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July 29, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:14:41
Leftovers
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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, by Gregory Hood.
Today's episode is called Leftovers.
We're going to be getting into some progressive thinkers of both past and present that we neglected last week.
Week before last.
Week before last.
And we're going to start off with somebody who Had a big impact on me, and I think who had a big impact on a number of white advocates, which is Jack London.
Jack London, of course, famously said, I'm a socialist but a white man first, or something to that effect.
Best known for his stories of adventure, men overcoming nature, fighting the elements, having personified really the 19th century romantic life.
I mean this is a guy who marched with the industrial armies and fought with the capitalists who were trying to break up strikes and travel the world and did all these great things, but he had a very strong sense of race and I think What his life really represents, and this gets into what we've talked about before with sort of the difference between the old left and the new left, is that with the old left there was this critique of parasitic capital.
The idea that the idle rich, right?
The problem with the wealthy is that they don't work, was that they don't contribute,
was that they're a feat and weak and really not part of the nation in any significant way
and deserve to be overthrown for that.
Was viewing the wealthy as traitors to the nation.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's sort of like what Carlisle talked about with the decadent French aristocracy before the revolution.
I mean, everything in my body says like the French Revolution was the worst thing in history.
But then when you actually get into the history of it and look at who the aristocracy was and what they had really become at that point, you think to yourself, well, maybe some of these people had it coming, or at least an element in it.
Because there's a level of degeneracy that once something is reached, there has to be sort of a purging of the social order.
And that seems to be what Jack London's version of socialism was really all about.
I mean, he also wrote a great deal about the problem of foreign labor, which of course really defined the American labor movement at the beginning.
Everything from the radicals to the relative moderates like Samuel Gompers and the AFL, which of course were hugely influential in pushing through a lot of the first immigration restriction acts in the 1920s.
London, as somebody who traveled in Asia and who recognized, and I think he was actually the person who coined the term, the yellow peril.
And he was talking about it not just in terms of Japanese imperialism, but he was also talking about it in terms of Asian labor coming to the United States and underbidding white men.
Well, and just global demographics, Jack London was similar to Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant in being concerned that The advanced Asian races would just outpace Europe in terms of raw births, and that that would be extremely consequential, and viewing them as more of a threat than Africans, or Latin Americans, or American Indians.
Which I think is very interesting since they were essentially contemporaries.
I mean, Jack London was writing about these issues maybe only 10 or 15 years before Lothrop Stoddard or Madison Grant.
It's pretty interesting that he predicted, this is in 1910, he wrote an article called The Unparalleled Invasion, where basically after some...
Management, shall we say, by the Japanese.
China modernizes and then rapidly becomes this superpower in Asia, destroys all the Western colonies.
It ultimately ends in this ridiculous fantasy of almost race war with like the Ottoman Turks of all people fighting alongside the West to contain this.
But in some of his non-fiction, he was predicting that, he predicted first, which was prescient enough, that the Japanese would try to push the West out of Asia and do it under a racial banner, which of course they did.
And a lot of the early black radicals, notably the people who started the Nation of Islam, championed Japanese imperialism because they saw it as a way of The enemy of my enemy's life.
You know, they took a lot of inspiration from the Russo-Japanese War, which was technically a draw, but not really.
I mean, we all kind of think the Japanese won.
The Japanese won.
Draw.
Give me a break.
I think that's what Teddy Roosevelt just told the Tsar just to get them to calm down.
It was the first victory of a non-white power over a white power in a very long time.
And that made a big impact on London, obviously, but he, interestingly enough, he always saw the bigger threat as China, which now seems Remarkably prescient.
Yeah.
And he, I mean, Napoleon Bonaparte famously said, when China awakes it'll shake the world, or at least he's alleged to have said that, but London wrote about this in significantly more detail, had more experience with it, took it very seriously, investigated it firsthand.
Well, like all great racialists, Jack London cared about the numbers, and fundamentally China had numbers in a way that Japan didn't.
Yeah.
You know, Japan is a small collection of islands.
They're just never going to be that populous.
You compare that to China.
I mean, if you think, you know, whoever's winning the birth race is winning the ultimate race.
Well, then it's got to be China and not Japan.
Yeah.
The problem with China has always been a question of management as opposed to pure resources.
And when you think of just the unbelievable catastrophe Mao inflicted on China in the later parts of his reign, and how in the grand scheme of things, it just didn't I mean, it was a speed bump on where they are today.
Yeah, it's weird.
Well, the Yellow Pearl, this is where he said, this is where he coined it, it was in response to the Russo-Japanese War, and he said, the religion of Japan is practically a worship of the state itself.
He contrasted this with the West, where whites are a quote, right-seeking race.
Now this is important, Sam Francis said that one of the characteristics of white people generally, one of the fundamental characteristics, was this idea of a divine order.
That wasn't man-made, that to some extent binds even the gods.
Even in Christianity, there's this idea of the Logos, right?
This order that is either one with God, or God creates a reasonable universe that we can understand.
It's not just arbitrary chaos and madness.
London recognizes this in Whites 2, but he contrasts this with Asians, where he suggests that this simply isn't there.
It's just a pure will to power.
It's also interesting, of course, is that in Japan, with Shinto, you have what a lot of white people have talked about for a long time, which is this idea of a racial religion, where essentially the religion of Japan is veneration for the ancestors, veneration for the emperor, veneration for Japan itself, which, you know, the land itself is of divine origin and everything.
Now, whether that really affects people today, or whether that is something they really believe, or whether This is just sort of a cultural background that gets mixed with other influences.
Clearly, that vision was weaponized during World War II.
Yeah.
Where you would say, I mean, it was essential that we were talking about, you know, 40k a little bit.
I mean, you did have people screaming for the Emperor and killing themselves.
I'm saying that Imperial Japan is the closest humanity has ever gotten to 40k.
Yeah, and it wasn't this glorious thing of self-sacrifice.
It was more this Nightmare of annihilation and madness where they were basically attacking in every direction Simultaneously and even people in the government who were saying this is a problem.
I mean we're at risk for assassination.
I mean, I think London picked up on some of these Traits within Asian societies that if left unchecked could pose a danger not just to themselves but to the entire world and he was sounding the alarm on this stuff just about before everybody else and And it's interesting to me that he thought the correct response to this was a kind of racial socialism where white workers would get a fair shake, would be liberated from capitalists who were happy to replace them with cheap foreign labor, and that the torch of civilization would basically be carried forward by patriotic workers.
You can call that socialism and You know, there were some of his... his concept of socialism, I think, is a bit fuzzy, but there's a lot good in that, and I guess that's where my sympathy... Yeah, there's certainly worse ideas.
Yeah, that's, I guess, where a lot of my sympathy for the old left comes from, which is that there is something aspirational about it back then, and it was this idea of creating something greater.
Now, they were wrong, just in terms of The system they create doesn't work.
I was going to bring that up.
When you read The Iron Heel by Jack London, which is his most political novel, it's basically in two parts.
The first half is a bunch of really autistic dialogue of people arguing about politics.
It makes Ayn Rand look very nuanced.
It really does, it really does.
And the second half is just kind of like, you know, this bloody class war.
But in that first half, when you're reading it... It's boring, too.
The second half somehow turns a global cataclysm into boring.
I could almost... I could barely get through it.
Well, the first half is boring, too, but more importantly than the fact that it's boring is that the arguments for socialism that the heroes of the novel are making are just wrong, right?
You're reading these lengthy, lengthy monologues of these heroic socialists explaining why capitalism fails, and it's like, this just isn't true.
This just makes no sense.
We just know that this isn't correct.
Factually, any economist and most layman could just explain why these monologues are just Silly, it's just this sort of insular, weird reasoning.
And it was definitely picked up second or third hand from like a newspaper or something like that.
It clearly was not grounded in a sophisticated understanding of Marxism or where it came from.
It was not a scientific socialism.
No, it was...
But of course what's hilarious about it is that the socialist hero in that is basically this... I mean, again, it does make Ren look nuanced.
It makes Zarathustra look nuanced.
I mean, the protagonist is this...
Over a man who's just a super genius and a great warrior and absolutely fearless.
A polymath.
Right.
And the female protagonist.
Well, and he has no flaws either.
Right.
The female falls hopelessly in love with him and betrays her class to follow him to all this stuff.
Yeah.
The capitalists, of course.
There's something interesting about, one thing that I like about the Iron Heel is that When he's going through our socialist overman.
And, you know, it's not worth talking about his character because there is no character.
It's just this stand-in for... Tom Clancy writes more complex characters than appear in the Iron Heel.
It's ridiculous!
But one thing that's interesting is in the Iron Heel they talk about, well, You can't get these arguments out there because the capitalists control the press, and you can't get these ideas out there because the capitalists control the university, and you can't get this idea out there because the capitalists control the businesses, and they'll shut down the businesses if they disagree with you.
And you're thinking to yourself, like, well, what does that sound like in terms of what's happening now in terms of the structure of power?
One thing I will give the Iron Heel credit for is that there is a kind of James Burnham-esque recognition of power.
One of the few scenes that is, I think, quite good is when, now it kind of contradicts what he had been talking about before, but our socialist overman goes to speak to a group of capitalists who, for some reason, have decided to be lectured to by this guy.
And he prophesizes their doom and says the revolution is coming and all these things are going to happen.
And one of the capitalists gets up and essentially says, well what if we meet you with power?
And the socialist overman says power is a kingly word.
He acknowledges the challenge.
He acknowledges that he is advocating a forceful overthrow of the system and that therefore there's something almost noble about being confronted with force in return.
Yeah.
And then that's when you get the iron heel which is the I mean, I guess this is where you get the explanation that, oh, fascism is capitalism in decay, and this is when it resorts to militancy to try to defend itself, which is historically not how it works out or was.
This is where that suggestion comes from.
And essentially what ends up happening is you get this global war, and then it just sort of resolves somehow magically into the Brotherhood of Man.
I think it's literally called the Brotherhood of Man, and then that's...
The end of history and how we really get from here to there is never really explained other than a bunch of tedious fighting with weapons that don't exist yet.
Well, it says, the book basically says there's a series of successive cataclysmic class wars and it takes several rounds of global class warfare before the capitalists are finally overthrown.
But yes, in the postscript of the book and sort of in the introduction it's made clear that Currently, which is the future, there is this classless utopia.
One thing that's interesting to note about The Iron Heel is that it was clearly an enormous influence on William Luther Pierce's The Turner Diaries.
It's structured really, really similarly, and it has equally thin characters as well.
In both the Iron Heel and the Turner Diaries, I practically feel like a feminist when considering the main female character.
She just kind of sits there and doesn't do anything.
Yeah, she's just there to be in love with the protagonist and to just remind you.
Yeah, even in Rand, at least you have female characters who do things and have thoughts.
That's right, that's right.
I mean he does have, I mean this is the problem, his other stuff, his other writing is objectively better.
I mean I think that what he suggested politically was interesting in some ways and I think it's worth taking seriously, especially now Where white advocates really should look to the old left, really should look to some of these economic concerns.
I mean, again, you're more familiar with the so-called dirtbag left than I am, but that's the motorcycles you can hear roaring around in the background, which is shows that we're recording in God's country.
But this idea that we should be speaking to the real economic problems that our people face and the recognition that The economic elite is not on our side.
And for some reason this is just something that American conservatism just can't wrap its head around.
I mean, I thought it was pretty interesting how when Jeff Bezos went to space, first thing he does, he comes back, he gives a hundred million dollars to Van Jones.
And yet, you go to National Review, and I think it was like four, five, six articles talking about how great Jeff Bezos is, and why no one should be criticizing him, and we need to see more of this, and it's like, you're not even getting paid to say this.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, there's something deeply pathetic about this.
You're not even selling out.
Right.
At least somebody like London would say, well, don't you get that these guys aren't on your side?
And don't you get that there is a question of power here?
Maybe he's flawed as an artist in terms of conveying those messages, but the messages themselves are worth considering.
Yeah.
Well, and more than that, it's something that I was thinking about as going over Jack London's life in preparation for this podcast is that Almost all of the leftist thinkers that you and I have talked about with at least some amount of respect are people who decided to go out and do things and see the world and go on adventures and look at the worst of the world really up close.
That was very much true of George Orwell.
It's true of Chris Hedges.
Jack Reed.
It's true of Jack London, and it's true of Matt Taibbi and Edward Abbey, who, if we have time, we're going to get into today.
I won't get into Jack Reed, but someday maybe into Jack Reed.
And I think that that is actually very, very telling.
On some level, there's Greg and I share this kind of admiration for just brave men who decide to, you know, go, you know, Jack London.
Well, who live a life!
Right, Jack London.
They don't just sit in front of their computer and, like, have nervous breakdowns because they saw something on Twitter and spend their days screaming about it, about why it should be banned.
Right.
On some level, if you're going out and living life to the fullest, you're going to end up with insightful things to say.
I mean, they weren't NPCs.
Right.
And, you know, I know it's a meme and everything else, but, I mean, at some level, You do look at a lot of the modern left and you question about do they have thoughts?
Do they have an internal monologue?
Do they have feelings?
Do they have anything other than just programmed responses given to them by the media?
Say what you will about guys like Jack Reed, Jack London, and a lot of these other old leftists, but, you know, guys who are fighting in strikes, guys who were covering foreign wars as correspondents, guys who were at meetings of extreme left-wing political parties and writing histories about, you know, this communist faction versus this communist faction and everything else.
There's something at least interesting about that.
There's something at least worth learning about, if only because it's entertaining.
I mean, can you even say that about most modern progressives?
I know everything they've ever said, will ever say, have ever thought, will ever think.
I mean, there's no reason even to engage with them.
With very few exceptions.
Yeah, this is something I thought a lot about when I was in college and me going to a private liberal arts college was definitely part of my radicalization.
I was radicalized entirely by the left.
Entirely by the left.
I thought a lot about, you know, I had all of these professors who all were, you know, smart enough and decent enough teachers and all this stuff, and we disagreed enormously about all of these very important issues, but more than the disagreements, something that really made a big impact on me was thinking about the fact that none of them lived very admirable lives.
You know, they were almost all unmarried.
Almost all of them were childless.
They were way too deep into just academic minutia.
They had all of these petty beefs with other professors.
They all wrote essays for these just very obscure academic journals.
They gave presentations on really esoteric stuff at these just tiny conferences.
It was all just such insider baseball, and it was like, you know, agree or disagree about the politics, like, these are people who I don't want to be like at all, and that's so different from somebody like Jack London, or George Orwell, or even Marx, or even Chris Hedges, where it's like, man, these people went out and did stuff, I mean, these people had guts, you know, these people took risks, these people really put their money where their mouth was, these people really went out and saw the world.
One's reminded of what Kissinger said about the battles in Academia.
They're so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's right.
That's right.
So something, I mean, again, we're talking about how the Iron Heel is kind of a dumb book, which it is, but... It is kind of funny.
It is an example of double irony, though, in that a lot of right-wingers read it and were like, yeah, this is great.
This is what we want.
Where they took the wrong lesson from it entirely.
I would like to stress that I did not.
I did not identify with this at all.
But that was precisely because it was so cartoonish and over the top.
It's like, here's the good guys and here's the bad guys.
You don't want to be like the bad guys, do you?
And it's like, well...
The good guys are unbelievable, too.
I mean, there's nothing there other than just sort of a vague message that's interesting, but the story itself is terrible.
It's just trash.
It's awful.
But his good writings are all about nature, what you were saying right in the beginning of he's kind of the American master of the man versus nature genre?
Right, and this sense of the heroic.
I mean, this is something that he wrote This is again coming from the journalism where he's talking about the yellow pearl.
He says, no great race adventure can go far nor endure long, which has no deeper foundation than material success.
I mean, that could come from Evola.
Here's the horseshoe theory of traditionalism and the old left.
Where you have to have some idea of the transcendent.
You have to have some idea of the glorious, of the heroic, of pursuing something beyond mere life.
And that could not be a bigger contrast than most leftists, where everything is just materialist.
And the goal of political, even political revolution, is just to, I don't know, sit around and complain and have enough stuff to complain and comfort.
Right.
I mean, again, say what you will about a lot of The early leftists, even if you look at a lot of the early Spanish anarchists and everything else, I mean, these guys had a transcendent vision of what life could be.
Now, it was wrong, and a lot of their assumptions were wrong, both in terms of human nature and, perhaps more importantly, the way the economy works.
I mean, you can't make a flawed system work no matter how much you wish it so.
I mean, politics is wish, right?
But there's something more appealing With that, then there are about conservatives who say, well, just defend the status quo and give tax cuts to people who hate you.
Right.
I mean, what's going to inspire more people to act?
And particularly when we're in the position we're in now where the big money is on the other side.
I mean, what message do you want to take to people?
I mean, do you want to have a message of idealism and heroism and chivalry and embracing the struggle and looking forward to it?
Or do you want to have a message of, you know, try to pile up some riches and hide?
And that's really the difference, I think, between the best of the old left and a lot of today's conservatism.
Yeah, that's pretty well put.
I'll say this about, and I don't want to downplay his racial identity, I feel like I'm doing that a little bit here, but this is in, and I'm quoting here from an excellent article that you can find on Amaran Jacklin and Socialists and Racialists.
And I strongly encourage you all to read it, but there's a excerpt here if you'll bear with me from the mutiny on the Elsinore where there's basically it's non-whites mutiny and he is with the white captain.
He's defending the captain's daughter and they're holding out against this and Narrator says the following, quote, Across my brain flashed a vision of all I had ever read and heard of the siege of the legations at Peking, and of the plans of the white men for their womankind in the event of the yellow hordes breaking through the last lines of defense.
And I knew anger, not ordinary anger, but cold anger.
And I caught a vision of the high place in which we had sat and ruled down the ages in all lands, on all seas.
I saw my kind, our women with us, in forlorn hopes and lost endeavors.
Penton Hill fortresses, rotted in jungle fastnesses, cut down to the last one on the decks of rocking ships.
And always are women with us, had we ruled the beasts.
And then he goes on.
Yes, I'm a parrot.
This is Jack London.
Yes, I am a perishing blonde and a man, and I sit in the high place and bend the stupid ones to my will.
And I am a lover, loving a royal woman of my own perishing breed.
And together we occupy, and shall occupy, the high place of government and command, until our kind perish from the earth.
There's a lot to unpack there.
Oh gosh, I'm not even sure there is.
It's just a very, very beautiful, beautiful sentiment.
I don't know.
That's all I would say about it.
That would be my only commentary.
I mean, I think... Color me romantic.
I don't know.
Well, I think that one thing that... I mean, you go back to the Indo-European conquest, right?
Depending on what historical theory you buy about whether they went into India or wherever else, it's always been a minority ruling over a much larger group until overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
But one thing we can also look at is, first of all, back then when Europe essentially ruled the world, he's already speculating and musing on the idea of white disappearance.
You know, white genocide, the conspiracy theory.
But he also has this... I was taken aback when he mentions that ruling the world till we disappear and we still kind of see this even now in regimes that are fundamentally anti-white.
I would go so far as to say dedicated to being against whites.
That's the governing ideology of the regime, of the world order, really, if you look at organizations like the UN and the documents they're based on and everything else, and countries like South Africa and all these other places.
And yet, when it comes to who makes the show run, it's a bunch of white guys.
Sometimes they give themselves other new fake identities or create some new gender or sexuality so they can get a place and they recite whatever script they gotta say to keep their place, but it's still a bunch of white guys keeping the lights on.
And this is one of the things they talk about with white privilege is they'll say, well, it exists because if you look at all these positions, it's a bunch of white guys in all these positions, therefore they have a disproportionate amount of power.
But the question has to be, but how is that power being used?
Right.
Who does the power benefit?
Right.
And ultimately, like if you have a black millionaire, it is taken for granted that he is to give
back to the community.
And he's praised to his community.
And that's how he regards it too.
And he is praised for doing so.
The founder of BET, of course, who's a millionaire, calling for reparations, I believe, in the trillions.
I think the founder of BET might actually be a billionaire, like with a B next to an M, millionaire.
Yeah, a B billionaire.
He goes out there and says, America owes us.
This is what I want for my people, for my group.
I would go so far as to say that there is not a single person in all the world, regardless of how much money you had, how much influence you think they have, how many connections.
If you had a white guy who said, I am going to use my money to help white people, lose everything.
Instantaneous.
Overnight.
I mean, my argument for that, of course, is if you look at a guy who had the ultimate in credentials was James Watson when it comes to science.
He lost everything for saying something that is true, and remains true, regardless of what anybody thinks about it.
Right, he wasn't even pro-white.
He lost everything for just making great, surrealist comments.
Yeah, for making an observation that nobody even really disputes anymore.
They just kind of hand-wave it away and ignore it.
Which is essentially what Charles Murray is crusading against in this latest book, which I note has been Largely neglected by the mainstream media.
Not seeing a bell curve style freak out.
Nope.
It's just kind of a conspiracy of silence.
That's right, yeah.
And again, say what you will about a lot of these old leftists, but guys like Jack London, they saw the world as it was.
They had a sense of poetry and romanticism about them which make them attractive, but they also... I mean, my hatred of Even just the word journalist is well known.
But there's something to be said for that old school, I would almost call them like correspondent.
There's just something better about it where you actually go there, you see what's happening, you write it up, and you bring the truth to the people.
Because there's no other way to get it.
And sometimes getting the truth means putting yourself in danger.
And guys like him, again, guys like Jack Reed, they would go and do things like that.
Yeah.
Do journals today do that?
No.
They sit on their butt and complain about, you know, videos that other people took.
Yeah, that's right.
And that's the difference.
I think there's a lot of value to be... Even, you know, again, Jack London was not some towering intellectual.
He was not some Marxist theorist whose ideas we need to grapple with.
Perhaps there are some of those we need to get into later.
There are even some contemporary theorists who I think we need to talk about.
He is not one of these people, but His ideas, second and third tier, as the political ones may be,
are still worth considering and certainly the life is worth considering and the writing is
still compelling and that transcends politics. I'm not going to like throw a book out the window
because I disagree with the guy's politics. Yeah his life is really uniquely admirable
and again his writing on nature that's honestly one of the things I like most about lefty writers
generally is I find they're much more in tune with nature than the right with certain traditionalist
exceptions that I'm sure Greg is chomping at the bit to name explicitly right now. Yeah,
but uh... Every Evola mountaintop meme. Right. But Jack London's stories like to build a fire
and stuff like that really are just amazing stuff. I mean it's the kind of thing that if we had you
know a real country and real schools this is what you give kids to get excited about like being in
the world and...
Get boys excited about living a life of adventure.
Yeah.
I mean this is, you know, life should be something that you you're excited about and you get out there and do things and sometimes you even put yourself in danger, put yourself in kind of crazy situations because you do it for the story and you want to have a life that's, you know, they tell a saga about when you're gone as opposed to, I don't know, He stared at a blue screen and wrote a bunch of stuff about how he was offended, and he suffered from a lot of depression in the end.
Well, moving right along, there's a couple of contemporary correspondents I guess you want to talk about, right?
Who you think are still worth considering.
Sure, well, and moreover, we asked a while ago for listeners to recommend or to name lefties for you and I to discuss, and we just kind of neglected to do that two episodes ago because we talked way too much about Karl Marx and also just about why we talk about the left in general.
I mean, the right on Marx could be a podcast in and of itself.
Yeah, well, and we mentioned that.
So, two people that got named quite a bit were Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, and generally both were named by the same people, and it seems like they are always in the news, the both of them, these days.
Yeah, definitely the contrarians now.
Yeah, both of their substacks regularly appear in Real Clear Politics, both of them are on TV often enough, especially Glenn Greenwald, who's becoming something of a mainstay on Fox News at this point.
Yeah, they're respectable enough to have a substack, so...
They can't go too far, so let's give them that.
That's right.
Well, I'll give out my standard caveat for whenever we're talking about lefties with any level of sympathy.
I'm not under any illusion that these guys are closeted racialists or right-wingers.
They're just interesting.
Same with London.
I'm not a socialist.
It's just... Yeah.
Jack London's theory of surplus value as laid out in the Iron Heel is wrong!
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
What I'd say about Greenwald and Taibbi, because they're really quite similar in a lot of ways, is maybe three or four episodes, Greg and I did a podcast on Noam Chomsky and sort of distilled what we said about Chomsky is that a lot of his theories about media power and media hegemony and how all of that works are true, he just applies them incorrectly.
Right.
Taibbi and Greenwald would actually be two of the few people who actually do basically take a lot of Chomsky's theories and apply them fairly correctly, because both Taibi and Greenwald more correctly, just have not, you know, just cannot help but notice just how hegemonic and ridiculous the liberal media at large is.
Now that does not make them, you know, MAGA cheerleaders or something, but they're both just too observant and too honest.
We're not MAGA cheerleaders.
I mean, that would be just as bad.
Well, but a lot of Greenwald and Taibbi's liberal critics say that they're both closeted Trump-tards.
That's the accusation they constantly get.
Because they notice these patterns.
I mean, reading both of them... Well, I think they've noticed how the left has been easily corralled into being anti-Trump.
And so everything they oppose gets put onto this devil figure.
Former President Trump is accused of things he never actually did or said.
Much like Richard Nixon, the Trump of liberals imagination is way better than the one that actually existed.
But even the things that I would agree would be bad, he didn't actually do.
But you have everybody on the left kind of this, I would just say just downstream of journalists, media leftists, instinctual reaction that You know, maybe it's a problem that the National Security Agency is spying on American citizens.
And it's like, oh, well, you must be a Trump-tard and you are an enemy of the state and you should be killed.
And it's like, all right, well, let's rewind like 15 years ago to what people were saying about the Patriot Act under President George W. Bush.
I mean you take somebody like Rachel Maddow, I mean you can take the exact same person and it's just a complete 180 from what the rhetoric was.
And again it just shows that it's ultimately about who not what.
It's about who wields the power and what ends power serves.
But the thing with leftists generally is they, at least the better leftists, they tend to look at the structure of how power functions.
The way the system functions.
Now it makes them blind to certain things, I think.
I think the who question is more important.
But at least they notice when something like the military-industrial complex is still functioning a certain way or the domestic intelligence agencies are spying on Americans and doing all these things that leftists used to be against in the name of civil liberties.
Now they're doing it and you've got everyday Democrats and progressives cheering it on and saying it's good.
Because, you know, some guy had a cowboy hat and a Trump flag once.
And they're really, the fact that they're notable because they're two of the very few who point this out is actually kind of terrifying.
I mean, at this point, if you look at something like the ACLU, for example, I mean, the ACLU is pretty much dedicated against civil liberties at this point.
I don't know if I would go that far, but the ACLU of today is dramatically different from what it was 10 years ago.
I mean, y'all recall that the ACLU played a role in securing Jason Kessler's right to organize Unite the Right.
And then flipped on it afterwards.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, they're never going to do anything like that again.
Well, you know, you're saying that Taibbi and Greenwald at least notice all of this.
I think you're not giving them quite enough credit.
They more than notice these kinds of contradictions.
I mean, they do more than just notice.
Just, like, the ridiculousness of certain liberal narratives surrounding, like, January 6th or Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
I mean, they really dig deep and dissect really meticulously how silly and how just factually wrong these things, these narratives are.
And moreover, they talk really explicitly about why this is the case and why it's so difficult to correct.
I mean, they also talk really frankly about how The silly vocabulary around, like, wokeism and spurious Me Too allegations are used really cynically within the left just for, like, power plays, you know, from one leftist to the other.
And it's to our benefit that Taibbi and Greenwald spent so much time in the mainstream left because that gives them certain insights into all of this that those of us who have always been outsiders just simply do not have and cannot have.
And they really know the score.
Do you remember that Greenwald was a lefty golden boy back in the day?
I mean, he used to be the marquee writer for Salon.com, back when Salon.com was one of the most important left-wing sites.
And Taibbi is.
I can think of the days when I actually used to read Salon.com.
Yeah, everybody used to read it.
Every once in a while they would actually have something worth reading.
Again, now I feel like...
Every article that's ever published, I already know what it says, so what's the point?
Right, right.
So I actually highly recommend reading Taibbi and Greenwald whenever they write things about the media, about media bias, about media narratives, about Trump hysterics, these kinds of things.
They do have really valuable insights on all of that.
To that end as well, Matt Taibbi co-hosts a podcast called Useful Idiots.
You can subscribe for free on YouTube.
It comes out every Friday, which I find Very, very entertaining.
I don't know how many of y'all will be into it, but you might check it out.
Another interesting thing about that podcast that goes really underappreciated is that Taivi co-hosts it with a woman named Katie Halper, who's much more progressive than he is.
And in their banter back and forth, you can notice these slight, it's always like very subtle, But you can always perceive these little points of tension where Katie Helper is just so much more progressive than Taibbi that she herself is actually often missing the nuance of the kinds of things Taibbi is talking about.
Like a lot of it doesn't quite click with her.
And you can tell that Taibbi notices that she's not quite getting it.
But he just doesn't take issue with it, because he just doesn't want to turn his own podcast into this big fight, like he doesn't want to lecture her.
And I wish, you know, I hope somebody else will write an article about this eventually, because if I did it, poor Taibi would get into just so much trouble.
I cannot be the first person to point this out.
Anyway, so yeah, for me that's sort of the deal on Taibi and Greenwald.
Well, with Taibbi, he's written quite a bit about international finance, famously, I think it was Goldman Sachs, famously characterized it as a vampire squid on the face of humanity.
But he blinks when it comes to mass immigration.
I mean, he writes about how it's functioning, and then when you say, okay, here's this effort, they're trying to suppress wages, they're trying to do this, that, and the other thing, well, what about arguably the most Regressive policy that exists right now, which is the policy of mass immigration, and it's just radio silence.
Listen, I try and meet people where they're at.
Yeah, granted, Taibbi is useless on immigration.
I would not recommend reading Taibbi when he talks about immigration.
And there's a lot of goofy, you know, Trump, proto-fascist, blah blah blah blah blah.
But I mean, who, you know, who cares?
He has really interesting things to say about the media.
Well, I think Greenwald pointed out, I think it was just yesterday, as we were recording this, I mean, where it was a New York Times reporter who said that Trump supporters were enemies of the state.
And this was, and Greenwald pointed this out, and, you know, again, what is the old joke, conservatism, the tombstone, and the thing on the tombstone is, imagine if the other side had done this.
To fall into that for a second, I mean, if you had George W. Bush saying things like, everybody who opposes the Iraq war is an enemy of the state, if you had Donald Trump saying all these people are enemies of the state, and using real power to go after them domestically, not just griping about it or making some offhanded comment, but weaponizing the so-called intelligence community, which is a bizarre phrase, I still find.
Leftists would lose their minds and you'd have a million high-priced lawyers filing every motion under the sun to make sure that none of this can happen.
Now you've got the same thing being directed against millions of Americans.
Tens of millions.
Most of whom are not anything close to even racially aware, let alone white advocates.
They just may believe a certain thing about the Constitution or they may have a certain theory that doesn't fit with mainstream media on this side of the other thing.
And they're being treated like criminals.
And journalists, I would say, are the ones who are the ones cheering on this campaign the most.
I mean, if they're supposed to be our shield against the government, right now they're the most dangerous adversary when it comes to defending civil liberties.
And there is something to be said for, I mean, you used to be able to say, Here are some principled leftists who talk about free speech.
Here are some principled leftists who talk about limits on the power of the state.
And you begin to question, did any of these people actually exist?
Or was this just, okay, we want free speech and we want these laws to break down the existing conservative order.
Now that we've broken it down and we're in charge, we're just going to build up the same apparatus of oppression.
Only we're going to turn it toward our ends.
I mean, that would be my, you know, theory of politics.
Well, Taibbi and Greenwald are two people who are actually principled, which is why they're worth reading.
But that's probably enough on them.
Another person that got name-dropped a lot was Antonio Gramsci, and I'll just do kind of a brief monologue on that.
Antonio Gramsci is an Italian communist and cultural theorist who gets talked about a lot on the right, on the left, kind of by everybody.
More than anything, people discuss his idea about having the left, quote, march through the institutions, which is to say, you know, communists and radicals and subversives should enter mainstream institutions like the media and academia.
Well, that march clearly worked.
Since the 1970s or so, conservatives have talked about emulating this idea and starting a long march of their own.
How's that going?
So we're getting to that point.
I have to say, this has been attempted by a lot of different groups.
People keep talking about it like it's a new idea to the one on the right.
Like, I know how we can win.
People have been talking about doing a counter-Gramsci for at least half a century now.
And something Greg and I can actually speak to from personal experience is we've been at least loosely involved in certain conspiracies to do sort of Gramscian right-wing marches through the institutions, and none of them worked.
I wouldn't say that.
Some of them worked, we just can't talk about them.
I suppose that's true.
I can't brag about the ones that worked.
But they generally don't work, and they're very, very difficult to organize.
They're more difficult now than they were six, seven years ago.
Yeah, also true.
I mean, I think one of the big... Well, go back to Jack London for a moment.
The fact that even in this over-the-top cartoonish novel, He himself doesn't see it as ridiculous that the capitalists invite their sworn enemy to come talk to him.
To, like, understand, right?
Like, you wouldn't see that at a university, you know?
Like, American universities not gonna, you know, extend an invitation for me to come talk about, you know, white advocacy.
No, that was something that reminds me of my own naivete at age, like, 19 or so of, oh, I'll just get, you know, just get an audience, you know, they'll just They'll just be compelled to want to hear me out and then I'll just convince all of them with one grandiose speech and it's like, yeah, real life isn't that simple.
And bureaucratic politics is a force of its own.
I mean, what is it?
Where you stand depends on where you sit.
How many programs are there where they say, if you give us money, we will get these conservatives and we will place them in the liberal media.
So then we'll have conservatives within the liberal media.
And of course, what ends up happening is not only do they just become liberal, they tend to be the biggest left-wing enforcers of all.
I mean, insofar as the people who I do know in the media, it's like those people who were usually funded their beginnings of their careers funded by conservative donors who thought they were countering left-wing hegemony and instead what they ended up doing was enabling
it and I kind of wonder whether the guys who run the conservative
foundations know that at this point and they're just still taking the money anyway.
I think the bigger question is first of all how much of what happened is due
to some Italian communists that Mussolini threw in the clink writing this
down and people saying that's a great idea we would never would have
thought of this before.
Because there was always sort of this presence in the universities, there was always sort of this flirtation with these radical ideas among the aristocracy, among middle class dissidents, among bohemians, and you could always get away with it.
And that's not really true when it comes to the right with the exception of, I don't know, maybe like the conservative revolution in Germany in the 20s where you had people talking about like bringing back the monarchy or opposing the cultural order because you still had these remnants of the aristocracy or the military or whatever traditional institution was behind where you could provide sort of a safe space for people to organize.
But barring that, you don't really have a viable way of carrying out this march through the institutions because, I mean, what university is going to set aside something for you?
What bank is gonna bankroll you?
What millionaire is gonna give you 10 million to get a foundation going?
I mean, even when you do see conservative philanthropy, it tends to be pretty narrowly focused, and mostly on causes that aren't just tangential or flawed, but often counterproductive.
Think of the Koch brothers.
Yeah.
I mean, people talk about them like, oh, this is like the right-wing equivalent of Soros, and it's like, one, They literally work with Soros on criminal justice reform.
I mean, one, it's not even close to the same order of magnitude in terms of just the sheer money.
Or the international scope.
Or the international scope, right.
But if you just look at how much money we're talking about, it's dropping the bucket.
It's nothing.
I mean, whereas if you compare that to something like the Ford Foundation, say.
I mean, you're talking Wealth that's equivalent to the GDP of entire countries with some of these NGOs.
Non-governmental organizations, that's a misnomer in and of itself.
Because really, they are powerful, active, quasi-sovereign forces of their own.
And those are entirely owned by the left.
You think you're going to march in there?
When you're talking about, you know, funding the right, you've got to get really specific about which right, quote-unquote, you're talking about.
Like, yeah, if you want to protect a coal company from environmental regulations, like, oh yeah, there's a lot of money in that!
Then you won't have any problem raising money for that!
You know, but if you want to raise money to restrict immigration, you know, it's like you're gonna have to hit the grassroots with a direct mail campaign.
You're just gonna have to get I mean, the success of the conservative movement, such as it was in the late 70s, early 80s, a lot of it was Phil Schlafly and people like that, essentially activating people who had been left out of the political process altogether.
In this case, it was conservative housewives and church members.
that was the moral majority which uh vigor um not vigore um ralph reed well no not ralph reed
It was Paul Weirich who got that going.
These are middle class people.
Even if you go back to the John Birch Society, I think you had a guy who was a candy manufacturer
or something, so he was a millionaire and he got it started, but if you look at who
was really funding it, it tended to be middle class people who were advancing pretty small
amounts of money and they would build up these organizations.
But then if you have something the equivalent of Soros' Open Society...
I mean, you're just going to get squashed like a bug.
Or, you know, Bezos or Jeffrey Katzenberg or Jack from Twitter.
Right, right.
I mean, the fact that he just, like, it's nothing, drops $100 million on Van Jones.
I don't know, if we had $100 million, like, we would have won.
I mean, this is sort of the one white pill I'll say with this is that they really do have to go nuts stamping out every little You know, smoldering ash of resistance because if it catches even a little bit, they can't control it.
That's right.
We saw that 2015-2016 and essentially we had a long counterinsurgency against those forces and a lot of inaction from the White House when they could have very easily kept it going.
That battle, like, never ends, and they always have to be on the alert, and they always have to be patrolling everything.
But unfortunately, that also means that they're very paranoid about their own institutions, and so I think the idea that you can get in there and, what, turn the New York Times into, like, a fair newspaper or something?
I would really urge all listeners to this, to drop this weird fetish of, oh, we will do a counter-march to the institutions.
No, no, absolutely not.
This really is not viable.
You can maybe make it work in a A few cases in like a little way, but at this point it's really all about creating counter-institutions, not taking back over old institutions.
A counter-institution with a budget of $50,000.
First of all, one of ours is worth $1,000 of theirs in terms of effectiveness.
Now the problem of course is that they've got like $100,000, but that's also a lot of it is just due to money.
And so if you have an organization that's Composed of people of strong will and a budget of $50,000, you can punch well above your weight.
But if you spend your whole life trying to, I don't know what, turn...
the local chamber of commerce into like making a statement against immigration.
All that's going to do is you're just going to get the mainstream media and all these
organizations from out of your city and out of your state turn their guns on you and basically
nuke you from work. Yeah, your time, your energy, and your money is much better spent creating
counter institutions, even like invisible ones, even just a secret society. Yeah, you don't need
to give it a name. It is way better than getting an internship at the New York Times to the skin
of your teeth and being like, oh, I will be the vanguard of flipping the times into the equivalent
of Breitbart. It's just... Yeah.
Even flipping Breitbart into the equivalent of Breitbart 2016.
I mean, good luck with that.
The one thing I will say, and this is obviously something I have some experience with, and again I would say was successful and can still be successful in some cases, If you're going into the conservative movement, I don't think we should concede those groups.
I don't think we should abandon them.
I think you should try to fight them and turn them, but a couple things you've got to understand.
One, ultimately the donors are the ones who control it.
So, you can be as well read as you want, you can be the best speaker, you can be the best organizer, you can deliver the most success for the programs, but if a donor says he wants a program on the benefits of mass immigration to the GDP, that's what the organization is going to promote.
The second thing is that, at the end of the day, these organizations Fundamentally exist within the same political climate as the hard left and they have much more in common with them than they do with you.
I noted again a couple days ago on Twitter one of the things they always say when they talk about oh Facebook isn't actually biased against the right because look at who's gets the most engagement it's guys like Ben Shapiro and it's like well yeah because Ben Shapiro is the controlled opposition who's allowed on there to make sure people don't go Past it.
And I know Ben Shapiro, he was tweeting, he was saying like, oh, who are some leftists who, who are some good people and we can disagree with them.
And I think they're well, you know, worth reading and everything else.
And he was, I think he even mentioned Van Jones and people like that.
Really?
Yeah.
These are good people and everything else.
And it's like, contrast this to what he was saying about Trump supporters or even Breitbart in 2016.
I know.
Contrast that to people who are I mean, he's not going to say that about, like, Pat Buchanan.
He's not going to say that about Trump 2016.
But he's going to say that about communists.
And so, this idea that when the chips are down, I mean, it obviously depends on the institution.
I'm not going to say that every conservative group is useless or every website is useless.
Personal relationships matter, different organizations have different missions, different people are doing different things, and the details matter the most.
But, generally speaking, you're not going to get the Heritage Foundation to defend you if the mainstream media trains their guns on you.
I mean, look at Jason Richwine.
Yep.
So, yeah, that's our big take on Gramsci.
And, you know, whether the prison notebooks are worth reading and such, this is sort of the basis of the, okay, here's the shift from economics to culture in terms of what the left did.
And that's interesting as a historical phenomenon.
It's interesting and understanding where these people come from.
I mean, you can get the quick and dirty version in, what, Peppy Cannon's Death of the West, if you don't want to slog through the original source and everything else.
But at this point, we all kind of know this.
I mean, we live it every day.
I mean, when you've got Blackrock promoting the most...
Far-left cultural policies possible.
Do you really need to be told this again or be instructed about where it came from?
I think the real question should not be, and in some ways it's a cope, I don't think it's that a militant group of secret communists took over all these organizations.
I think that the more terrifying and truthful possibility is that these elite institutions are promoting these things because they benefit from them in some way.
And decoding why that happens and what tangible benefit they get from what's happening I mean, that's what you need to understand if you're going to be able to reverse it.
I mean, do you really think, like, the guys on Wall Street who are funding this stuff are like, well, some Italian communist from the 1920s said this, so therefore blah blah blah?
Yeah.
Yeah, it can be very hard to determine how much something was genuinely influential versus they're just, like, the first one to say it and just would have happened anyway.
You actually find the same thing when you look at influential films or influential novels, where it's like, they may have just been the first one coming out of the gate, or the most noteworthy one coming out of the gate.
This might have just been a general trend.
The mystery that I don't think even Sam Francis really fully unlocked is a lot of these, particularly big business and corporate elites, are they funding these left-wing causes out of fear?
Essentially because they think they're going to get bad press if they don't do these things?
Are they doing it out of belief?
Are they doing it out of cynical calculation?
You know, the obvious thing would be, we benefit from mass immigration because we get to pay our workers less, therefore we're going to advocate these policies.
Occupy Wall Street scared us, so therefore we're going to get everybody distracted with issues about sexuality and race and everything else, and therefore people won't talk about pay disparities anymore, that kind of thing.
Understanding those motivations, I think, Is much more difficult than pinning it all on Gramsci.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
I do think we should move on a little bit here.
Largely because I want to move on to something I really enjoy and you don't know anything about, which makes me feel really smart.
And generally, it's the other way around.
So one listener asked us to speak a bit about Edward Abbey, who was a very influential environmentalist back in the day.
Like I mentioned, Greg is not super familiar with Edward Abbey, but I am.
I read Desert Solitaire in 2015 and really it made just a huge, huge impression on me.
And this gets back to what I was saying earlier about Jack London, where, man, if you want to appreciate nature more and just the spirituality that comes with existing in nature and being a part of nature, Edward Abbey is actually probably even better than Jack London.
Probably as good as Marcus Aurelius, who wrote a lot about that as well in The Meditations.
So I'm just going to read a few passages from Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, which I love.
Not only was he an interesting thinker, but he was just an absolutely masterful writer.
I'll give you a few examples here.
I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small, motionless shape of vague outline, desert-colored, and with the wings of imagination, look down at myself through the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller, in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening.
A man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons, and the course of rivers and mountains, mountain ranges, on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains.
the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet,
the darkened east, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself,
and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.
Oh, here's another part. In the long hot days and cool evenings to come,
I will not see the gopher snakes again.
Nevertheless, I will feel their presence watching over me like totemic deities, keeping the rattlesnakes far back in the brush where I like them best, cropping off the surplus mouse population, maintaining useful connections with the primeval.
Sympathy, mutual aid, symbiosis, continuity.
How can I descend to such anthropomorphism?
Easily.
But is it, in this case, entirely false?
Perhaps not.
I am not attributing human motives to my snake and bird acquaintances.
I recognize that when and where they serve purposes of mine, they do so for beautifully selfish reasons of their own, which is exactly the way it should be.
I suggest, however, that it's a foolish, simple-minded rationalism which denies any form of emotion to all animals but man and his dog.
This is no more justified than the Muslims are in denying souls to women.
It seems to me possible, even probable, that many of the non-human, undomesticated animals experience emotions unknown to us.
What do the coyotes mean when they yodel at the moon?
What are the dolphins trying so patiently to tell us?
Precisely what did those two enraptured gopher snakes have in mind when they came gliding toward my eyes over the naked sandstone?
If I had been as capable of trust as I am susceptible to fear, I might have learned something new or some truth so very old we have all forgotten it.
Here, just one more.
Like a god?
Near the first group of arches, looming over a bend in the road, is a balanced rock about
fifty feet high, mounted on a pedestal of equal height.
It looks like a head from Easter Island, a stone god or a petrified ogre.
Like a god?
Like an ogre?
The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself,
to eliminate for good.
I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus, but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.
I want to be able to look at, and into, a juniper tree.
A piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description, to meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human and myself.
I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism, in which the naked self merges with a non-human world, and yet somehow survives, still intact, individual, separate, paradox and bedrock.
Shades of Heidegger there, like, taking something in and of itself.
Man, I don't know, perhaps about half of y'all listening to this, that's just corny googly gawk, but I think it's just... No, I think that's great.
I think it's just masterful.
I think it's just so beautiful and so moving.
And this is something that is just absolutely... It's lost on both, like, the modern right and the modern left, because I remember one of the things I used to hate, hate, hate having to do with conservatism was just sort of the...
instinctual anti-environmental stuff where it's all like pollution is great because we get to have this industrial civilization and fast food is great We're going to deliberately trigger the environmentalists by doing this, that, and the other thing.
We're going to burn coal with the trucks and all the rest of it.
We're going to pave over every wilderness and turn it into some city.
This was one of the things that really repelled me about Rand, too.
You look at a mountain and it's going to be blown up and turned into resources to build some piece of garbage.
But I think, unfortunately, this is also now being lost on Because you cannot have these views.
You just simply cannot reconcile these views with unlimited mass immigration.
And as we all know, The Sierra Club was straight up bought in terms of abandoning its opposition to mass immigration.
And Edward Abbey, who wrote all of what I just read, he got in trouble late in life by talking about immigration and how it absolutely needed to be halted, not just on environmental grounds, but also on cultural grounds.
He was willing to go that far.
And there are people who have been willing to go farther, I mean, as far as like more radical environmentalists in terms of population control and things like that.
I mean, the problem, of course, too, is then once you start talking about population control, because you can still talk about that, but the question is, OK, well, who's the one doing the overpopulating and who are the people not reproducing?
I mean, this is we have to talk about these things if we're going to be honest, but even The National Parks are now being attacked as racist and problematic.
One, because all the guys who started them and all the first conservationists were also people who were very concerned about race and who saw their love of nature as an outgrowth of what they recognized in humanity and its different variety and types.
And also because it is said that not enough non-whites use them.
And if not enough non-whites use them, we have to have a huge propaganda campaign to get them to use it.
And presumably, if that doesn't work, we have to scrap them.
Which has never really made much sense to me.
I mean, I've always just thought that these things are worth preserving.
You can't put a price on the idea of getting out there and being able to experience pure being and being able to experience what this country once was.
and what made people think that they had discovered paradise.
Right.
And this whole myth about, oh, the American Indians knew how to live in balance.
No, nonsense. I mean, the more we find out about that, the more we find out that it's just complete gibberish.
But the idea that we're going to pave everything over in the name of global capitalism is hardly an improvement.
No, I mean...
I will say, for our leaders who are just kind of generally unhappy or feel that they are in a malaise, reading about the joys of nature and getting in nature is a shockingly easy solution.
It's something that I myself forget at times.
It's very real.
And reading environmental lefties like Edward Abbey, for example, who I would highly recommend, especially Desert Solitaire, is a good way of getting outside your head a bit.
Well, there's also definitely now a lot of the transition when it talks about these things.
Oh, I remember in college when they would talk about genetically modified food or something like that and it was all lefties.
There was some seminar or something where they took us, I think it was like literally Monsanto or something like that, where they took us to this and the corporate executive I may have the company wrong, but whoever the corporate executive was, was sort of straight out of Central Casting as far as evil Chamber of Commerce guy.
And he basically mocked them to their face and said that, you know, somebody had said, oh, the Europeans have tighter regulations with food and stuff.
And he said, yes, but the Europeans are cowards because they didn't have the courage to cross the seas.
Create America!
And we know better than everything else.
But now, if you look at who's talking about, well, we need to get away from processed food, you need to get exposure to sunlight, you need to, I don't know, run barefoot or exercise with, not just in the gym, but outside and doing all this kind of back-to-nature primitive stuff, both in terms of exercise, diet, mode of life.
All that's coming from the right now.
And brands have been created around it and lefties go nuts about it and try to get it shut down.
And now it's instead, I mean, what is the thing?
Get back in the pod, eat the bugs, and by the bugs I mean that's really a stand-in for ultra processed food and somehow it's become more authentic to eat really processed soy on the grounds that it's not meat than it is to eat Free-range chicken or something like that.
I mean to me this is just a far more inauthentic way of living and ultimately there's a connection between the people and the land.
I mean that's a big part of what race is.
It's not just a mere biological essentialism.
It's also a spiritual thing and a people can't know itself without knowing the land.
I mean this is one of the biggest problems that we have now.
I think a lot of it is because we're in this artificial world of Of cities and concrete and processed plastic garbage that people feel so alienated from.
And it's alienation isn't from economics and the mode of production as Marx would have us say.
I'd say it's alienation from the cultures, just from the way of living.
And it's not just about how we produce things.
It's about this is how leftists, this is how the people who are in charge and the leftists are the people in charge.
This is how they're telling us we need to live.
And we need to say, no, we're not meant to live this way.
And because we're not meant to live this way and being forced to live this way, so many people are miserable.
If you'll allow me just one more quote from this book.
I've always loved these paragraphs as well.
In the case of the Navajo, the effects of uncontrolled population growth are vividly apparent.
The population, though ten times greater than a century ago, must still exist on a reservation no bigger now than it was then.
In a pastoral economy based on sheep, goats, and horses, the inevitable result, as any child could have foreseen, was severe overgrazing, and the transformation of the range, poor enough to start with, from a semi-arid grassland to an eroded waste of blowsand and nettles.
In other words, the land available to the Navajos not only failed to expand in proportion to their growing numbers, it has actually diminished in productive capacity.
In order to survive, more and more of the Navajos, or the people as they used to call themselves, are forced off the reservation and into rural slums along the major highways and into the urban slums of the white man's towns which surround the reservation.
Here we find them today, doing the best they can as laborers, gas station attendants, motel maids, and dependents of the public welfare system.
They are the Negroes of the Southwest, red black men.
Like their cousins in the big cities, they turn for solace, quite naturally, to alcohol and drugs.
The peyote cult, in particular, grows in popularity under the name of the Native American Church.
Unequipped to hold their own in the ferociously competitive world of white America in which even the language is foreign to them, the Navajos sink even deeper into the culture of poverty, exhibiting all the usual and well-known symptoms.
Squalor, unemployment or irregular and ill-paid employment, broken families, disease, prostitution, crime, alcoholism, lack of education, too many children, apathy and demoralization, and various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism.
Whether in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the barrios of Caracas, the ghettos of Newark, the mining towns of West Virginia, or the tar paper villages of Gallup, Flagstaff, and Shiprock, it's the same the world over.
One big, wretched family sequestered in sullen desperation, pawed over by social workers, kicked around by the cops, and preyed over by the missionaries.
Now make up your will about his political or cultural argument there, but just the prose is again... I disavow the insult to evangelical Protestantism, but just about the rest of that was dead on.
Do what you gotta do, Greg.
One of the things that I feel not a lot of people have paid attention to is what has been the cultural damage on blacks when they fled The Agrarian Life in the South to go to the big cities during the Great Migration.
They always talk about it as this great, glorious thing, but we've been doing this whole thing.
We've been doing this whole series on the Great Replacement and all these cities, and it essentially annihilated these cities.
I mean, it was a devastating strike.
You could not destroy cities more thoroughly, and it's hard to argue that most of the people there even That's it.
Blacks aren't doing great in the South Side of Chicago either.
Are they happier there?
Take a step back and say, okay here's...
You could argue that, oh, they should have been given more land, or they should have been more self-sufficient, or something like that.
Fine.
Take that as we're at 40 acres and a mule, whatever.
But even as they were, even in a relatively wretched state, can you really argue that they're better off now in some of these cities where it's something...
I mean, hell, the piece I just went up to today, just went up today, a guy in Chicago said it's basically like The Purge.
I mean, it was something like, what, 13 people got shot on one day?
Well, I'll give you a good anecdote here.
I grew up in a relatively large city, relatively near Chicago, and in high school I knew this black guy Uh, who once told me that he'd grown up in Chicago, uh, but his mom had wanted him to move out of the south side of Chicago because of the violence and the gangs and the drugs.
And he was like, but now we just live in the ghetto of this city and it's like the same thing.
Like there wasn't actually, there's actually not that big a difference.
Like sure, if we'd moved into a good area of this city it would be better, but that also would have been true in Chicago if we'd just left that ghetto.
Like we just transferred ghetto.
It's like, it's not that meaningful a change.
I thought that was just so funny.
But we've gone way over time here.
Yeah, we probably should cut it short.
One last thing, though.
I think that one of the takeaways, particularly from leftist environmental writers, there's something about the way cities are developing now, especially when you're not allowed to consider questions of race, when you're not allowed to consider questions of identity.
Where every city is basically the same.
I mean, I see these hipsters, which were once famously defined as the endpoint of Western culture.
I mean, you can say, oh, Portland, Austin, Seattle, New York, whatever, we're so unique.
Like, look at our coffee shop.
It's like, you've seen one, you've seen them all.
You've talked to one person in one of these places, you've talked to them all.
There's nothing there.
Whereas if you go to, like, You go to West Virginia, you go to rural California, you go to New England, you go to Texas, you go to places where people still have a connection to the land, you're going to experience like actual people, with actual culture, with actual identities and actual things to say beyond, look what Netflix had last night.
Right, yeah.
And pay $40 for like the tiny sandwich or something.
Yep, yeah, it's rough man, rough.
Alright guys, well thanks for sticking with us.
We're going to be returning to some more traditional conservative Territory next week including one of the formative battles of the modern conservative movement.
So looking forward to that.
Talk to you next week.
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