this podcast to be kind of intellectual as opposed to cultural appropriation.
Greg and I are happy To steal leftist concepts that are useful or to steal good journalism they've done on this or that issue and then kind of retool those and use, you know, use those theories or use those facts for our own ends.
So that's one part of my answer for Charles.
And again, Charles is speaking for a meaningful segment of Ameren's readership.
Another thing is Charles says that the left is our enemy.
And I'm not sure it's quite that simple.
So he's right to some extent, definitely.
NGOs that help shift non-whites to America are certainly my enemy, as are anti-racist groups like the Sun Papi Law Center, the ADL, obviously non-white pressure groups, Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, all enemies.
And I'll grant that the idea that the races are equal and interchangeable is an enemy idea.
And given that equality is the zeitgeist of the modern left, then yes, in that sense, the left, writ large, is my enemy.
However, it's complicated.
I don't think people who care passionately about protecting the environment are my enemies.
Nor am I convinced that people whose foremost political priority is finding a way for poor people to have decent medical care.
I don't think that's their big thing.
I don't think they're necessarily motivated by evil.
That's not to say that I think environmentalists should get their way about everything, or that I think America should pass Medicare for All.
Those are policy questions.
I'm talking about animus.
Are lefty environmentalists who want to curb pollution and save the whales secretly motivated by a hatred for whites?
I don't see it.
Probably not.
When socialists say they want a healthcare system that ensures middle class people don't have to take on staggering amounts of debt in order to keep their kids healthy, are those socialists really secretly saying they want black-on-white crime to increase?
Probably not.
They have different priorities than we do, and they might even be factually wrong about some of the issues they care about, and they might very well be wrong about the policies they want to implement to solve these problems.
But that doesn't exactly make them evil.
So I'd say that sometimes the left is my enemy, and sometimes it's not.
But regardless of that, there are not a few leftists who have commentary worth understanding.
And again, Greg and I want to intellectually appropriate that commentary.
Another frequent commenter, and also supporter, Jack Ryan wrote, the terms left-wing and right-wing are way out of date.
They are left over from the days of the French Revolution, depending on where French representatives stood in the French General Assembly.
It's true.
Monarchists, Traditionals, Catholics stood on the far right, Moderates in the center, Atheists, Communists, etc.
stood on the far left.
Who will be our American royal family?
The Bush family?
The Kennedys?
Some Hollywood celebrity like Brad Pitt?
We are white identitarians, not left or right, just white European Americans.
Greg and I pretty much agree with that.
We don't want to get distracted over partisan issues.
We want whites to set aside their little divisions over whether to privatize social security and focus on big picture stuff.
Personally, when I meet another white guy, I don't want to immediately categorize him as an enemy or not enemy based on what he thinks of gay marriage or anything like that.
I want to be able to, at least eventually, convince him that he and I, as whites, are on the same side.
And I don't think I can do that if I dismiss him right off the bat because he says he considers himself on the left because he doesn't like America's crappy wars in the Middle East.
I don't think that that's a very, like, a winning attitude.
But my final point on all of this matter.
Maybe all of what I just said didn't sway you at all, specifically Charles or anybody who largely agrees with him.
Maybe you still think I'm wrong and that Greg and I are wasting our time talking about Jack the Magazine and what have you.
That's okay too, but don't read too much into this podcast because it's not the only thing that Greg and I do.
So even if you think this podcast is kind of dumb, have faith that we do a lot of other stuff that's more Maybe for lack of a better word, more on-brand for American Renaissance.
You know, I think the thing I write most frequently about for AmRen is probably crime, actually.
And Greg's writings are, I mean, just freaking masterful, unquestionably masterful.
And I do lots of other stuff.
I mean, if you like the classics we run on Sundays, the first-person accounts we run on Saturdays, those are my projects, and those are definitely good.
Those things don't flirt with the left.
And, very cynically, something that I discovered in 2016 that I had no idea was going to happen is that when I write about the left sympathetically at all for American Renaissance, enemies of the leftists that I write about then use that against them.
So if you really, really hate Noam Chomsky, which there are good reasons to hate him, honestly, take comfort in the fact that because Craig and I did a podcast He has really valuable things to say.
Enemies of Chomsky on the left are going to cite this as proof positive that Noam Chomsky is like a secret Nazi or like a closeted reactionary or something, which is hilarious.
And like, we can't, there's nothing we can do to, to preclude that from happening.
It's one of the weird things about, about working for Amran is like everything you do is so closely watched and then just cynically used.
By other people.
Like, the big example for this was in 2016, I wrote a piece that noted that Jackupin Magazine really had its moments, and Jackman actually has a lot of enemies on the left, and boy did those enemies just go to town on that site that I wrote.
I mean, to such an extent that I felt sort of bad for Jackman.
I mean, it had not been my intent to get them in trouble.
This was when I was just starting at Amaranth, and for the first time, I had no idea that this was, like, How it worked.
So, it's absolutely nothing else.
Take some cynical level of pleasure in the fact that when Greg and I are like, yeah, no, this Chris Hedges book was a big influence on us, that some left-wing enemy of Chris Hedges is going to try and cancel him for that, or is going to heckle him during some Q&A because of that.
And there's nothing Greg can do about that.
Leftists just cannot help themselves with this sort of thing.
We're just deeply amusing.
Because, I mean, there's leftists who will just Completely.
Like, they will just strip any of the nuance of what Greg and I said from what we did say just to use it as this sort of, like, cudgel.
They don't care that Greg and I will know, like, Chomsky is really wrong about all of these things.
Like, they don't care about that.
It just matters that we said he was right about media analysis.
And even, it even still doesn't matter that we said he applies it incorrectly.
This will still be enough for I don't know, the Revolutionary Communist Party to write a blog post about how Noam Chomsky is such a right winger.
Just look at American Renaissance.
Well, one of the interesting things that's happening on the left now, the modern left, which I would argue is basically defined by journalists, is that reading a thinker now implies agreeing with that thinker.
And if you know about certain people, that in and of itself is proof that both you and the person you know about are bad.
So this is obviously used with a lot of right-wingers, you know, Oh, you've read this guy.
You must agree with everything he says.
Well, I've also read my Marx.
I've also read my anarchist theory.
I've also gone through all this stuff.
I mean, does that mean I'm an anarchist?
Does that mean I'm a socialist?
Does that mean I'm a communist?
I mean, I think unfortunately for a lot of progressives, they would say, well, obviously these guys are tainted now because right-wingers are using them and using their ideas.
I want to make three points based on everything that was being said there.
First thing, I want to say hi to Jack and talk a little bit about the ideas of right and left.
Obviously, yes, the ideas of right and left are outdated in the sense that they come from a very specific point in time and we keep using them and they don't really quite fit.
No argument there.
That said, There's a reason we keep coming back to the idea we like the human species keep coming back to the ideas of right and left and I think it goes beyond conservative and liberal.
I would argue that they are meaningful terms that the left is defined not just by egalitarianism as its central value and then everything grows out of that and the right defined by hierarchy and the pursuit of greatness and everything grows out of that.
I would say it's almost a A more primal thing, more psychological thing, more base thing, mythic thing, the battle between order and chaos.
And in any situation, you can have too much of one or the other.
If you had a, you know, let's use the most extreme scenario that everyone's freaking out about.
If you had a white nationalist state, you couldn't have a pure, if you had a pure right wing state, quote unquote, if that meant a hierarchy of undeserving people ruling, And subjugating everybody else.
But you said this needed to be preserved at all costs because we have to preserve hierarchy.
We have to preserve order.
We can't have any reforming impulses.
I would argue that's not a good thing.
I mean, you do need a certain amount of chaotic spirit.
You do need a certain spirit of egalitarianism.
You do need a certain spirit of rebellion and revolution to keep things moving forward.
Otherwise, you get static and unchanging and ultimately decadent.
One of the things that Thomas Carlyle, that I took away from Thomas Carlyle writing about the French Revolution, which really changed my mind on a lot of these things, is how decadent and weak the French aristocracy was on the eve of the revolution and why, to a certain extent, they had it coming.
And so, at the end of the day, you know, unlike my counterpart here, I am very comfortable saying, like, I'm a man of the right.
I mean, full stop.
And in terms of the thinker, I align with Most closely, in regard to specifically non-racial stuff, I'd say it's probably Evola, who Jonathan Dowden famously called the world's most right-wing thinker.
So I'm not going to try to pretend like, oh, I'm beyond left and right and everything.
No, I'm a right-winger, but that's the end of the story.
But those impulses are not just in every society, they're in every single one of us.
And so we have to be able to deal with them and maybe think of a way that they can interact And it drives society forward because we have to be thinking in grand terms, like where are we going with all this?
That brings me to the second point, which is when we look at these writers, we're not doing this to amuse ourselves or waste our time.
The point here is to develop a doctrine of what I would call identitarianism, which is an explanation for how society functions, why social dynamics work the way they do, How we can interpret them and then, ultimately, how we can act on them.
You know, to paraphrase Marx, the point is not just to understand the world.
The point is to change it.
Now, this is why we started off with Burnham and the Machiavellian traditions and everything else because, as Sam Francis said, despite all its writing, despite all its sophistication, the American right really does not have a theory.
The American right, specifically, does not really have a social theory.
It does not have a way of understanding everything that's happening.
Which is why you get these unbelievably brain-dead responses to every single thing that happens, where the left will do something and the American conservative movement will seize on it and go forward with the response that almost makes the leftist look good.
So, you know, the left will do some stupid thing and the right's response is, oh, yeah, well, we're going to drink some big gulps of CPAC.
You know, oh, the left is going to do this?
Well, we're going to say that.
Did you know that the slave owners were Democrats?
And like, there has to be... We're just calling everything they don't like communism.
Right.
You know, like, oh, well, the real problem is socialism or something.
I don't like Obama, so I'm going to call it Stalinism.
Right.
You're just not going to attract that many people to your side.
Well, it's not even a question.
I mean, I think that In terms of attracting the most people to your site, I'm cynical enough that if you control enough media outlets, you can attract most people to your site regardless of how stupid your ideas are.
But the point is we need a functioning way of looking at things so we can not just be effective, but also when we win, and I fully intend on winning, have something worth living in.
One of the things that I was reading for a positive critique recently and Vennaro, you know, who will also get his own episode at some point, was saying that we have our Marx, we don't have our Lenin.
And he was talking about right-wing, you know, nationalism broadly defined.
Now let's say, do we really have our Marx?
Because I would kind of disagree with that.
I mean, there's a lot of great thinkers.
There's a lot of great traditions out there.
There's a lot of people that are worth reading and understanding and taking insight from, but we don't really have a general theory.
So without that, we can't really have our Lenin.
So, I mean, the point is we are building to something.
The last thing that I want to take here is in terms of what value is there from a lot of these progressive thinkers, particularly when we get to people like Jack London, who said, you know, I'm a white man first and only a socialist afterward, paraphrasing that to some extent.
If you look at yesterday's so-called leftists, a lot of them were better on race and nationalism than today's so-called conservatives.
I don't even think that's up for debate.
I mean, if you take... Yeah.
And we also need to go further that the real enemy, quote unquote, is not just progressives in many ways, it's the corporate elite that works in tandem with these guys.
I mean, the people who scare me are not, you know, some scruffy antifa who are, you know, journalists are lovingly rewriting their press releases or something.
Those people don't matter in the grand scheme of things.
The people who worry me are BlackRock, And the Chamber of Commerce and guys like Soros who put, you know, billions of dollars behind all these NGOs.
And to say, well, the real problem is socialism.
It's like, well, it's really not.
I mean, if we're talking about where international finance puts its money and its resources, and why are they doing these things?
It has to, we have to have a critique beyond just saying, oh, well, actually they're secret Bolsheviks because that doesn't make any sense.
I mean, there's obviously something else going on.
And that requires understanding corporate power.
And unfortunately, until we get some better critics of corporate power from the right, they do exist from the traditionalist wing.
But in terms of contemporaries, you're mostly going to get that from progressives.
And if you're talking about who is the real enemy, who is the most dangerous enemy, you know, I'm a lot more afraid of Wall Street than I am of, I don't know, Harvard or Yale or something.
Yeah.
Who ultimately backs these institutions.
Right.
And what you said is a good point that I should have brought up of, for better or for worse, probably for worse, a lot of the most valuable critiques about certain aspects of the world we live in are on the left.
We should on some level be embarrassed by that.
I mean, I'm, you know, in that episode on Chris Hedges, I talked about how his, I talked about his original journalism into Southern West Virginia and the opioid crisis.
You know, he did original reporting on that before American Renaissance or V-Day or countercurrents or anything like that.
I mean, that's, that's embarrassing.
That's, that's unfortunate.
In our defense.
He did the work, you know?
Yeah.
In our defense.
I mean, obviously they enjoy platforms and money, which, you know, I mean, there's, and this gets into another thing as we say, okay.
Why is society the way it is?
Who gets to enjoy a platform?
Who gets to enjoy bank accounts?
Who gets to enjoy these things?
I mean, we have to ask this question.
It's like, okay, well, why are banks aligning with the Revolutionary Communist Party in all the ways that matter?
Right.
And you can't say, well, actually, Goldman Sachs is secretly run by communists.
That doesn't make any sense.
You can't, you can't even say that.
Right.
And you can't, if you're talking about Soros and support what he means by the open society, you can't say, well, actually it's a super plot to implement Leninism or something like that.
It's no, it's a bit more Leninism or full-blown communism.
He says that China is the biggest opponent to his world vision right now.
What does that tell us about what his world vision is and everything else?
When we start throwing around these kind of outdated Cold War terms about what's communist and what's not, I would say it's just not very productive to understanding the way the world works right now.
And if you look at the conservative movement right now, they're sort of trapped in this dialectic from, what, half a century ago?
Yeah.
Which is why we're still in this tiresome thing of calling everything communist when that's just not the facts on the ground.
That's right.
With all that said, we're going to move on to some of y'all's recommendations.
One of the big ones we got is Karl Marx, of course.
Yeah, that's not going to be done in passing.
I mean, Marx is... Well, I've got a few notes here.
Yeah, I mean, not only could Marx deserve his own episode, you could do... You could do his whole podcast.
Yeah, you could just do one podcast a week for a year on Marx, because Marx wrote so much and influenced so many people.
But I want to say just a couple of A couple of things about him.
First off, I've always really taken credence in the conservative Christian view that to assess a politician, you actually have to look at his personal life, and if his personal life betrays a lot of sin and vice, he's probably not a good person.
That's actually one of the reasons why I don't like Newt Gingrich.
Three times divorced, he's cheating on the second wife with the third wife while the second wife is dying of cancer, and this is while he was calling for the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
I mean, what a monster.
It actually very much applies to Marx.
It's not talked about a lot, but Marx had seven kids and only three of them survived to adulthood.
And of those three, two committed suicide.
Uh, so this guy might've been just like the worst father, husband, like of all time.
I mean, can you imagine that?
Like three, only three of your seven kids live and the two of those kill themselves into adulthood.
I mean, a lot of people, especially now, are committing suicide.
I wouldn't pin it all on him, but I think if you look at his personal life, it's certainly nothing to be proud of.
This is true of a lot of people.
Yeah, he was constantly begging friends and family members for money.
He always put his writing first about his family.
They were absolutely destitute as he was just fleeing from one country to another and just obsessively writing all of the time.
I mean, I think that this is true when you look at a lot of Luther King, right?
A lot of these people who They hold up as paragons of virtue and everything else.
And if you look at their personal lives, it's, it's not just that they're flawed.
I mean, everybody's flawed, but it's, it's a level of depravity that goes far beyond what we would expect even a pretty bad person.
Right.
So that's, that's something to note and pass on.
Again, I mean, it's, it's not just that one of his kids committed suicide.
It's the two of the three.
I don't know.
I find that so haunting.
Well, and we also have to look at who ultimately supported him, which is, you know, Engels, who really deserves more credit, frankly.
Yeah.
That was the guy who was really bankrolling him.
And of course, why was he doing that?
It's because his dad was a factory owner.
Yeah.
Frederic Engels is actually a much, much more talented writer than Marx.
It's called Leaps and Bounds.
But digging into some of Marx's ideas, The big one he had, or that he at least popularized, was the labor theory of value.
Which is retarded.
Yeah, which is just indefensible.
It's the idea that the value of a given object, any kind of object, whether it's a boot or a printer or an airplane, its value in terms of its financial value is determined by the average amount of time and effort it takes to make it.
Now that's not true in the slightest.
Prices are largely determined by scarcity.
There's basically no, there's just no way that the labor theory is valid.
Now Marx isn't the first one to come up with it.
This is actually like an outdated economic concept from like centuries earlier and Marx sort of retooled it, but it's just ridiculous.
And that is the linchpin for a lot of his economic writings, which is why a lot of his economic writings are garbage is because they rely axiomatically on the labor theory of value, which is just, I mean, a child could explain why this is incorrect.
Marx was one of the first, Leftists to really dress up obviously false things in really opaque and academic language to make it sound a lot smarter than it was.
Yeah.
So yeah, given Marx's personal life and this labor theory of value thing, it can be hard to take Marx seriously, but he does.
I mean, given his enormous body of work, he does have his moments.
It's almost inevitable that he wouldn't.
I think when he writes about alienation, I think that's where he's at his best.
Sure.
He no longer completes a product for himself.
He's essentially a cog in an assembly line.
He has, of course, that great passage where he says, you know, that the point is not to... He's talking about the comforts of religion and comforts of what we would call traditional culture and how they're almost like sweet smelling flowers on a chain.
But the point is not to keep the flowers on the chain.
The point is to remove the chain and to keep the living flower.
And that's this vision of a communist society that he has in front of him.
The problem, of course, is that his vision of how to execute these things is completely wrong.
And this isn't something that I even think is worth debating at this point.
The economic theories that he puts forward are just not true.
But the cultural theories have endured, and I think that The reason Marxism has become almost a more influential cultural theory, you hear the term cultural Marxism get thrown around a lot more, is because his insights about alienation and about who constitute the revolutionary class and all this kind of stuff were closer to the mark than his economic theories.
And so the original manifestation of Marxism, the whole point was that they were going to outproduce us.
And they were going to, you know, as Khrushchev famously said, we're going to pass you and wait, right?
Right.
That the Soviet Union is going to show that it is objectively economically superior to capitalist America.
Well, that failed.
So now we're coming at it from a different angle where we say, well, there's something inherent to this process, which strikes at man's very essence, that it's inherently immoral, that it's built upon exploitation, and then it needs to be destroyed for these reasons.
These theories and the various people who have, you know, built on that, that's closer to the mark and I think more useful for the leftist project.
The problem, of course, as I would see it, is that it's deeper.
It's that Marxism and, or I would just say communism, capitalism, I mean, fundamentally, they're just two sides of the same coin.
It's just a materialist conception of humanity.
And therefore, they're always chasing something that they can never quite grasp.
I mean, this is where I think you got to come back to traditionalism, where you just say, man is not purely a wanton creature, man is not purely materialist, man is not purely an economic output.
And any theory of society where you basically say, if we give man enough things, he'll be satisfied and history will literally come to an end, I think is complete nonsense.
Right.
And also, if you look at the way, one of the things I would also note in passing is that, again, if you look at what, what Marx Wanted the kind of world that he envisioned.
He would be canceled, so to speak, by the left today.
I mean, again, we touched on this briefly in a previous episode, but he talked about, you know, oh, you would get to farm for part of the day and you'd get to theorize at night and you would, you would, everyone would get to be a Shakespeare and everyone would get to be pursuing excellence and all these things.
The whole point was that if you remove the shackles of capitalism, you would unlock human potential.
But today's life is not about unlocking human potential.
It's about containing human potential and making sure nobody accomplishes anything.
I mean, I'm not trying to strawman it here.
I think it really has come to this point where when you have people talking about why ableism is a problem, why gyms are a problem, Why any kind of cultural accomplishment is a problem.
Energy drinks.
Yeah, you can find left-wing criticisms of energy drinks and energy drink culture.
It's too bro-y and I let guys drink before they go to the gym.
I want to get amped up.
Gym bros will save the West if nobody else will.
But this is one of the big reasons why we have to look at the left, particularly from a century ago, is because in many ways they were better than the right of today.
It's because when they were talking about the sort of society that they wanted to pursue, something that was beyond mere consumerism, something that was really appealing to, I don't know, the highest aspirations of humanity, and the idea of unlocking human greatness, not just, oh, we're all going to be equal, but we're all going to be great.
I mean, I think that's a very positive impulse.
And today's conservatives and today's libertarians have a much less compelling message than what they had a hundred years ago, because now what they're telling us is that, oh, everything's fine.
Be content with consumerism.
Did you know, like, socialism is bad and that our GDP is higher than Cuba's?
I mean, I just don't find these things very compelling.
Yeah, I'd actually, I never thought of that before.
Marx really wanted to, like, unleash the full human potential of everybody.
He was just wrong about how to do it.
Right.
And that, yeah, contemporary leftists, by and large, I don't.
One economic thing of Marxists I do actually want to talk about, though, is his theory of capital accumulation.
I'm sure I won't be able to help but butcher my explanation of it, since I'm not actually a Marxist, reputation notwithstanding.
And I'm, you know, if a real Marxist were to listen to this podcast, I'm sure he's going to send me a really angry email for my kind of layman's interpretation of this.
But anyway, his point was basically that since under capitalism, the companies and businessmen that profit the most, instead of using the word profit, Marx always used the phrase surplus value, which just means profit.
It's just because he maintained the silly idea that any profit a company Earned was like the exact amount of money that was being stolen from the workers, which makes no sense.
Anyway, if you ever read Marx, whenever he says surplus value, that just means profit.
So anyway, so under capitalism, companies and businesses that profit the most do the best.
So the economy is always favoring businesses that profit more and more.
And so the people at the top are steadily increasing the money that they have in the bank, while employees won't necessarily be making more.
This will basically make income inequality worse and worse with every passing generation.
It seems to me that this is basically true, or there's at least a lot of evidence to suggest that it is true, as economic inequality has, by and large, been increasing really rapidly recently.
Bear with me on this, Greg.
Bear with me.
When you take into account how rich people invest their money in stocks, which often make them richer, but certainly don't create More jobs for anyone else.
And moreover, there are people today who can live year to year just on the interest they collect from the money that they have in the bank.
And that wasn't true 200 years ago.
Nobody actually had that much wealth accumulated to just do that.
It's something I thought a lot about recently.
This has been like a preoccupation in the back of my mind for like months now.
is how America's elite has used its accumulated capital for evil.
The millionaires and billionaires have more money than they know what to do with, so they give it to Black Lives Matter, George Soros' Open Society, etc.
This is terrible.
This is actually an enormous problem.
Part of the reason all of these monstrous NGOs have all of this money is because our evil, treasonous elite gives it to them.
In an ironic twist of history, all of these evil leftist groups are flush with cash Because the super rich don't pay much in taxes, and because they're just collecting interest on all of this money they've accumulated.
It's like one way to keep the Koch brothers from pushing criminal justice reform would be to raise their taxes to 90%, which was the law for the super rich in the 1950s.
Now, I don't want y'all to read too much into this.
I'm not unequivocally saying we should do that, and I'm definitely not saying that middle class or even the upper middle class should pay higher taxes. I'm just saying the matter of
capital accumulation, which Karl Marx wrote about, does appear to be real and it's causing real problems. If
you care about the issues that American Renaissance cares about, a real material issue we
face is that the elite has so much money and they get to do with it whatever they want. And we have
to explain why they do that.
I mean, this is why what Burnham and Francis was talking about is so important is when we talk about the managerial elite that they have, whether they truly believe in it, whether they've convinced themselves to believe in it, they do benefit from donating to these progressive causes and breaking down the ideas of nation and white identity And traditional culture and every, you know, the remnants of bourgeois culture essentially.
Right.
Because if you break everybody down into weak, dependent cogs who have nothing except what value they can contribute to a certain company.
And then of course, you know, you get, you give non-whites their elite, their identities.
But I mean, this is sort of like the difference between so-called black nationalism and then white nationalism.
If you actually break down what black nationalism is in practice other than Marcus Garvey, I mean, if you look at like Malcolm X and everything like that, oh, you know, they wanted to be independent.
No, they didn't.
If you actually look at like what they were advocating towards the end of their lives, it was just whining and white people subsidize me.
Yeah.
It's the same thing with all this stuff today.
It's, oh, we need to have our own graduation ceremonies.
We need to have our own thing.
But they don't actually want independence.
I mean, there are Right.
Dozens of countries around the world that they could go to.
Yeah.
But, I mean, they'd rather be burned alive.
Well, and it's easier now than it ever has been because Ghana just gives citizenship to black Americans.
Right.
If they just return.
And it's like, yeah, Ghana, black people are running the show in Ghana.
That's an independent black state.
Yeah.
South Africa too.
How's that doing these days?
And I think that we have to get into why is it that those who run the show are using The Capitol they enjoy in this way.
If you look at yesterday's oligarchs and you can, you know, Rockefeller and Carnegie and all, and all the rest of them, you can talk about, oh, the robber barons built their wealth illegitimately.
And they did this, that and the other thing.
And obviously they put their money behind some bad things.
But if you look at most of what they did, libraries, symphony halls, I mean, things that were basically, you would hold up as sort of duels of civilization.
Those were great things.
Right now, if you look at where guys like Bloomberg, I'm putting his money.
It's not just that the money is being used for things that I disagree with.
It's being put forward for programs that will actually make life worse for everybody.
Like all of our lives are worse because of their charitable donations.
It would be better if they just spent their money on diamonds and expensive champagne or lighting it on fire because much better.
The programs that they're making, Are destroying civilization for everyone, including the people they intend to help with the exception of those who actually, you know, work for these institutions.
And we have to grapple with that.
And we can't do that when we're saying, oh, the problem is socialism.
The problem is communism, because we get into this position where we're talking about the tyranny of big tech.
We're talking about wool capital.
We're talking about what financial institutions are doing to right-wing dissidents.
And then you turn to the Republicans and say, what are you going to do about all this?
And they say, well, we're going to give them another tax cut.
And that's just not good enough.
And ultimately, I think the answer is that we have to reorient ourselves away from this dichotomy where it's just about, oh, opposing socialism or not.
Ultimately, it's about what sets the lodestar for society.
And I would say it needs to be Driven by identity, by tradition, by an ideal of human greatness, by the idea, I mean, this is where Ebola comes in, where you're always directing something upward to this idea of order or divinity or greatness, however you want to get into that.
And I think ultimately the state has to be that which directs society, not the market.
I think we're seeing an interesting lesson in how this works out with China.
Where you actually have a governing class that despite all its flaws, I don't think the Chinese elite hate their people the same way our elite do.
And it's interesting how these same companies that literally bend the knee for Black Lives Matter and will be very uncomfortable with calling themselves an American company are falling all over themselves when it comes to getting into the Chinese market and will obey any condition that the Chinese Communist Party lays down.
I mean, one of the great examples, of course, is Nike, which sponsored.
Yes, that's right.
You know, Kaepernick and all these people who were turning against the American flag, and they say, oh, this is great.
This is bold.
We have no problem being corporate sponsors for all this stuff.
But then they made the mistake of mentioning Taiwan in passing once, and China came down.
Boy, the corporate officials then were saying, oh, well, Nike is a company by and for China.
And they are willing to align with all of these things.
One of the more amusing things I thought was that John Cena, who of course, professional wrestler, toward the end of his career, he sort of redefined himself.
Richard was some sort of rapper or something like that.
Toward the end, he defined himself as sort of this super patriotic soldier type.
And he mentioned something about Taiwan.
And now he's in, what is it?
Fast and Furious 35, however many iterations of this franchise there have been.
Something like that.
Yeah.
And what did he do?
He immediately prostrated himself, started babbling about how great China was, how sorry he was and everything else.
And there's an important lesson here.
I mean, if you're Chinese, you've got this guy who had been set up as almost a parody of American patriotism.
And here he is like bowing and screaming and everything else.
And the lesson here is that if you have powerful state leadership, if you have nationalist leadership, capital ultimately will bend the knee.
I mean, the issue, is not that we have some tyrannical state.
The issue is that we have, in fact, a very weak state and it is allowing corporations to undermine the nation.
Whereas if you had a state that did not allow these things, corporations would have no, and powerful economic elites would have no choice but to go along with it.
And the proof of that is what's happening in China.
So yeah, let me, let me contrast my, My perspective on all this a bit, Greg is very much a state guy, state power at every turn.
I am much more of a Machiavellian utilitarian.
For me, it's kind of whatever works in a given moment.
That's part of the reason why I talked about this capital accumulation from Marx and how it applies today.
For me, it's just that, okay, so Marx helped me think more critically about capital accumulation.
I looked at the numbers.
It appears to be true.
We do have a super, super wealthy elite and they just keep getting richer because they have so much money.
It's like they're kind of like too big to fail.
It's because of like their investments and stock and interest and all of these things.
And I view that as a problem in today's context.
It's because the elite is funding BLM and the Open Society and the NAACP and all of this stuff.
That's the issue.
And because that's the issue, that's why I'm open to the idea of right here, right now, maybe the solution is to just put a top marginal income tax rate at 90%.
Because even if the government wasted all that money, that waste on stupid government programs would be better than the evil that the billionaire class is funding now.
I mean, that presupposes you could tax and they would find a way to get around it.
And also, it's not just that the government would waste the money, it would use it on the same program.
Not just on the same programs, though.
I mean, the government would also dump some of the money into the military and building bridges and stuff.
I don't see how it really could be worse than the situation we're in now.
However, that's not exactly my point.
And I don't want to say, like, oh, yeah, it would just be a cinch.
We'd just start taxing them.
Like, yeah, we'd have to think seriously about how to do this to make sure we actually get the money.
But my point is that, yeah, if we rewind the days of Carnegie and company back then, the
elite was building libraries, museums, and all this stuff.
And at that point, like, oh, no, we should not have progressive taxation.
You know, these guys are doing good stuff with their money.
They earned the money.
You know, who are we to judge how they spend it?
In that context, I'm happy to be a libertarian.
It's always, for me, it's, again, it's not left or right.
It's white.
It's what's helping whites.
Anyway, I thought, I think this is just kind of an example of what I was talking about,
like intellectual appropriation.
Oh, if you look at what nationalism was initially, originally European nationalist movements
were profoundly anti-conservative because they were going after basically the remnants
of feudal elites.
And they were saying, you know, if you take something like Deutschland und Brales, I mean, the original meaning was not Germany above all of the countries.
The idea was that we are German before we are parts of whatever Petty kingdom or dukedom or whatever part of the Holy Roman Empire it was still remaining and everything else.
The idea was that we had this overall national identity that meant more to us than everything.
And that originally was coming from the left.
I mean, Bismarck's genius was that he was able to take that impulse, kind of put it into a right-wing form.
Victor Orban is doing that now.
Right.
Right.
Nationalists, like a nationalist welfare state.
Right.
And Poland has done some of the same thing.
I mean, this sounds a little esoteric, but this also gets to the most obvious problem in American politics today, which is that you have this unbelievable, I mean, we've all seen the graph, you have this unbelievable political opportunity, whereas if you look at where American voters are, There was a study not too long ago which basically confirmed that most tend to be socially conservative, economically liberal, and that's the sweet spot of American politics.
Sam Francis wrote a lot about this in Leviathan and a lot of other things that the party that hits this sweet spot will rule, essentially.
And both parties just seem firmly devoted to making sure they avoid this, and the Republicans Then the rest, because the issue again is not that Republicans are on principle.
The issue is not that Republicans will do whatever they need to to win.
I wish that was the problem.
You'd be in a very good position if that were the case.
The issue is that they are willing to go to the mat on profoundly unpopular policies.
The issue is that they are willing to defend the interests of a certain class of people, of a certain class of economic elites, and That class of economic elites hates Republicans, hates their voters, hates us.
So they're almost like janissaries.
I mean, you're basically this enslaved class of people who are fighting hard for the people who should be your worst enemies.
And American conservatism, for all its magazines and for all its million dollar nonprofits and everything else, Can't grapple with this most basic question.
Yeah.
Aside from stupid takes, like, you know, why won't corporations stand for the flag and all, you know, just sort of these dumb reactionary thing, reactionary in the bad sense, where there's kind of like knee jerk reactions of like, why can't we get them to do this?
It's like, well, maybe we should start thinking about what interests they gain from not going along with these things.
Maybe we should start thinking about why, Corporations are looking past American identity, why they see it in their interest to fund DLN.
Why is it that they're willing to align with, you know, Chinese ultranationalism, for lack of a better word.
Whereas the very idea of, I don't know, having an American flag at a stockholder meeting will send the whole place into uproar.
I mean, it's something that Pat Buchanan quotes in some of his writings and some of his books.
was a proposal that certain American companies start their stockholder meetings with the Collegial Allegiance.
Time out, time out, time out.
No, that was, Sam Huntington wrote about that in Who Are We?
Buchanan did too.
Ralph Nader.
Ralph Nader asked corporations to do this, to show a little patriotism, since America does so much for them, they're so wealthy!
And also if you look at who were the big immigration restrictions even in the 90s, I mean Barbara Jordan, who was of course the first black woman to give the keynote speech Give a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.
If you look at who were the big immigration restrictionists in the 20s, obviously you had Samuel Gompers of the AFL-CIO.
You had people saying that the real problem is we need to have these corporations paying the cost for employing illegal labor.
Like, yes, obviously.
Definitely.
And so, I mean, I'm not a communist or a socialist or anything like that.
Certainly, just because fundamentally, I disagree with the Basic way they view reality and of man as an economic creature and I think the way they interpret the sources of his alienation are just completely wrong.
I'm hitting them from, you know, farther from the right, you know, a right-wing critique of capitalism essentially.
But if you are purely defining yourself as anti-socialist, anti-Bolshevik, conservatism is defined by the free market.
Conservatism is defined by individualism.
As white advocates, this is the real problem that we face right now, because the battle over the American right, and when all is said and done, we are on the right, I think, just in terms of where the massive voters are and where, I mean, there's not like a way we can take over the American left.
Right.
Yeah.
Contextually.
Contextually speaking, you know, whatever philosophy and everything else, but in terms of your position, political positioning, we're on the American right.
And the battle now is to take over the American right.
And wrench it away from these ideas of defending corrupt economic elites, defending treasonous economic elites, and defining America as simply this placeholder for individualism and failed classical liberal values, which have led us exactly to where we are.
And also, classical liberalism, whatever these ideas may mean in theory, I think in practice, they ultimately are just sort of a transitory stage between one form of society and another.
I mean, if we look at what classical liberalism was designed to preserve, the ideas of freedom of speech, of property rights, of essentially the interests of small bourgeois property holders, all that is gone.
You don't really have freedom of speech.
You don't have control over your own property.
And these things have been taken away in the name of individual liberation and human rights, oddly enough.
We have to figure out a way to comprehend that and figure out a counter to that, rather than simply just saying, well, the problem is socialism, the problem is Marxism, the problem is leftism.
I wish it was that simple.
Yeah, it would be great.
I mean, if we, if we could have a kind of, I mean, let's use a model that a lot of people have been throwing around.
If you had just kind of a knockdown drag out fight between the right, broadly speaking, and the left, and I think probably the closest example of something like that, where you had every possible faction, You know, lining up on one side of the other and then just throwing each other into like a meat grinder.
That would be something like the Spanish Civil War, right?
Yeah.
But if you look at who were the traditionalists on the right in that war, you had the monarchists, which again, as Jack Ryan said, you don't really have in an American context.
You had the churches, which frankly would be on the left in this case.
You'd have the economic elites, which would be on the left in this case.
The military, I'm not even willing to say, would be on the right in this case.
So who's left?
So, I mean, that's your base and you have to figure out a way to get that base to be willing to advocate for its own interests instead of what I think is the main problem of the American conservative movement right now is you basically have these good people, these good Americans who are waving the flag and still think they're saving a republic that has long since died fighting for people who despise them.
Okay, so that's perfect because the most eloquent right wing figure to Draw from Marx is actually the late, great Sam Francis.
Here we've got a great passage about exactly what you're talking about.
It is also an example of what he learned from Marx.
Sam Francis was writing about the Christian Right in the mid-1990s.
He said, if they, as in the Christian Right, ever ended abortion, restored school prayer, outlawed sodomy, and banned pornography, I suspect most of its followers would simply declare victory and retire But having accomplished all of that, the Christian right would have done absolutely nothing to strip the federal government of the power it has seized throughout this century, restore proper understanding and enforcement of the Constitution and of Republican government, prevent the inundation of the country by anti-Western immigrants, stop the cultural and racial dispossession of the historic American people, or resist the absorption of the American nation into a multicultural and multiracial globalist regime.
Indeed, a globalist American empire, if you will.
Indeed, the Christian right, for the most part, doesn't care about these issues, or even perceive them as issues, and insofar as it does, it not infrequently lines up on the wrong side of them.
Thus, the religious orientation of the Christian right serves to create what Marxists like to call a false consciousness for middle Americans, an ideology that appeals to and mobilizes a sociopolitical class Right.
I mean, ultimately, what we're trying to do here, what is the point of this podcast?
interests and needs of the class and in the end only distracts and deflects its
political action and ultimately works to betray and reinforce the dominant regime.
Right. I mean ultimately what we're trying to do here, what is the point of
this podcast? Ultimately it's to break down the false consciousness to develop
a new doctrine that is capable of mobilizing people behind essentially
revolutionary action.
And by revolutionary action, I'm not referring to like a tactical thing of like, oh, we don't need to ride in the streets.
But what I mean is taking control of society and reorienting in a new direction that's positive for whites.
And again, I'm basing a lot of this.
I mean, my idea for where this podcast came from, where it kind of clicked in my head, like this is where it needs to happen is after I read for a positive critique.
And it had just been kicking around in my head for years after that.
But I mean, without the doctrine, there is no revolution, right?
Yeah.
And if you look at the American right now, I mean, you have some sort of groping attempts to come towards something, but even the best within Conservatism Inc., it's just so woefully inadequate and a lot of times is so misguided.
I mean, I see all these videos and all these books and all these things where they'll They'll break down everything that's happening.
You're nodding along in agreement.
And then at the end, it's like, and that's why we need to get back to being individualists or something.
It's like, you're, you're not even grappling with the causes of why we've been brought to this moment.
You can't even explain why is it that economic elites pathologize white identity above every other thing.
Yeah.
We also can't talk about who these economic elites are.
And what their own motivations are.
And I'm not just talking about in terms of what they regard their own identity as, because that's part of it.
But it is more complicated than that.
There are also structural factors that are driving their actions.
We have to understand these things if we're going to change them.
And as far as like, well, can they be changed?
The obvious answer is yes, because look at how quickly China is able to make them emanate.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, there's an infinite number of examples.
I mean, even in living memory of a sudden Switch, I mean, of ideological shifts and cultural changes.
And these things, I mean, how many people 20 years ago were good Catholics who thought that, I mean, let's just take a random example.
I don't want to get stuck in this ground, but you know, good Catholics who would have said like homosexuality is a mortal sin and who now, you know, we're out there waving whatever the new flag is.
It's probably something new, like as of this morning, And it's simply because interests have changed, media culture has changed, the church itself has changed.
There has to be something that is sort of a fortress for people to rally around and say, this is where we are.
This is where we're beginning.
This is the theory we have.
These are the tangible institutions we have.
And it's from this ground that we're going to go forth and, you know, Reconquista.
But that requires an understanding of how we got to where we are.
One progressive I want to talk about a little bit, I'm probably going to butcher the name a little bit here, but Gunther Grass, who's a German writer.
Now, again, he was a supporter of the SPD, the Social Democrats, you know, typical self-loathing German.
He was against German reunification, if you can believe that.
Obviously, a big influence on a lot of leftist writers.
Until it came out that, I think he was drafted, but still that didn't quite cut it as an explanation for a lot of people.
It turned out that he was a member of the Waffen SS and when he was younger, obviously.
And there was a lot of, you know, you kind of wonder like, okay, all his later leftism, all the self-loathing, all the sort of things that he said, was that all just coming to terms with this internalized defeat?
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Of all people.
If you read his autobiography, he talks about his dad and he talks about the sort of psychic shock of people who were told that they were conquering the world.
And then, you know, fast forward a couple of years later and they're basically, their cities have just been utterly annihilated.
Everybody's starving.
You know, your women are out there selling their bodies just to get like a couple scraps of food to eat.
You've got the threat of Soviet, in Austria, you've still got the threat of Soviet invasion.
In Germany, of course, it actually happened.
And so, I think that also explains a lot of what's happening to white people today, where we've sort of internalized this sense of defeat.
As Steve Saylor says, a lot of whites are acting like the way American Indians once did, this defeated, despairing race.
And that's why not only did they turn to alcohol, they turned to drugs, but also they turned to these cultural creeds where you sort of seek out exploitation.
And seek out a kind of moral justification for being alive and being able to act in your own interests.
Because the very idea of acting as whites to defend yourself has just been driven so far out of you.
Yeah, it's unthinkable.
You've internalized that sense of defeat.
You have been utterly conquered.
You've been conquered in the way that, like, Southerners after the Civil War were never conquered.
I mean, they were building monuments to their generals within a few years, whereas now, I mean, let's face it, you do have a lot of white southerners, like, aligning with the current movement to destroy southern identity.
There's this passage that he writes, this is a book called The Head Bursts, or The Germans Are Dying Out, and it's at the beginning, it's not terribly important to plot so much, but he's talking about how many Chinese there are in the world, and just how bizarre this seemed to him, and he says, in the midst of the cycling multitude, cycling, literally cycling, all these Chinese people on bicycles, We were seized with terror.
Is such a thought possible?
Is such a thought permissible?
Is such a world conceivable?
A world inhabited by 950 million Germans who, even if the rate of increase is kept down to a bare 1.2%, will nevertheless multiply to something over 1,200,000,000 Germans by the year 2000.
Could the world bear it?
Wouldn't the world have to defend itself?
But how, against such a multitude?
Or could the world put up with as many Germans, Saxons and Swabians included, as there are Chinese today?
He goes on and mediates himself on this some more.
He says, of course, this is not what's happening right now.
He says, the Germans are dying out.
Living space without people is such a thought possible, such a thought permissible.
What would the world be like without Germans?
Goes on a bit more, and then he concludes with this brief passage, and another question.
Isn't there a certain grandeur in stepping out of history, in forgoing progeny, turning into a mere object of study for younger nations?
Since the speculation promises to be long-lived, I have taken it as a subject.
For a book or film, I don't know yet.
The title of the film or book or both might be Headburst, hearkening back to the god Zeus, from whose head the goddess Athena was born, a paradox that has impregnated male minds to this day.
That passage, written from somebody who experienced utter defeat and moral disgrace, and I have no doubt that he I mean, it's not like a lot of these people had a choice in the matter, but that's still with them.
And this idea of asking the question, could my nation have this many people?
Should that even be allowed?
the 60th. I mean, it's not like a lot of these people had a choice in the matter, but that's
still with them in this idea of asking the question, could my nation have this many people?
Should that even be allowed? How can we even grapple with this thing? And when you think
about how terrifyingly few white people there really are in the world and how we are a global
minority, and yet the very idea of even referring to white people as a minority seems ridiculous.
I mean, the word minority just automatically means non-white at this point, even though whites are the global minority.
The first person to break through on that was The punk band that did that song, White Minority.
Ian McKay's... Well, if it's the song that I'm thinking of, it's like, I want to be a white minority, right?
No, no, no.
That was better.
No, you're talking about going to a public school in D.C.
Oh, yeah, right.
Ian McKay's going to be on Fugazi.
What was his first?
Minor Threat.
Minor Threat.
Minor Threat has that song, White Minority.
That was like the early 80s.
Yeah, that was... Ian McKay, of course, is a punk guy, super anti-racist, but he did.
You did write the original, like, man, it sucks to be a white minority song.
Well, there's another song where it's, uh, I want to be a white minority.
And at the end, it sounds something like we're all going to die, something like that.
But there's almost a certain grandeur in it where they're saying they're looking forward to it to some extent.
We're going to get into this next week.
We're going to talk about this concept of double irony, where essentially you have a leftist putting something forward as a dystopia or a satire.
And then we say, yes, we know what you're doing.
Like we recognize the satire, but we're still going to take it and run with it.
And we're co-opting this and this is ours now.
So we'll get into that next week.
And don't worry, we are going to get back to a lot of these thinkers, including traditionalist thinkers, Richard Weaver, Nell Bradford.
I promise there'll be an Evola thing at some point, even if it's just me ranting insanely for four hours.
But like we are going to get into this stuff, but we do have to grapple ultimately with where we are right now.
And that ultimately is in a world that has been created by left-wing thinkers, basically on the ruins of Western defeat.
Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it.
And one of the ways we have to think about this too is, and I've already written about this for American Renaissance, so I don't think we need to get into it again.
I wrote about it for Veeder too, R. R. Reno's Return of the Strong Gods, where he posits that World War II is essentially the moral foundation of the entire world, that we're still living in the long 20th century.
But the way World War Two has been understood is it's no longer a defeat of Germany, or even a defeat of Nazism in Germany.
It was really a war against racism within ourselves.
And it's a war that's still going and can never end.
And this sounds crazy, but look at pop culture.
Man in the High Castle, Wolfenstein, the plot against America, Philip Roth, this idea that America was actually Nazi too, in some weird way.
And in some other dimension, it actually still is.
And therefore, we have to be constantly fighting this war and going nuts and everything else.
This paranoia, this insanity, really is at the root of a lot of what's driving people today.
And every culture has a foundation myth.
And our culture, if you can call it that, is really kind of an anti-culture.
The foundation myth is instead of a tree of life or this idea of prospering and growing, it's almost a tree of death.
It's this idea of original sin, of racism, where there is no salvation, where there is no Messiah coming to save you or liberate you or relieve you of the burden.
It's just something you're going to—that invisible knapsack of white privilege is just something that's going to be on your back forever, and you've got to do the work.
Still, we call the racist the whole time, and then die.
And that's what the world offers you.
On the one hand, we're offering, we have to craft kind of a spiritual message of liberation saying like, you don't have to do this, but we also have to be kind of cynical and materialistic and grapple with these thinkers, which is, well, why are these ideas so prevalent?
What interests are backing them?
Where's the money coming from to back this stuff?
Because this is the atmosphere we're all in.
And that's, that's why the podcast is necessary.
That's why we have to look into this stuff.
That's why it has to just go beyond, did you know that blacks commit more crime?
It's like, okay, yeah, we get it, but why is this tolerated?
I think that's probably a good place to close for this week.
Yeah.
I mean, what I want to get through to everybody here is that we're all in this together in the sense that, and I say this, whether you're progressive, whether you're conservative, whether you're one of my old friends over in Conservatism Inc, pretends they don't know me.
We won't do the discursive.
Yeah.
Whether you're my old friend, Oliver Darcy.
Hi Oliver.
I mean, if you're, if you're white, ultimately you're in this situation and however you want to define yourself, whether you want to say, Oh, I'm an individual.
Oh, I want to die out gloriously.
Oh, I just want to be forgotten.
Your conception of yourself as an American, as a person, none of these things matter.
The fact is, You are in a society where your identity has to some extent been crafted for you by people with power.
You are white.
You're going to have to deal with that fact.
That's not just a biological reality, but it's also, it is a social truth.
And the government and institutions with economic and cultural power are going to treat you as white, whether you want to admit this or not.
So the only choice left is how do you respond to this?
And the only two choices, as I see it, are fight or surrender.
Conquer or cuck, basically.
Understanding that structure of power, there are a lot of great traditionalists that help us understand this.
I don't think there are a lot of great modern conservatives who help us understand this, especially now that San Francis is gone.
I do think that there are some insights from today's progressives, and especially yesterday's progressives, that help us understand this.
Because at the end of the day, The people who I fear and the people who are upholding this are not some grubby communist or antifa.
Those people don't matter.
The people who matter are the people who have these fortunes, who are putting it at their disposal.
Who are those people?
Why are they doing it?
What structural factors are encouraging this behavior?
How can we overcome them?
Those are the questions we have to deal with.
Otherwise, we're just amusing ourselves and talking in circles.
Is that a wrap?
Yeah, I think that's a wrap.
So we'll see you next week, guys.
We're going to get into a bit more some pulpit culture stuff and talk about this concept of double irony.
And then we'll return to the traditional format and hopefully have you guys be more satisfied by talking about some more traditional right-wing figures.
So we'll go from there.
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