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Feb. 28, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:10:40
Old World Disorder
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Hey, guys, welcome to Left, Right, and White.
I am your host, Gregory Hood.
I'm here with Chris Roberts.
Today, obviously, there is only one big issue that everyone's talking about right now, which is the war in Ukraine between Russia and Ukraine, the independence of the breakaway republics in the east of Ukraine.
And as we're recording this, it appears that the Russians are attacking the capital city of Kiev.
So we're going to be talking about that, but in the context of this sort of triumphalist liberal capitalism, Globalization narrative that we saw through the end of the Cold War, most spectacularly defended by columnists such as Thomas Friedman, who I think holds a special place in all of our hearts as one of probably the worst writers who's ever lived, but who nonetheless enjoyed remarkable success and I think was really the sort of the prophet of what the Clinton years represented and sort of the liberal leading
the liberal neo-intellectual leader of globalization, who really was sort of a
prophet of the end of history, wouldn't you say? Yeah, Thomas Friedman in a lot of ways is a poor
man's Francis Fukuyama, or he sort of took Fukuyama's thesis of the end of history and
sort of built on it in terms of talking about globalization and, you know, the spread of
democracy, especially in Eastern Europe, and then, you know, optimistically about the Middle East as well.
I mean, Thomas Friedman was a big cheerleader for the Iraq War, very famously with his line, suck on this.
Yeah, what's interesting about that, I mean, this is, I guess, somewhat of an aside, but although Friedman draws on Fukuyama a lot, Fukuyama is a lot less optimistic about his end-of-history thesis than Friedman is.
You know, like, Friedman is almost an overzealous cheerleader of Fukuyama in terms of talking about democracy and the benefits of globalization Well, he was the one who came up with the famous golden arches theory, correct?
That two countries that both had McDonald's had never fought a war against each other and since each got their McDonald's That actually I mean that was questionable even when he said it But right now we're reading a report in Ukraine that the McDonald's has ceased operations.
So the golden arches theory is filled.
I Well, it's not the first time it's failed.
It's interesting, because when Friedman wrote that...
It was arguably untrue because of NATO's bombing of the Balkans.
But the sort of cop-out for why it was still true was that NATO is not a country, it was an alliance and it wasn't a full-scale war.
But then it was totally disproven in 2006 with the Lebanon War.
Then in 2008 with the conflict between Georgia and Russia, And then in 2014, with the Crimean crisis, and now again, so it's totally debunked now.
And again, what I was getting at about Friedman being more optimistic about Fukuyama-ism than Fukuyama, in Friedman's column about the Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention, he wrote in it, I've got the quote here, he writes, Francis Fukuyama, author of the classic work The End of History, argued to me that a country's getting its own McDonald's was probably not a good indicator of that tip-over point, because the level of per capita income needed in a country to host a McDonald's is too low.
I would not be surprised if in the next ten years several of these McDonald's countries go to war with each other, he said.
I loved that because I couldn't imagine, I can't imagine myself writing an essay with a thesis and then in that essay asking somebody smarter than me if they think I'm right and they say no and then I include that in my essay.
It's a sort of characteristic of Friedman where he goes off, he goes around the world, he sees some pretty Normal stuff in terms of other companies operating in different countries that also operate in the United States And he's baffled and astonished by this and thinks this heralds the beginning of a new age of history When actually it's not that astonishing and the fact that Capitalists in different countries have a great deal in common with each other maybe less In common with like the poor of their own countries that doesn't
Prove that your theory about how the world works is completely correct.
It just proves that a certain class of people in these countries is reading the New York Times and making decisions based on it.
But that doesn't mean, like, that's the world.
I mean, I feel with Thomas Friedman and really with this whole idea of the liberal world international order, there's a lot of selection bias in terms of the people who they're talking to.
Yes.
And the assumptions that they're making about how people behave.
I think one of the reasons why this war in Ukraine, which is not, you know, the most destructive in terms of the people killed or in terms of even compared to some of the stuff that NATO has done over the last few decades, but it's like the first time you don't see American munitions flying through the air and you don't see American missiles as TV entertainment.
Now it's Russia doing all these things and it's Russia doing it in the face of Europe and the United States telling them not to, which would have been frankly unthinkable 20 years ago.
Now you have China sort of tilting in Russia's direction, and so you're actually finally seeing this multipolar world, which Thomas Friedman was basically saying we're past all that, because now we're just one giant consumer plantation.
Well, yeah.
Two thinkers to me have really been vindicated this past week.
One would be John Mearsheimer, the realist foreign policy expert who's been writing about great power theory for literally decades.
I know he's most famous for the book he co-wrote on the Israel lobby, but that's really far from his most important or even his most interesting work.
I mean, Mearsheimer has been so blunt for so long about how There are regional superpowers, even if there aren't multiple global superpowers, and regional superpowers are going to have their way with nearby small states that they consider to be in their orbit, and there's just not much any kind of international organization or global superpower is really going to be able to do about that.
And Amir Sheimer, just time and time again, has said that this description and this analysis of the world is not a moral one, that he does not think this is morally as things ought to be, it's just the way things are.
And regardless of how often he repeats himself on that point, Mearsheimer has just constantly been hit with these dishonest attacks of, oh, Mearsheimer is pro-Russian imperialism or pro-Chinese imperialism, or that even he's just sort of nihilistic and and
Lacking in true conviction for democracy or something, but it's just I mean
He's just much more in the tradition of Machiavelli or James Burnham of he's just very honest about the nature in
which Power works and that power can really trump
ideology Yeah, yeah, and I think what you said when you characterize
them as a poor man It's Fukuyama really sums it up because Friedman being a
poor man free free Not Miersheimer.
Not Miersheimer.
No mere charmer is a Refreshing tonic to all this kind of stuff because he says look the rules are still Fundamentally the same as they were thousands of years ago.
It's a great power politics Fukuyama Suggested that that might be changing in that liberal democratic capitalism didn't face a compelling worldwide rival.
That doesn't mean that it was going to triumph everywhere all the time and all at once.
He pointed out militant Islam as potentially a counter.
The most interesting part of the book, of course, is where he talked about right wing challenges to the last man and how people might find this sort of stuff.
Basically the modern way of life unfulfilling and that would get history restarted again whereas Friedman It's almost like you can't see past his own very selective Experiences.
I mean this guy lives in an incredible house which is sort of a running joke on Twitter and social media about the the profit of globalization and how he actually lives and But all of his books, even when he talks about a particular speed bump that liberal democratic capitalism or globalization or free trade hits, he never really takes its triumph as even possibly losing.
You know, he never, he never even considers that this could be going some other way.
It's just that And he also never considers that people are going to be unsatisfied
by this global society of the last man, because it satisfies him. So therefore, how could
anybody else feel unsatisfied by it?
Yeah, there's a real class myopia to all of Tom Friedman's writings, which I think most people
who are writing opinion columns for the New York Times really suffer from, which is why so much.
Well, and it's true of the Washington Post as well. And it goes a long way in explaining why
the interpretations of the current.
War in in the Ukraine are just all oh, well Putin is a bully
You know He he is a jerk and he is like Hitler and he's just a mean-spirited
guy who doesn't believe good things He believes bad things and as such he does bad things and
it's just and it's just sort of that simple You know
It's been refreshing to read stuff in far-left publications as of late quite frankly like like the nation
of just talking well and the paleocons are I mean Sort of on the same the paleocons in the far left are
really kind of interpreting a lot of what's going on in the same way
You like Pat Buchanan had a recent column about how Putin just wants his own
Monroe doctrine if he considers the Ukraine and Georgia and these places to be
his backyard and he's going to have his way and that's always been true of
America's foreign policy in regards to You know Cuba and the Bahamas and Haiti and the Dominican
Republic and Mexico and Guatemala Nicaragua and the list just goes on and on and on
I mean, the amount of times the American military has intervened in Latin American countries, whether it's these sort of brief invasions or helping with coups or assassinating key people or, you know, sending in, you know, weapons and equipment to one side in a civil war.
I mean, this list is hundreds of instances long since the 19th century, you know, going back to President Monroe.
And it's like, yeah, Russia Russia does the same thing, except Russia doesn't do it in the Caribbean, because the Caribbean is not Russia's backyard.
Russia does it in Orthodox Christian countries that border it, and it's just, it's the same thing.
And again, getting back to John Mearsheimer, I'm not saying that this is right or that it is wrong.
It's just the way that things are.
I mean, and how could anybody How could anybody really expect it to be any other way?
I mean, this happens on even way smaller scales, like really, really minor regional powers even still do this, like Chile is more powerful than Bolivia and Peru, you know, and flexes on them accordingly, right?
You know, India is a regional power that flexes on its neighbors as well, you know, and it's laughable to, you know, Chile is obviously not gonna become some kind of global power, nor is India, you know, and Russia, at the very least, was.
a global superpower.
So them being a regional power makes us more scared in some sense?
I don't know.
But the idea that this restarts the Cold War or something is really to presuppose that this is another ideological conflict.
And I really don't think That it is, and I think that's what so many people like Thomas Friedman and even Fukuyama sort of miss.
This conflict in the Ukraine almost has nothing to do with ideology.
It just has to do with power and with material interests.
And that's something that just goes beyond what the New York Times really talks about, because they have this kind of messianic vision of this is A cure.
This is a way of looking at ourselves and history that goes beyond any other ideology.
It goes beyond great power politics.
It's very tempting in a way, because it basically says that in the end, we all want the exact same thing.
And history is sort of reminding us like, no, that's not actually true.
And people from different cultures and different civilizations really don't see the world the same way as New York Times journalists do.
And Friedman Makes this mistake because, I mean, you've read, if you've read one of his books, you've pretty much read them all because it's the same sort of thing.
I mean, he goes to India or something and he sees some venture capitalist start something and he thinks he's witnessing the beginning of a new world revolution, when in fact it's very typical.
And it also doesn't tell you very much about whether this man, whether this hypothetical capitalist shares the same values as somebody in, say, New York City.
And the Lexus and the olive tree is probably the most famous.
And I mean, I'm not going to say well written, but most influential of Thomas Friedman's book.
And I remember reading that long time ago when I was first getting involved in international relations and stuff like that.
And he had this kind of throwaway line where he's talking about the Lexus, obviously as the symbol of globalization and you know, what you can get if you just play by the rules.
And, He at least was willing to say that there was a conflict with, you know, what he termed the olive tree, which he said is basically a people's traditions and people's identity and things like that.
But he's already deconstructing it.
He's already taking a step back and saying, well, these are these attachments to region and religion and tradition.
And these are sort of these things that kind of come into the way.
The undercurrent of all this is that he can't quite believe that there are people out there who really believe this stuff.
That it's not just a token of their identity, but they believe in their religion because they believe their God is real, and because it's the most important thing in their lives.
Well, and who won't ultimately sell out with the arrival of Lexuses, much less McDonald's.
Right, right.
And also that Lexuses don't necessarily lead to the olive tree becoming less important.
I mean, perhaps the great, I mean, when they go back and write a history of everything that happened, which will probably be in Chinese, the biggest mistake that the United States made, arguably, particularly the Clinton administration, is essentially betting that if we let China into the system of international trade, those who run China will stop regarding themselves as Chinese.
serve regarding themselves as economic managers the same way that Western leaders regard
themselves most Western leaders anyway and furthermore that they'll change their political system so
that everybody will Essentially live the exact same way and see the same
information From California to New York to Paris to Moscow to Beijing
and of course that isn't what happened Instead, China's economic power has been used as a tool to secure the governing party, to push Chinese national interests, to fuel information warfare that pushes the nationalist line, especially when it comes to Taiwan and other places that China holds claims to.
And I just don't think that our elite is capable of dealing with these sorts of challenges because To some extent, even though now it's a lot easier to make fun of them, they still fundamentally are operating off the Thomas Friedman globalization playbook, which is just that if we invite people into the system of global trade, that their identities will become almost like a cute fetish or an attachment, but not something we really need to consider when it comes to serious policy.
And I also think that's sort of the undercurrent with a lot of what we're seeing In the rhetoric surrounding the Ukrainian war, where we're getting a lot of wow, just wow, current year posting, where they're saying it's the year 2022, how could this be happening?
Well, because the year 2022, the same motivations for human behavior exist now as they did thousands of years ago.
And there's no situation in which Russia is going to allow nuclear weapons to be parked right next to its territory without doing something about it.
Same thing with China where they say, well, you know, it's the current year.
You're not going to use a military solution to solve Taiwan.
Well, I mean, I think the only reason they haven't done it so far is simply because they can't, but once they develop that capability, I think they'd be willing to suffer some sanctions rather than what in their mind is national humiliation.
And I think that mindset is just completely foreign to our media elite and also more disturbingly to our political elite.
So they don't really have a way of understanding reality.
They've just got this kind of ideological model that they try to force on everybody else.
Yeah.
Well, so I mean, this is also the premise with sanctions too.
I mean, I think this is sort of, there's a whole literature in international relations about how sanctions very rarely work.
Yeah.
I was thinking about that this morning, actually.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it's not, I mean, you don't even have to be an expert in international relations.
I mean, we've been sanctioning Cuba since the 1960s, and it really hasn't brought down that regime.
We famously sanctioned Saddam Hussein starting in the 90s, and then we just invaded anyway.
And even now with Venezuela, but sanctions are very good at making the poorest people of the sanctioned nation even worse off, which is so Cruel that we do that.
Yeah, we all remember Madeleine Albright giggling about what the sanctions were doing to Iraq in that interview.
Giggling is a stretch, but they did.
Madeleine Albright said it was a price worth paying.
Yeah, Secretary of State under under Bill Clinton.
Yeah, I was asked if the sanctions against Iraq had been worth it given that it was estimated to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children because you got the world to stop selling It was a certain chemical to Iraq, so they couldn't make certain biochemical, what am I thinking of?
That's not chloroform, but it's chlorine gas?
The stuff that blinds you?
Yeah.
But that's also used to clean water, so there was a real downside to not selling that to Iraqis.
It's interesting that it's like the same chemical component to purify water as is used as the base of a war gas, but that's true.
Anyway, Albright was asked if this had been worth it, and she said yes, which is strange because the sanctions didn't bring down the Hussein regime.
Anyway, so yeah, now we've just passed another wave of sanctions against Russia, which will impoverish Russia, but the idea that What, the military is going to retreat out of Ukraine because of the sanctions that were just passed?
It's just so ludicrous.
It's just, it's just crazy.
I mean, we also, the West also forgets that people outside of the West are used to being poor.
You know, we think of ourselves getting sanctioned, you know, suddenly having to lose, You know, iPads or, you know, micro brew beer or whatever the case may be.
And it's like, oh yeah, the rest of the world doesn't have any of that stuff.
You know, average people in Russia and the Middle East and Latin America, you know, their, their middle class is what we would consider to be extremely poor.
I mean, it's not, it's such a different world.
These sanctions, Pose an inconvenience on the type of class that somebody like Thomas Friedman sees himself as representing.
I mean, one of the few cases where people have seriously made the argument that sanctions worked was changing the old white South African regime.
But of course that was coupled with a, the guerrilla war that they were fighting at the same time.
But B, you had an elite in that country that made the Conscious choice to essentially sell out its own people in order to be allowed to participate in the larger global economy where they basically said, we can do business with the ANC.
We're essentially going to be allowed to keep our stuff.
We're going to be able to go to London or wherever else and not have people call us mean names anymore.
Therefore we're going to cut this deal in the long run.
They are probably going to end up losing all their stuff anyway.
Um, As the ANC is increasingly having to deal with very unhappy black South Africans, whom they promised they were going to liberate and make wealthy.
And instead, you know, things just seem to be getting worse there.
But even that case, even if you want to argue that sanctions work there, they didn't work by themselves.
And it only works because you were dealing with an elite that desperately wanted to be part of The Western liberal capitalist order, and it was also coming at a time when that order seems unchallengeable.
The American unipolar moment and that moment has passed now where, you know, they're sanctioning Russia, but notice they didn't go as far as they could have.
They didn't boot Russia from the swift system, which is a system of making international payments through banks.
It's basically the kind of thing that if you're listening to this podcast gets done to you but they have they could have done that to the country and They also didn't do too much to mess with Energy transfer payments because if you do that you could attend you potentially could crash the whole global economy So instead of this world of pure knowledge instead of this world where?
we just kind of exchange information of what country we're from and Does it matter?
And also this idea that goods and services get to where they need to be just somehow just because we don't have to worry about the logistics too much.
We don't have to worry about which country actually owns these things all that's fading to because now we're getting into very.
Blunt and simple power politics where, you know, why doesn't Germany want to push Russia so far?
Because Russia controls its energy.
And if it does that, Germany is going to be in the dark and people are going to have to pay three times what they're used to for electricity.
And they're not going to do that.
Yeah.
The limits of this liberal global order are being revealed.
And I think it's almost a crisis of faith.
Among the people who run the world because they've just taken for granted for so long that this is how things are and that we really have hit the end of history.
And the idea that people are choosing a different route to pursue power.
It's not that they see it as threatening or, or just don't understand it.
I think it's, I think it's literally incomprehensible to them.
It's like a different way of viewing a reality that you're never going to get.
Somebody like Friedman or somebody, at this point I'm just kind of using him as sort of a stand-in for the cosmopolitan liberal elite in the West.
And he's a good, he's a good stand-in.
He's a good pick.
It's that, it's like trying to understand the worldview of an Islamic Jihadist and they tell you well I'm doing this because the Quran says to do this and I'm doing this for Allah and I'm doing this because it's my faith and then somebody parachutes in and says no no no he's actually doing it for socio-economic factors and American foreign policy caused this and if you really want to know why people did this direction read this giant book where I tell you it's about everything except Islam I mean at some point they just can't deal with people and their own stated motivations because
You know, what is what is that the Friedman's the olive tree?
It's just sort of a totemic symbol of identity.
It's not anything real.
But to most of the world, not just throughout all of history, but now, it is real.
It's the thing.
It's not imagine what there's nothing to kill or die for.
There are things willing to kill or die for there are things that people really believe in, not just globalization.
And I think You know, picking on Friedman is not new.
And you know I was going to do this because there was a publication I used to read when I was younger at the New York Press and Matt Tybee, whom we've discussed on this podcast before, used to write for it.
And I think he, you agree, probably the single best book review of all time.
The world is flat.
It's up there.
Certainly.
Certainly.
Yeah.
His editor says that, whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out.
All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough.
He approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world's manganese supply.
Who knew what it meant, but one had to assume the worst.
And from there he goes into Friedman's book, The World is Flat.
And I have also read this book.
I do not recommend it.
You're not, you're not going to, you read, again, you read one Friedman book, Redux, the Olive Tree, and you've read every thought he's ever had.
It's just him expanding on this metaphor of flatness as something resembling globalization, but the metaphor doesn't actually work.
And the comparisons that he's making that Friedman's making are often nonsensical.
I quote from the review here, Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by
accident.
It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree.
It's that he always screws up.
He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible.
He's incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius.
The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will,
say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue.
Friedman will have him spout it, and that's guaranteed every single time.
He never missed.
So you get not just the.
The language that fails to fit with metaphor and whatever image he's trying to create.
It's that.
I think this is almost indicative of his inability to see what's right before his face.
I mean, how can you go to Russia?
How can you go to India?
How can you go to Lebanon?
How can you go to all of these places where you see there before you powerful forces who are willing to go to the mat for non-economic reasons?
And walk away and conclude, well, the world is quote unquote flat that all these differences have essentially been smashed out via technology.
And now we're all just trading things with each other in this global marketplace.
And.
It's not just that this is a simple way of looking at things.
He doesn't.
He acknowledges it, but he doesn't really come to terms with it.
All of this is ultimately dependent on.
The thing we don't like to talk about, which is American hard power.
It's the American military.
It's American military.
And if that fades this social and economic system that he's talking about, it's not strong because it's so intellectually persuasive.
It's strong because it serves the interests of those who have power now.
And it's only going to last as long as American power lasts.
I'm going to quote from this review because this sums it up, and I think from there we can get into how people are misreading the Russia situation.
I quote from Tybee's review.
On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middle-brow horseshit.
If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet, replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader, leg-humping that passes for thought in this country.
It is the tale of a man who walks ten feet in front of his house, armed with a late-model Blackberry, and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife, that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the
reading of CAT scans.
Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore.
He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore. That's the whole plot right there. If the
underlying message is all that interests you, read no further because that's all there is.
But, you know, the very next thing is him acknowledging that when people say,
oh, Thomas Friedman is the most important columnist in America today,
Tybee says that's essentially true because he's the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened
stupidity.
And the new flat world argument is no longer a two-way street for people like the president and the country's most important columnist.
You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone.
The process ends when you make the case.
I always thought that line was especially significant for us where Possession of the megaphone really does allow you to create truth.
It allows you people to operate based on what you're saying, rather than what they're actually seeing and experiencing.
Clearly, when it comes to race, that is arguably what's driving the whole thing, where you can point out all the statistics you want, you can get IQ charts, you can talk about crime, you can talk about educational Achievement, you can talk about all of these things, but you're pushing against this narrative and this mythology of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and everything else.
And you're not going to be poetry with prose.
And I think Friedman in his own to take his literary incompetence almost as a benefit.
He is sort of a poet.
He's a poet who's so bad.
And has such a tin ear, but.
Because he presents these things in sort of a dreamy way as something to aspire to.
I think in the nineties and the early aughts that this was seen as.
As almost a religious thing that we need to follow a religious vision that we need to follow, because what he's talking about with free trade and what he's talking about with one global economy is nothing less than the unification of humankind and the end of war.
And he's saying these things as if he's the first person to have ever thought of them, even though people were saying essentially the same kind of stuff before World War One.
Yeah, well, Friedman, I mean, Friedman made all of that ideology really particular to America in the 90s and the early 2000s, and although he probably was one of the most influential intellectuals then, he certainly isn't now, thank God.
Although, I mean, I do think it's fair to say that Friedman was instrumental in convincing a lot of Democrats to support the invasion of Iraq, because he was such a Democrat and such a liberal on so many issues, but he was so gung-ho for that invasion, and I think that's really worth remembering.
But he, Friedman still has his head in the clouds.
I mean, it was just two or three weeks ago, I want to say, that he wrote a piece saying that Biden should have Lynne Cheney be his Veep in 2024 as a unity ticket, which is incredible because essentially I mean, Lynne Cheney is one of the least popular Republicans in the party.
I mean, it's only, it's only Democrats who sort of like, it's only centrist Democrats who like Lynne Cheney.
Yeah, it's not like the progressive, progressive base is going to rally behind her.
I mean, she'll be quoted on MSNBC, but that's it.
Huge swaths of the Democratic base would be absolutely furious with replacing a woman of color with a white Republican woman.
I mean, and this would satiate essentially no Republicans.
So again, Friedman, you know, Friedman just doesn't get it.
I mean, it's amazing how Friedman, both with, you know, his calling for this insane Cheney-Biden ticket and his just three cheers for globalization writing in, you know, between 1990 and 2006, it's just amazing the swath of humanity that he just ignores.
It's like, Friedman is somehow ignorant of the fact that the majority of the Republican Party still loves Trump and watches Tucker Carlson every night, which means they hate Lynne Cheney, and with the world as flat, it's amazing that he just didn't really write with any seriousness about how many people were going to be worse off because of this new economic order.
I mean, that was true of a lot of the people who loved the passage of NAFTA and who were You know, world trade agreements and all of these things.
And this is something, again, people on the hard left, like Chris Hedges, who did a podcast about a while ago, were very aware of how many people were going to be left behind by all of this and that this was going to cause really serious problems.
And that's really undeniable now.
I mean, after Trump and with the opioid crisis and everything that's happening in Appalachia, And just the rise of national identity politics from Hungary to India.
And even economic populism.
Right, right, right.
It comes with national identity politics, if you will.
You know, to Friedman's credit, I guess none of that was really a thing, at least outside of the Islamic world in 2002.
I mean, not that it wasn't a thing, but it wasn't major.
I mean, now it's really major.
Now it's really big, and they're still acting like You know, it's going to go away. Or if you're if you're
somebody like David Frum, that's the biggest threat that needs to be put down. You know, that that
Victor Orban is, you know, worse than ISIS or something, which is just a monstrous position to hold,
in my oh so humble opinion.
Yeah, there are two groups of people that I actually want to talk about. I mean, we're not
digging too deep into what Friedman actually believes. But again, as everyone states,
There's not a lot of stuff else there.
Yeah.
I mean, this is something that I read his columns for years, you know, as an IR major, so it was just part of the standard dose of stuff that you were expected to keep up with.
Greg means international relations major.
Right.
That's what IR major means.
You can tell I know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, that's right.
I use acronyms.
And I have read several of his books, but you know, that was frankly wasted time after the first one, because again, if you've read one, you've read them all.
And there really is no need to go deeper.
I think he has a fundamental misunderstanding, not just of the way things work in the world, but even the people who exist within his own country, which You know, frankly, I don't think he has much of an eye, a sense of belonging to America or certainly any sense of solidarity with the Americans who were left behind and the Americans who got their symbolic revenge in the 2016 presidential election, which filled people like him with just absolute horror and loathing.
When you talk about, and this is something we talk about American restaurants quite a bit.
When you talk about white victims of the opioid crisis and the people who are being left behind in middle America and Appalachia, nobody speaks for these people.
And it's worse than that.
It's not just that nobody speaks for these people.
It's that the people who run the show genuinely despise these people.
They fault them for not keeping up with globalization or something.
They think it's their fault that they didn't just move away when the factory that had employed everyone shuts down because of trade policies.
You know, this is where the whole idea of learn to code comes from, and that was a progressive idea until it sort of became a parody.
What are we going to do with all these coal miners who have nothing to do now?
Well, we're just going to teach them the code.
And then they can, what, make cell phone games in San Francisco or something?
A big moment for me I know at American Renaissance we talk a lot about, you know, redpilling, or what made you see the light with race, and although I happily commission those essays, I would also say that it's generally not just one redpill, it's a series of little things.
And something that made a really big impression on me, it's a bit of a long story, but bear with me, is I got really into Ron Paul.
When I was a teenager, basically for three reasons.
I was a total free speech absolutist.
I really liked that.
That was great.
I wanted drugs to be legalized because I was taking them a lot.
And I wanted to end all of these stupid wars that we were fighting.
So Ron Paul was really my guy, but I really was really never totally on board with the libertarian economics.
I used to sort of describe myself I'm not exceptionally good at math by any means, and I've never found economic policy exceptionally interesting, but for me it was kind of like I would have still voted for Ron Paul even if he had been a socialist, so long as he had been pro-drug legalization, pro-free speech, and anti-war.
Those were the big reasons.
And then I got involved in libertarian politics in my 20s and moved out to D.C.
to do that full-time, still really caring most about those three issues and not so much about the economics.
And then Trump happened in 2015 and the libertarian sort of world really freaked out about Trump, especially because in the early days of 2015, a lot of libertarians were optimistic that Rand Paul might get the nomination or at least have a fighting chance at it.
And Donald Trump sort of sucked out all of the kind of outsider energy from the libertarian world.
And a lot of libertarians felt very aggrieved about that.
And something I talked to a lot of libertarians I knew in the Beltway at the time was, you know, I held the position that people who supported Trump weren't monsters and they had a lot of things to be mad about, you know, that a lot of these people had been, you know, economically left behind for 30 years.
in these sort of forgotten corners of the country, and that Trump was speaking to them,
and they were supporting Trump because of that.
So maybe Trump was wrong about his sort of economic plans, which were obviously not free
market, but it was easy to see where his supporters were coming from.
And libertarian after libertarian would reply to me and say, like, oh, no, it's, these people
do not have the right to be mad about the factories in their towns shutting down.
They need to get over that and move on.
I mean, that's just too bad for them.
Which I just thought was so bizarre, and that actually made me really question the efficacy of free market economics, because until then, everybody I knew who was a diehard libertarian in the economic realm had said free markets will benefit
absolutely everybody.
And then suddenly when we were talking about Trump supporters, all of these libertarians
were saying, oh no, free markets don't benefit Trump supporters, but that's fine.
Right.
That's not a big deal.
That's not a problem.
Which I was just blown away by, because to me, libertarianism had been so much of, like, do no harm.
Don't invade countries.
Don't bomb countries.
Don't put people in dangerous prisons just for getting high.
Don't censor people who have eccentric things to say.
And suddenly it was like, oh yeah, the global engine of free markets is leaving people behind, but the people it's leaving behind are awful, so that's okay.
Which I just couldn't believe.
And that was a huge kind of red pill for me in leaving libertarianism, or at least losing interest in a really big way with libertarianism, just the complete lack of empathy For all of these people.
And Friedman, who's not a libertarian, but Friedman, it's the same deal.
You know, you have this interesting convergence between Friedman, who's on the center-left, David Frum, who's on the center-right, and libertarians, who have this kind of united front of believing that all forms of nationalism or religious identity are irrational and silly, and everybody who's getting left behind by the neoliberal international order deserves it or isn't worth helping.
Which is just so, it's so messed up.
I still, I don't know, I'm still blown away by it.
You know, because we're supposed to have all the empathy in the world for George Floyd, right?
George Floyd never did anything bad to anybody and deserves every ounce of empathy, but you know, nobody in West Virginia does.
It's just messed up.
It's just so crazy.
Yeah, I think that This unbelievable, this very selective lack of empathy.
And this, it's beyond simple ignorance.
It's that these, they know these people exist.
And very quickly you see that they believe these people deserve to suffer.
That it went from liberal capitalism is going to lift all boats, and there may be some people left behind, but if we train them the code and give them Some sort of transitional support, everything will be okay, to we should actively grind these people into the dust because they have these attachments we don't approve of and because they're voting for people we don't like.
And in fact, maybe they really shouldn't have the right to vote because they're holding back.
You know, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
and New York and Austin and all these places and everything else.
Well, and it's the same mentality with these sanctions.
You know, it's the same thing with Madeleine Albright not caring about, you know, keeping medicine from Iraqi children.
And now the Biden administration impoverishing, you know, the already super poor people of Russia of just like, well, they're they're bad.
They're part of this global bad.
If they didn't want to be poor, maybe they should have been more democratic by our standards.
And becoming more poor will really teach them that democracy is great.
This way they'll learn how to love America.
There's less stuff in their grocery stores because of the sanctions we impose.
They're going to come around to our side once they realize that that's happened.
It's just outrageous.
It's just beyond outrageous.
And again, we judged all these other countries By our own mythologies of this portrayal of Putin as the world's biggest bully for invading Ukraine, as if we've never had special military operations sent to way less powerful neighboring nations of ours.
It's just crazy.
And the excuse is somehow that it doesn't matter when America does that, because America is a democracy, so it's okay when we militarily intervene in other countries, especially if those other countries themselves are not democracies, is also just bizarre.
It's like, so you only get national sovereignty if you're a democracy per American standards, right?
Because America gets to judge what is a democracy and what is not a democracy.
Yeah.
It just, I just don't, it just, it just doesn't, it just doesn't really follow.
And also now democracy no longer seems to have anything to do with popular sovereignty.
It's just a set of particular policies.
Yeah.
American multicultural values.
Yeah.
You know, Hungary is not a democracy anymore.
Why?
Because like the wrong person won the election.
Election.
Yeah.
Okay.
If you say so.
And you know, you know, you look what's happening with Canada.
restrictions of civil liberties and people are saying, well, this is good.
This is in defense of democracy.
Right.
And we're we discussed Orwell, obviously, Orwell is somebody who is quoted maybe a bit too much.
But again, testament to his effectiveness, it just goes to that word where democracy is becoming like
fascism.
It's just a nothing word.
It's just a it's a signal that you use to inform people which side you should be on to give a
particularly cringe example.
Here, I want to read from Matthew Dowd, who's moderately influential columnist,
content creator.
Let me make this perfectly clear.
Putin is Emperor Palpatine.
The Ukrainian people and all those who stand up for democracy around the world and here in America are Ray Skywalker, Jin Urso, and the Rebel Alliance.
Pick your side.
It's just This is how they really think.
This is how they really talk.
I don't know who Jen Erso is, because in my world, there's only been three Star Wars movies, and I'm not going to watch the rest of this stuff.
But they do think that, like, pop culture and simplistic narratives unite the world.
Yeah.
I mean, to write for an adult audience about geopolitics and to draw an analogy To a children's film that depicts a good evil binary is just amazing.
And I think that this is a real contrast to what Huntington, Spengler, Toindy, a lot of other authors would have said.
A lot of people who I think have more influence on us than somebody like Friedman's, for example.
Which is this idea of civilizations being sort of self-contained mental universes where everything that happens gets interpreted through a certain cultural framework.
And so your ideas of good and evil, your ideas of noble and shameful are incomprehensible to an outside civilization.
And what I would suggest is that what What governs the West now, what we live under, is not Western civilization.
It's almost this kind of global anti-civilization, with people like Friedman sort of as its prophet and propagandist.
And it's united by pop culture.
It's united by cheap access to consumer goods.
It's united by media narratives that apply universally.
It's united by a rejection of The idea of being part of a people that stretches back to antiquity.
It's a rejection of your traditional religion.
It's a rejection of your traditional racial ethnic identity.
It's, and this, this is not something that, you know, Friedman and others wrote about this sort of process is just something inherent, almost, almost like Marx would talk about communism being inevitable.
Right.
That we're all just going to become consumers.
The olive tree will still be there, but it's kind of in the background and we don't care about it too much.
I would say now it's more of an act of will where you basically say, no, I really will define myself as a liberal consumer.
I really will define myself via my attachment to various pop culture franchises.
I have more in common with people who do this around the world and the people who are still allowed on YouTube and social media than I do with the people in my own country who I see as not just as People who are getting in the way of the pattern of consumption that I want to engage in and therefore I consider to be morally flawed and my enemies and this was someone I want to talk about Russia a little bit here, but this is a good pivot point because.
There were a lot of center-right columnists saying, well, moments like this show us who the real enemy is.
Like, your real enemy is Russia and China.
It's not the guy next to you has slightly different political opinions.
And people were pushing back and saying, like, no, I promise you that the Kremlin or the Chinese Communist Party don't hate you with the same ferocity that, say, the Washington Post does.
And they also don't have the ability to harm your life.
As much as, say, liberal elites in this country do.
You know, it's not the Russians who are getting you fired from your job.
It's not the Chinese who are saying that your kid needs to be taken away from you so they can train him in gender studies or whatever else.
And the underlying weakness of Friedman-style liberalism is that it does, to some extent, Create its own nemesis because the only reason we even have to talk about challenges like China is because American technology and American investment flowed into that country because we assumed that they would just become consumers like everybody else.
And there were sort of a flip side of that with Russia, which was.
We can afford to push them.
We can expand NATO to the borders of Russia, which was something that we had promised not to do when Germany reunified.
We can see like a protest march in Moscow and assume that they're marching for the same things that BLM protesters are marching for in DC and they're just like us, even though there's very little evidence that's actually true.
Alexei Navalny, you know, the dissident who the Western press is always promoting.
I mean, he initially, when he got into politics, was an ultranationalist who was cutting TV spots about how Central Asians should be shot and was waving guns on camera.
That's right.
You can watch that.
If you don't believe me, you can watch it on YouTube now.
And.
So even when there are people who are upset at their own government overseas or when we see a problem and we see a rebellion, It's not because everyone wants to be a liberal Democrat.
It's not because everybody wants to, I don't know, watch Rick and Morty cartoons and like that's their life.
It's because they have, they're seeing things in a fundamentally different way that people here are.
And Friedman got his start as a Middle East correspondent.
I think probably one of the most spectacular examples of this was the Arab Spring where we remember how This is back when they were defending Twitter as a great way to undermine authoritarian regimes.
That's why we need Twitter.
That's why we have to stand up for free speech online.
Same people who are censoring you now were making these arguments when the Arab Spring was going on.
But of course, how did that end up working out?
Basically, the popular winners were all the Islamist parties.
And then it eventually got pushed back by authoritarian kings who we can do business with.
Yeah, that's right.
grievances that drove the whole thing never really went anywhere.
Yeah, that's right.
It was just...
And again...
The takeaway was basically like, oh, we tried democracy, it didn't work out all that well,
which is arguably what happened to the Russians in the 1990s.
That was another instance as well of Thomas Friedman.
Thomas Friedman wrote about the Arab Springs and said, oh, this proves Francis Fukuyama
And Francis Fukuyama himself at the time was writing, do not be overly optimistic about these revolutions.
This is not, this might not go well.
It's very hard to be certain.
But yeah, I mean, you can see the Arab Spring, the failure.
I mean, the fact that the Arab Spring didn't end in all of the mass democratization is one of the kind of biggest failures of I guess all of these theories about global capitalism and global democracy, and now Russia just exerting its power because it wants to, is another big one.
As far as that guy you quoted about this is how you know who your real enemies are, I why Russia invading Ukraine has anything to do with me or why that would make Putin my enemy.
I don't know anything about Ukraine.
I know very little about Russia.
I mean, I'm an American.
I don't know anything about any country besides this one.
But why this territorial dispute in this faraway place has something to do with me?
Or should be perceived as an affront to me or my values or this country?
It just doesn't click.
I mean, was Russia supposed to feel like it was threatened when we invaded Iraq?
I don't get it.
This is so within his domain.
I mean, this would be different if Russia invaded France or something, right?
Or colonized the Congo.
But this is one of its immediate neighbors that it has, presumably, a complicated history with going back centuries, if not millennia.
And yeah, it's war.
Wars happen.
I mean, it's so amazing that all of these people are really just convinced that conflict was just going to go away entirely because we all got Prosperous relative to 300 years ago.
I just I I'm sorry, I keep just defying but I find all of this so strange that I often have a hard time articulating How weird I find it because I just find it all so baseless Yeah, I mean, I think one of the problems that we're seeing with Russian Ukraine we're seeing Really a civilizational divide in terms of Consciousness has been some sort of been hammering on for a while that the real divide is not Geographic or even political in terms of which government run certain territories sort of the the mental framework people operate in Media blocks are more important than like civilizational blocks to some extent and we're sort of seeing this with Russian Ukraine now where a
I think the Russians truly expected to be welcomed in as liberators by at least some people because they really do believe their talk of a Russian civilizational identity.
Uh, they really think that they're part of the shared culture that goes back millennia.
And of course, Ukrainians mentally are just no longer there, uh, at least not in the West.
And so that's why they're fighting so ferociously and standing up against what looked to be overwhelming odds.
Uh, Kiev still has not fallen as of this recording.
A lot of the major cities that came under attack on the first day have not fallen.
And this works both ways too, because taking the long view of history, If Ukraine is able to maintain itself and remain independent, all these Ukrainian nationalists, all these, you know, right sector guys, Azov Battalion, whatever you want to quote, all of these guys who are fighting for their homeland, at the end of the day, the system that they're fighting to be a part of is just going to make sure that their grandkids call them Nazis.
I mean, like, that's what's going to happen because that's what happened in this country.
That's what happened with World War II and everything else.
And you know, all of these are the original anti-fascists.
And then you look at what, you know, World War II veterans had to say about race relations.
Like, well, I'm, I'm not so sure.
I mean, whatever we were going to war for, it wasn't racial egalitarianism, at least not in the minds of the people who fought it.
But this idea that you can, you can see into somebody else's mental framework, that you can really understand somebody from a different civilization.
I just don't think that's true.
And I'll close with, I guess, a couple of stories because I was actually in Donetsk years and years ago.
It was obviously like... Well, in a very particular year, yeah?
It was about a year after the Maidan.
Okay.
So you had the breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine, but of course they weren't recognized by anybody.
I think even Russia, well, obviously Russia hadn't recognized them.
Russia didn't recognize them until last week.
And you still had the scars of all the fighting and everything else.
And what I guess I really want to bring home to people is that you had, this was during the height of the migrant crisis, and you had hundreds of thousands of refugees in these camps, white people in these camps, and nobody cared.
I mean, Russia was taking them in.
There were some Eastern Europeans who were reportedly taking some in, but nobody cared about the fate of these people.
You did not have the same kind of hysterical media coverage.
You did not have the pictures of the children that people were waving in front of you and demanding that you care and that this is how we need to guide our policy and everything else.
It was just these were people who were sort of outside history, outside the Thomas Friedman view of what's actually happening.
The world is not flat, because we're not seeing all this stuff.
We're just seeing things that have been chosen for us to see.
And then, when I was on the ground, seeing how these guys operated, keep in mind there was a ceasefire supposedly in place, but there was still scattered fighting and artillery and machine guns.
You could hear it, but you didn't have any huge offensive going one way or the other.
I want to emphasize that it was a Russian propaganda tour, and I'm not a Putin shill.
It was not for right-wingers.
I was the only conservative among the group.
It was mostly left-wing Europeans, academics and journalists and people like that.
I was the token conservative, I guess.
The propaganda was essentially what you get now from both sides, where basically we have to go to war against the other side because they're Nazis.
I mean, both sides were calling the other Nazis and everything else.
And it's very tiresome.
But there are two things that stuck with me, which I want to bring up.
The first is there was a mountain, more of a hill.
Which broke up sort of these endless planes where you could almost imagine like the great tank battles of World War Two taking place.
And there was a monument to the Soviet defenders from World War Two.
This is in the eastern areas where people still consider themselves Russian, speak Russian.
And they had literally fortified this monument and fought a battle with the Ukrainian armed forces.
And this was happening at a time when Russia was celebrating victory in the Great Patriotic War.
And so, you know, you can talk about LARPing or reenacting or something, but mentally, these people who were often fighting dressed in these, you know, old Soviet era clothes and kind of paramilitary divisions that they organized themselves, they really did see it as refighting the legendary struggle that their grandfathers fought.
And then When we went to the city, there was a, you know, one of the tour guides was this girl about my age who was telling me about everything that was happening.
And she was giving the story about the Great Patriotic War and this region's role in it and everything else.
And I was trying really hard to see, like, does she really believe this?
Is she reading off a script?
But no, I mean, this is, these are normal people, but like the, the everyday pop culture, the everyday influences, everything that shapes them, Tells them this story that they're part of this people that fought this great struggle years and years ago.
And for them, it wasn't a struggle against, you know, racism or something like that.
It was a struggle for the survival of their country and their civilization.
And so when there was this war memorial site and they had all these old World War II Soviet tanks, they had actually repaired one of them and taken it to the front.
It would be like stealing artillery from, you know, Veterans of foreign wars, like your American Legion halls or something, one of those old artillery pieces and you actually convert it and start using it again.
And so.
Putting yourself like in the mindset of somebody like that, I think is ultimately impossible.
People like us can at least imagine it.
I think someone like Thomas Friedman.
It's not just that he can't do it.
It's that the existence of people like that challenges his entire worldview.
And that's why they just kind of fall back on these moral terms of, oh, fascist or authoritarian or racist or backwards or whatever else.
But there's a lot of those people.
And Russia, in many ways, is a very weak country.
I mean, we're kind of seeing it now where they're not exactly overrunning Ukraine and lightning speed.
But if you look at a country like China, and frankly, if you look at what's probably the majority of people, even in this country, the center of globalization and globalization's enforcer, most people don't want to go along with this stuff.
Most people don't see the world the way cultural or coastal elites do.
They still see themselves as being rooted at something deeper than what's on the television.
But just our sheer existence is a kind of threat.
To the Costa worldview, to the Thomas Friedman worldview, to the idea that the world is flat and that globalization and the end of history are truly upon us.
And Fukuyama was at least willing to concede, and I think did it more depth than he gets credit for, that there could be a right-wing challenge to this idea of the last man, because it's just emotionally not satisfying.
Whereas Friedman's thought can best be summarized as the last man is here.
I am the last man.
And if you're not the last man, there's something mentally wrong with you, and we're going to lose.
We're going to use our last remnants of hard power and force and compulsion against you to bring this into bring you into this worldview because it's for your own good.
In the long run, as far as the Russian-Ukrainian conflict goes, I mean, no more brothers wars.
I don't Want to see this happen.
I don't think anybody wants to see this happen.
I think it's extremely stupid because where this all is going to end up is pretty close to where it started with the exception of the two breakaway republics in Eastern Ukraine.
Uh, to show my bias at least somewhat.
And I guess again, having been there, I do think those areas are not part of Ukraine and never were.
Uh, let's not forget that the Maidan was actually a violent insurrection.
It was just one that.
Our government supported so therefore it's democracy and not, you know, January 6th and the biggest threat to humanity ever.
But ultimately, I think at this point, we just want to see it end with as little bloodshed as possible and without the United States being dragged into it.
But taking a step back, taking the really long view, if Ukraine Ultimately is able to remain independent and if the you know, these troops so-called traditionalist Eastern Europeans are able to hold off Russia They're probably going to get subsumed within the larger Western European cultural order because that's where the money is that's where the power is that's where the the real sway is and in the end They're going to lose their countries more more totally and more
Absolutely.
Then even if Russia had military occupied them, you know, Hungary and Romania and Poland and all these places didn't cease to be just because they were part of the Eastern block.
But once they become part of the so-called West, will these countries continue to exist in any meaningful sense?
I don't know.
And I think that's something that people should keep in mind too, which is that it's easy to dunk on the failures of Thomas Friedman.
And to say that he doesn't see the world as it is, and to see the invasion by Russia as sort of the beginning of the end of the global world order.
But we should also remember that Friedman is not where he is in his career because he's alone.
He speaks for a lot of people.
These people have a lot of power.
They do control the way capital flows, and they do control the way media covers events.
And a lot of people are ultimately persuaded by that.
And while I don't think we're at the end of history, and while I don't think that it's going to end with the last man, my greatest fear is in fact that Friedman's right, and that this is where it really does end up.
So, I mean, raging against that is sort of what I see our mission as being, because I don't think that people are meant to live as nothing but mere consumers.
I'll just throw this out there.
I think Ukraine and Russia should Yes, we're all.
some kind of peace and then do a joint invasion to retake Constantinople.
That would be, I think, the ideal outcome. I'm just dreaming.
Yes, we're all...
There you have it.
That's our practical plan for solving this.
But that's still more realistic than what Friedman is proposing.
For those of you who want Ukraine to join NATO, which I assume very few listeners do, but well, how about we bring Ukraine in, kick Turkey out, and then do a NATO invasion of such a historic enemy of Europe, instead of just trying to antagonize Russia.
Yeah, that would make a lot more sense.
Thanks for joining us, everyone, and we're glad to be back, and we will catch you next week.
And, you know, wherever you're listening out there, we wish you the best, stay safe, and no more Brothers Wars.
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