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June 1, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:27:28
After America
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Hey, everyone.
Welcome to Left, White, and Right.
I am your host, Gregory Hood, and I have a special guest today, Gregory Johnson, Dr. Gregory Johnson from CounterCurrents, a site that I don't think anybody needs much of an introduction to.
He's published my work for a long time.
He's a good friend of mine, and one of the things that makes him, I think, really important in the movement is his willingness to push back against a lot of the popular narratives that take root even in our circles, and having that Always having your thoughts be tested.
Iron sharpens iron.
I think that's one of the greatest things he brings to the table.
So thank you for joining me today.
It's an honor.
And why don't you tell us about what CounterCurrents has going on right now?
Well, thank you for having me on.
This is the first time I've done this particular show with you, and I appreciate it.
I've been following it for some time.
What's going on at CounterCurrents?
Well, unbelievably, a lot is going on at CounterCurrents.
Uh, we have a lot of writers, uh, that we have regular work from Jim Goad, Nick GLV, uh, Mark Gullick and others.
Uh, we are doing weekly podcasts.
We have countercurrents radio on Saturdays and the writer's block on Sundays.
Uh, I've been doing a lot of writing and, uh, we are doing fundraising now.
So we just brought out several books.
We brought out a collection of Jonathan Bowden's essays and lectures on modern art called Reactionary Modernism.
We brought out another volume of my Trevor Lynch film reviews and essays.
It's the fifth of them.
It's called Trevor Lynch's Classics of Right-Wing Cinema.
And then we brought out a long-awaited book Which is called, uh, the enemy of Europe by Francis Parker Yawkey.
And I'm very proud of this book.
I am the editor of it.
And, uh, it, as I say on the back cover, it represents the return from the ashes of a book that powerful people literally, uh, went to great lengths to, to prevent you from reading.
They actually burned the book.
This is a burned book.
This book was published in 1948 and occupied.
Germany, West Germany, and it argued that the United States, rather than the USSR, was the greater enemy of Europe.
The Cold War liberal democracy that we had set up in Germany was not amused, and so they had all copies of the book seized and destroyed.
They had the printer's plates destroyed.
There was an English version and a German version.
The English version was completely destroyed and a few copies of the German survived.
And what we have here is a, um, an edited version of the German translation.
Uh, Yaki himself translated it and it's never a good idea to translate something into a language that's not your mother tongue.
And it was filled with little errors.
And so we did a corrected edition to make, uh, make it good Deutsch.
And we also then did a reverse translation from the German back into English.
That was worked on by Thomas Francis and F. Roger Devlin and I worked on polishing it
all up and making it consistent.
And so we have returned the book from the ashes like the Phoenix.
It was literally incinerated and now it's back.
This is the first complete edition of it.
There was a partial edition that was published in a magazine or newsletter called Trude.
And then in the 80s, there was an almost complete edition that was done by the Liberty Bell that Thomas Francis worked on.
This is complete.
It has all the epigraphs.
It's corrected.
Uh, and, uh, it's as accurate, I think, as, as well, certainly within my power to, um, to make it.
So anyway, I'm, I'm rather proud of this book because, uh, I, I feel that it's a, uh, an act of defiance, uh, against censorship.
And it's also a very interesting piece of writing.
It, it's got virtues and it's got flaws and, uh, it's, it's up to you to decide now.
The people who try to prevent you from reading it have been defeated.
Yeah, somehow I don't think the mayor of Chicago is going to be putting this one up at a public library saying, oh, look, I'm reading a banned book.
They always promote these things like to kill a mockingbird as some secretive piece of rebellious lore, as opposed to books like this, which the democratic system was quite willing to destroy.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And what I wasn't originally going to go in with this, but I mean, it's such a good opening, I just can't resist.
Obviously, one of the things that, well, as you explicitly said, Jaak, you said that the United States was the bigger threat to Europe than even the Soviet Union.
Some people might be thinking that way about the situation with Ukraine now.
I think few deny that Ukraine has a right to exist.
People might have different disputes over particular territories, whatever it is.
But the danger is that with this war, Ukraine will essentially fall under the global American empire, and America will continue to hold hegemony over Europe, which is the big threat.
And therefore, we should not be cheering on American intervention into this conflict.
Do you think that this sort of critique still holds weight?
Do you think that America still poses a unique danger to Europe, and Europe should cast off essentially American overlordship?
Or have I got this all wrong, and we really need to just be thinking of this in a totally new way?
Well, there's a lot of virtue to what Yaqui says.
Basically, his argument is this.
His argument is that the Russians are so inept That they simply couldn't destroy Europe if they wanted to.
And he's extremely dishonest in some ways.
He knew about the Khatyn massacre, but he denies that the Russians could ever do such a thing.
He says that, you know, the idea that you could just murder millions of people, ha ha, It's just very dismissive of that.
We know that that's a very dishonest approach.
So he's being dishonest.
He's being polemical in some ways.
He's drawing a veil over the evils of communism in certain ways.
Yet he does make us a valid point.
And the point is this.
The post-communist bloc has a certain advantage over Western Europe.
And that is this.
Communism destroyed the middle classes in these societies.
It destroyed the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie that wasn't German or Jewish and destroyed in the Second World War was basically destroyed after the war or run out of the country.
It's the bourgeoisie that are the most destructive class in modern democracies.
Their values are inimical, ultimately, to identity and nation and civilization.
They're the people who hold for private life and commerce and globalization and so forth.
By destroying these people, The Second World War and the communists in the Eastern Bloc, they actually did the post-communist countries something of a favor.
You could make that argument.
There have been writers, there's a Polish writer that we interviewed at Counter-Currents who makes this argument, for instance, that the Eastern Bloc countries, the formerly communist countries, don't really have The bourgeoisie, and to the extent that that is coming back now, that is going to be a serious problem.
What Yaki calls them is the German Michaels or Michels.
Basically, they are the middle classes, the bourgeois liberal middle classes of Europe.
American domination strengthened these people.
Soviet domination liquidated these people.
In the long term, he made the argument that it's the bourgeois middle classes and liberalism that's going to be most destructive of Europe and its identity.
I think you can make a case for that.
I think you can make a strong case that that's true.
That is not to say that communism is a good thing.
It's simply to say that they tried to destroy these nations, but they failed.
They did quite a lot to wreck these countries, but they failed to destroy their identities.
But they did destroy the middle classes, and the middle classes are the most anti-identitarian stratum in the West.
Of course, communism is anti-identitarian as well.
So the communists came in, they destroyed the middle classes, then the communists left, and then The identities of these people and sort of healthy social traditions that had not been extirpated by communism or liberalism sprung up.
And so you have, I think, some of the healthiest societies in Europe are former communist bloc societies.
No thanks to the communists, of course.
It was just that they were particularly inept at destroying things.
Liberalism is more destructive.
There's no question about that.
But in terms of the current conflict, I think we have to be very, very critical of a premise that's being advanced here, which is Russia's apologists in the West will say things like, it's the European Union and NATO will destroy these Eastern Bloc countries.
It's inevitable.
I don't think that's true.
I think that what's happening is the Eastern Bloc countries are actually having a positive influence on the European Union and NATO.
Orban and the Poles especially are resisting a lot of the bad things that are coming out of Brussels and Washington, and they're forming a counter-Bloc in the East That's resistant to this.
And they're giving hope to identitarians in the West.
And one of the things that I think is most farsighted about Orbán is he really understands soft power.
And he knows that Hungary is a small country.
It's never going to be a major power in terms of hard politics, hard power.
But it can have an outsized influence in terms of soft power, in terms of metapolitics by Countering some of the worst globalizing tendencies coming out of the West.
So my feeling about countries in the East is that they actually strengthen nationalist forces in the West.
And that there's absolutely no inevitability that the West is going to destroy these countries.
In fact, it might be just the opposite.
They might be the ones That show you show Europe the way in the future.
And so when people say, oh, it would be a terrible thing for Ukraine to get into the EU or NATO.
I don't I don't accept that.
I think Ukraine has more than 40 million people in it.
They're very talented people.
They're sort of held down by an incredibly backward and corrupt political system.
I think that if they had better government and Better opportunities, better economic opportunities, that their essential conservatism and sensibleness would have a positive influence on Western Europe.
So I don't and I don't think that Russia offers offers them anything other than cultural genocide.
I think that Russia's explicit stated attitude is that it just simply deny that Ukraine is a society.
It's not a real country.
These people are just looked at as raw material to be integrated into the Russian Empire.
So I don't see anything particularly positive about Russia as an alternative to the West.
I just think it's another kind of globalization, this time hooked to Asia.
Eurasianism is not a good thing for Europe.
And I think that Ukraine Like Poland, like Hungary, like the Czechs and the Slovaks, like the other countries in the Balkans that have more sensible governments, Slovenia, Croatia, I think they can have a positive influence on Europe.
So I just I would like them to come in.
I would like them to be as more involved in Europe, in the EU and in NATO, because I think they have a civilizing influence.
And so to that extent, I would disagree with that argument that that's being put out there today.
However, I do think that Yaki puts a finger on something very, very important in understanding why these post-communist countries are healthier than the West.
And that is because they lack the bourgeois stratum that has been that has been completely wiped out by communism.
And once the communists were out, and there are a lot of places where they cling to power, you know, they have these mafias, rebranded communist parties and things like that, clinging to power.
Those are the worst off places in the former Soviet bloc.
To the extent that they have actual governments that are free of communist influence and communist corruption, these are genuinely nationalist and populist countries.
Practicing real identitarianism.
The Constitution of Estonia is explicitly ethno-nationalist.
Which I think is quite fascinating.
So I look to these people as models.
One thing that people need to understand, I think that with the Ukrainian situation there's a lot to unpack, but I don't think that there would be anybody at this point who wouldn't be willing to say We would have to defend the Baltic states explicitly if Russia invaded those.
Of course, I don't think there's any chance whatsoever that Russia would do that.
But I think because they're in NATO.
Right.
I mean, you could say, but also I think with the there are a lot of things to unpack with this.
I mean, one.
There's an issue with Ukraine in that in the eastern part, you could argue that the people there aren't Ukrainian and don't want to be Ukrainian.
I mean, that's how I think some people would say it.
You can't say that about Estonia or Lithuania or places like that, where it's very clear that... But Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania have Russian minorities there that basically function as a kind of fifth column as a pretext for future Russian interventions, just like the Russian minorities in Moldova.
Uh, have functioned that way and the Russian minorities in Ukraine have functioned that way.
So all of these countries have a lot to worry about.
There's a, there's a long history of the, of, of Russia using remnant Russian colonist populations in these former Soviet republics as pretexts for, uh, interventions, breakaway states and things like that.
They, they did it with Transnistria.
Yeah, exactly.
Moldova and they've tried to do that with Donetsk and Luhansk.
Yeah, South Ossetia and Georgia, I believe.
Yeah, exactly.
And so all these countries have reason to worry about the same thing happening there.
The main reason why it won't happen is that they have the NATO war guarantees on their
side.
side.
And they're very, very happy about that.
That's why they got into NATO, because they felt that that was something to be avoided at great cost.
It turns out it hasn't, you know, imposed a great cost on them at all.
So I think that those countries got a very good deal.
However, the The Russian population in eastern Ukraine is problematic in this way.
First of all, there are a lot of people in eastern Ukraine who speak Russian as their first language, but think of themselves as Ukrainians.
Then there are people who speak Russian as a first language and think of themselves as Russians.
And that populace is divided between people who like to be in Ukraine and people who would like to be in Russia.
We're talking about a minority of a minority.
that wants to be part of Russia or to be part of a breakaway republic.
And there are two ways of handling ethnic conflicts like this.
One is to move borders, which of course is what Russia wants to do, and the other is to move people.
There should be some kind of settlement of this issue, but the idea that settling this issue Naturally would result in revising borders so that Russia has more Ukrainian territory is it does not follow.
I think that if one if one were to take a hard look at who's agitating for independence or union with Russia, it's a fairly small percentage of people who are agitators, largely agitators who are working directly for the Russian government.
So there's a lot of stuff that's fake about these people's republics in the East.
And there are a lot of reasons why Ukrainians just roll their eyes when people like me say, well, shouldn't you just let these territories go?
They say, should we surrender territory to neocommunist people's republics, which are being propped up by Russian money and foreign antifa?
And I kind of have to I kind of have to wonder, you know, does it make any sense to say you should cede your territory on ethno-nationalist grounds to this group of neo-Bolsheviks?
They wouldn't grant you autonomy on the same principles because, of course, that's not their principle at all.
And they regard people who are ethno-nationalists as basically Nazis.
And that's one of the things that's very alarming about Russian rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin today.
They basically define anybody who's an ardent patriot of another country as a Nazi now.
They're saying that Ukrainians need to be denazified.
And that means not just getting rid of Azov, as some of those people genuinely are Nazis, It means basically eliminating any kind of national consciousness and national elite in that country.
And now they're saying that Lithuania needs to be denazified.
And Sweden is a Nazi country.
After Sweden started coming into, talking about entering into NATO, suddenly posters were going up in Russia decrying Swedish Nazis like Ingmar Bergman.
And what is Ingvar Kamprad, I think that's his name, the founder of IKEA.
Poland now needs to be denazified.
I think there are a lot of Polish nationalists who would bristle at the idea that they are now being identified as Nazis, who were their bitter enemies not so terribly long ago.
So, you know, anybody The word Nazi is being used by Russians in the exact same way as it's being used by, say, the Anti-Defamation League, when you get right down to it.
Or sort of more vulgar Jewish activists would use that.
Anybody who's patriotic is a Nazi.
Mitt Romney is a Nazi, right?
There are people who use that term as broadly.
Uh, as, as the Russians do we, when, when, when they do it in our political context, we immediately know that they're full of it, but the Russians are making similarly broad brush claims that anybody who's a patriot of a country other than the Russian empire, which is explicitly multicultural, uh, it's a multicultural imperial project.
Uh, if you're an ethnic nationalist, that's a, you're a caveman nationalist.
As Putin describes them, or a Nazi.
And we know what has to be done with Nazis.
It's very, very ominous.
So anti-Nazism basically is a warrant for the cultural destruction and assimilation of all of these countries that formerly were part of the Russian Empire.
One thing I want to challenge you a little bit on is this idea that the bourgeoisie is the great enemy of nationalism.
I mean, historically, of course, it was the middle classes who advanced the very idea of nationhood against more reactionary multicultural empires.
And I would say looking at, I mean, everything from Napoleon to populist movements in Europe to the Trump movement here, the basis, the bedrock, really, of any movement that people call far right tends to be Small business owners, basically the petty bourgeoisie.
It's not, I understand, I certainly understand what you mean when you go to, say, Northern Virginia, right?
And you have people living there who are dependent on the government, who, I don't know who said it, but they said everyone who lives there has one thing in common, which is that they've all betrayed where they came from.
I mean, I guess unless you were born there and saw it change around you.
There's certainly a class of people, I mean it wasn't that long ago when I was living in Arlington, it was still recognizably Southern, that's obviously way gone now.
There's obviously a class of people who don't really have any kind of a national identity and who share more in common with members of their class abroad than they do with their fellow citizens.
But that said, we can't really say the far, we can't say the very rich are really a Basis for nationalism because what's true of the bourgeoisie is even more true for them I mean, they essentially just sit around looking down on us.
They're not really part of the nation The very poor you could say obviously have the same problem because they don't really have a stake in what's going on But the small property owners the small businessmen what most people think of when they think of the middle class I would argue that really Is the nation I mean, that's that's ultimately what you have to rest the political order on what I what am I missing here?
Well, I do think there are there are a couple things that can be said here.
First of all in the 19th century and even the 18th century.
Yes.
The middle classes promoted nationalism in opposition to monarchy.
And I think that this was a rational thing for them to do.
It was in their class interest, you could say.
But it was also a rational thing to do because nations are real.
Nations are real communities and whereas being under a dynasty is just a historical accident.
And it's very much a historical accident.
Because one king had two daughters and one son, you are now ruled by this branch of the Hohenzollern family rather than another.
Something stupid like that.
The idea that your nation was just somebody's dowry and that that's how politics should be done is offensive.
And to the rising middle classes, to the people who were Gaining some power, right?
And they obviously had a better principle, namely nationalism.
I think nationalism, the idea of a sovereign people, is an important idea.
And it was the middle classes who were the first people to champion that.
There's no question about it.
I don't know if it was necessarily so much in their class interest, As it was something that was natural and that they had the ability to champion it because they were becoming more powerful.
Maybe you could just say that.
That it had its appeal and that the people who were most vocally advocating for that tended to be middle class people.
Not aristocracy, not proletarians, but the middle classes because they were a new rising force and They identified with nations rather than dynasties.
They wanted to have republics or parliamentary government, liberal rights, things like that.
That makes a lot of sense.
However, we can make a distinction here between the different levels of the bourgeoisie, too.
Early on, you know, the bourgeoisie really referred to big business.
It was like the wealthy.
Right, right.
The jet set of its age, right?
The 19th century jet set were the bourgeoisie.
These people tend to be internationalist.
Not in the same way that the aristocracies were.
They were marrying one another.
They spoke different languages than the people they ruled over and stuff like that.
They were internationalists because there's something international, indeed global, about the marketplace, about commerce.
And so, even in the 19th century, the high bourgeoisie still had, I think, Telos, if you will, sort of built into what they were doing towards wanting to overcome borders, overcome customs tolls and things like that, bring things into a single system.
Now, at the time, it was more understood in terms of imperial systems rather than like a global marketplace.
But still, they they had that underlying drive and Certainly, I think in the 20th century, when nationalism was becoming sort of old hat, it was already accomplished, the tendency of the wealthy was towards internationalism.
And they become more explicitly the sort of jet set, the rootless cosmopolitan jet set types.
And of course the whole professional managerial class in The West and even in the East now, they're all becoming increasingly identical in their habits and their preferences, the way they live and so forth.
So there is that element to it.
That element was for decades destroyed in Eastern Europe.
Again, it began during the war.
And that's, in the long term, sort of a good thing in terms of preserving the identity of these countries, is what we're saying.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I do believe that.
I mean, the argument, communism starves the body, but liberalism rots the soul.
And I guess the question then, and to bring it into what I want to talk about for the latter half of this, is as a country that Essentially was founded by the middle class that had these kind of universalistic aspirations that we can create a new order of the ages the United States of America Has it always been what someone like Evelyn would consider a subversive force?
I mean, is it something that?
Will be essentially destined to end up the way we are because right now I Global, we're seeing, as never before, global liberalism does rely upon hard power in the end.
It ultimately relies upon the American military and the power of the federal government in terms of its ability to project that power overseas.
But did it have to be this way?
I mean, because right now what people call the global American empire arouses disgust, I think, in a lot of Conservative Americans and interestingly in the last poll that I've seen about patriotism patriotism, of course continues to decline That's not that surprising considering the way the population is being transformed But what was interesting in this last poll was that patriotism had started to decline among conservatives Which he had never really seen before That you actually have a sort of anti-americanism of the right emerging now the European new right of maybe a decade ago I mean that was pretty
Standard.
I remember going over there and even as someone who wasn't particularly happy with the situation in America, I would get very defensive about the United States because of the way Europeans would talk about it.
But now, especially post-Trump, once we've seen how the way the system really works and everything else, I think there's a lot more validity to these critiques, or at least what was correct before is now much more obvious.
Can the United States, or was the United States, ever a constructive force, or were we doomed to end up this way ever since Jefferson wrote, all men are created equal?
I don't think we were doomed.
I think the all men are created equal thing has been, it's been turned into a civil religion.
It didn't have to be.
It was essentially ignored in American political debates until I think the 1820s 1830s.
That's really when you started seeing a revisionist classical liberal interpretation of the American founding being floated.
We have to we have to look at the history of this.
The idea that America was a classical liberal society is something that many people on the right take for granted, but that was an idea that came about at a particular time and place long after the founding, and it accelerated and it became especially important in the 20th century.
And if you look at what the founders were influenced by, they were more influenced by things like Montesquieu, They were more influenced by the rights of Englishmen than the rights of man.
They were more influenced by the whole Republican tradition rather than the liberal tradition.
And by Republicanism, I mean Greek and Roman thought, Machiavelli, Harrington, Montesquieu.
Aristotle's idea of the mixed regime is basically the model of the American Constitution.
They were more influenced by this than they were ideas from John Locke about natural rights.
The claim that all men are created equal, well, that was simply the Republican principle denying hereditary monarchy, hereditary titles.
And that was reflected in the Constitution simply in the Refusal in the prohibition against hereditary rank.
Right.
In the Constitution.
It certainly didn't mean that all men are equal in the sense of that they have the same capacities, etc.
And even more important, it was never meant that all races are equal and equally capable of living in the same system.
And we know that because the man who wrote All Men Are Created Equal also wrote that these two races, blacks and whites, can never live in the same society under conditions of equality.
Thomas Jefferson.
Right.
In fact, the next sentence after the one that they put on the Jefferson Memorial, they don't include the very next sentence, which is when he makes that prophecy.
Exactly.
It's simply impossible.
Yeah, exactly.
When this kind of Well, I want to call him sincere.
This fellow, Thomas Maine, he wrote this book on the rise of the alt-right.
Now he's written another book on anti-liberalism.
He interviewed me and he was very, very pushy and he really wanted to make all men are created equal into a civil religion.
He's a kind of neocon.
He writes for the Brookings Institution, which is just the establishment.
And he really, really wants to push that.
And my pushback was, look, I can agree that all human beings have rights.
Sure.
That doesn't mean that all human beings are a good fit for our society.
It's not implied, right?
Even if you believe that all races have rights, like the right not to be murdered, Uh, that doesn't mean that all races are a good fit in the same political system.
And I don't think any of the founders would have, uh, would have believed that.
Now they had certain classical liberalistic tendencies.
Uh, you, you, you see somebody like, um, Washington, General Washington, President Washington saying things like, well, if a guy's a good worker, why should it matter if he's a Muslim?
Right, right.
You hear that quote all the time.
Yeah, yeah.
But that is a lapse.
I don't think he would believe that it would be a good thing for America.
A guy, qua worker, might be a matter of indifference whether he's a Muslim or a Christian or an atheist or a Freemason.
But qua citizen, It might be an entirely different matter, right?
I'm sure Washington didn't care too much about the personal beliefs of the people working on his plantation, but he didn't think the slaves should vote.
Right, exactly.
So, I think that America's founding can be understood as a non-liberal event.
It certainly had their elements of liberal ideology circulating around in it, definitely, unfortunately.
But the greater part of the founding, the greater part of the actual functioning institutions that were set up, the Constitution, are influenced by non-liberal, pre-liberal political traditions.
There was a folkish kind of element to it.
They understood that they were An offshoot of the British Isles, primarily, with a few compatible other peoples like Swedes and Dutch and people like that who had mixed in because of the colonial history.
They were white, they were Protestant, and they were mostly Anglo-Saxon, the dreaded wasps.
And this was a form of life That had been evolved on the British Isles and then in its colonies for hundreds of years and then thousands of years going back into into British history.
And this people in North America decided to set down new principles of government and that was the founding the Constitution.
The idea that The Constitution can be meaningful outside the context of the people who created it and their political traditions, etc., is just an absurd act of abstraction, blightiness, silliness.
Yeah, for ourselves and our prosperity.
I mean, there's really nothing else that needs to be said.
Yeah.
The Constitution isn't the founding, it didn't found America.
The American people created the Constitution.
Right.
That's the point.
The American people pre-existed the Constitution.
Right.
America was born in the 17th century.
Yeah, exactly.
And they had various experiments in self-government, and the Constitution was the one that stuck around the longest, although it's been mutated horribly, like orcs.
You know, unrecognizable now to its founders, but still, there's some continuity, right?
But yeah, it was an experiment in self-government of a particular historical people.
It was something that they drew from their traditions, their practices, as well as the traditions of political thought going back to the Greeks.
And the idea that the Constitution creates the people, that's almost like a Protestant heresy.
It's like the idea that the Church is founded on the Bible, rather than the Bible as a creation of the Church.
Right.
But if you have this act of abstraction that basically says there's this constitution that creates a good society, well, why don't we Xerox it and send it to Liberia?
Didn't work out there.
Why?
Because the people were different.
And of course, If the people in America change too dramatically, the Constitution here will be a dead letter as well, which is one reason why the Great Replacement is happening and one reason why we need to stop it.
Because all these traditions that conservatives like to admire and genuinely enjoy, things like freedom of speech and the right to bear arms and so forth, those will become a dead letter if America's Core founding stock is replaced by alien peoples to whom this means nothing.
And I think that that anti-liberal interpretation of American history, um, is, is extremely, uh, well justified.
Uh, and, and so if you, if you look at the constitution as a product of a people and its traditions, its identity, Then you cannot take these sort of abstract liberal views that basically turn the Constitution into an instrument of war against the people who created it.
Constitutional rights become a way of undermining the social fabric.
That kind of abstract liberalism I think is a danger, and it's progressed very, very far.
But there are ways that we can reign that in.
And I don't think that Joe Biden's administration was inevitable in the history of America because of the words, all men are created equal.
I don't think it's inevitable at all.
I think that there was a long debate in American history about what this country means.
And unfortunately, the classical liberal interpretation has won out, largely, not in a fair fight, simply by suppressing alternative views.
Why?
Well, because it's ultimately a tool of the Great Replacement.
It's ultimately a tool of creating, making the people fungible.
Right?
And it should be noted, it's not just happening here.
Jean Raspail, before he died, wrote that famous essay, The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic, where he essentially makes the same argument that the ideals of the revolution are now being used to unmake France.
Yeah, exactly.
Just as the liberal interpretation of the American founding is being used to unmake America.
Again, the question can be phrased this way.
What is Essential and what is fungible.
If what's essential is the people, then what can be changed is the Constitution, right?
If the people are essential, if the health and flourishing of the people is the highest law, then even the Constitution isn't the highest law.
The Constitution can be revised, and it has provisions for revision.
The Constitution can be changed.
But the people should be absolute.
Right.
I mean, what is the goal of the polity?
And even those libertarians out there who will say, well, actually, it is our freedoms and the Constitution does define us.
The obvious retort is that we don't have those freedoms anymore.
So we can't even argue that.
Yeah, exactly.
We do have to come back to this first principle.
And it's again, it's the old Argument that if the Constitution was supposed to if it's working as intended It's not much good and if it's not working as intended and people were allowed to Use these government powers against us and the Constitution wasn't able to stop it then what good is it right?
The the the the liberal attitude about the Constitution this is very much an attitude that you have amongst so-called conservatives is that the Constitution is essential and the people are fungible and Yeah, that's definitely, I'd say that's probably prevalent among what we would call conservatism.
That's what defines the country.
Yeah.
Adherence to a constitution that at the same time, in the same breath, they'll also say, oh, it's not being practiced, which is why we need to restore the constitution.
You hear that rhetoric a lot from mainstream politicians.
Implicit in that, of course, though, is that if the Constitution has to be restored, what are we operating under now, and why is it even legitimate?
Yeah.
You know, what are we standing on if we can restore the Constitution?
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
You see, the people who want to make the Constitution the ultimate bedrock have nothing outside it that they can stand on to revise it or restore it.
You know, the people who say, no, the Constitution is a creation of the people.
It serves the people.
If it doesn't serve the people, it needs to be altered.
They at least have a bedrock that they're standing on.
And it's a bedrock, ultimately, that appeals to identity politics.
It appeals to who we are, right?
I think that ultimately all politics is identity politics and you find people reverting to that or showing their hand when they say, this is just who we are.
Right?
Yeah.
Okay.
That's the bedrock thing.
You can't go past that.
This is just who we are.
And having a robust sense of who we are, Right, and this, I think, is the fundamental issue that has really plagued us from the beginning, which is not, what is America for, but really, who is an American?
then you've got no standpoint outside them to criticize them.
Right, and this I think is the fundamental issue that has really plagued us from the beginning,
which is not what is America for, but really who is an American?
Because it's very clear that the founders, and Jared Taylor has obviously written on this
on what the founders really thought about race, which can be found at the NRAM website.
The founders didn't spell it out as much as we would like, but the founders clearly intended the United States to be a white country.
We see this in the 1790 Immigration Act, which limits citizenship to free white persons of good character.
We have the Taney decision in Dred Scott, which, of course, You know, he didn't just make it up.
He was using precedent and things that people had taken for granted for a long time, even though it was controversial.
You had the support of many of the American founders, notably James Madison, for the American Colonization Society, which was essentially an attempt to solve the slavery problem by bringing them back to Africa and helping them set up a country there, which was, of course, Liberia, which as you Pointed out is not exactly a glorious success even though it was founded more or less on the exact same principles as the United States in terms of how the government was set up.
But the question is all of this was implicit.
Now there are some explicit times in American history where I think you had a Very forthright, anti-egalitarian ethos.
John C. Calhoun was probably the best prophet of this, and notably, as boring a conservative as it gets, or as mainstream, Russell Kirk, nonetheless included Calhoun in his anthology of great American conservatives.
And even during the Progressive Era, not to feed Jonah Goldberg or something like that, but even during the Progressive Era, A lot of the support for environmentalism was also coupled with a kind of eugenics project of improving basically the human stock.
There's a very interesting book that has not gotten a lot of attention by now Senator Josh Howley called Theodore Roosevelt Preacher of Righteousness and it goes into great detail about Teddy Roosevelt's racial views and he obviously denounces them.
You could say that he Has to in order to be able to operate, but I just want to indulge me for a second here because this summary is very interesting, especially coming from somebody who's in power in terms of Teddy Roosevelt.
And I quote.
One of the most unsettling implications of Roosevelt's racial ideas is the place they give to the state.
He drew no distinction between the race acting as a whole in the national government.
The latter was a natural extension of the former, in his view.
And if humans found their greatest meaning in the triumphs of the race, as Roosevelt believed they did, the nation-state came to be the focus of all human life.
The American founders had countered such a statist view by pointing to natural rights as limits on the power of the political community, indicators of the person's destiny behind the political realm.
Roosevelt rejected this construction and eviscerated the notion of natural rights.
For him, there was nothing natural, common to all humans by virtue of their humanity, about rights.
They existed to protect the conditions citizens needed in order to achieve for the good of the race.
They could be changed by the state from generation to generation.
Roosevelt's consummate hostility toward private religion, local associations, and other possible sources of civic identity outside the national collective betrayed his troubling belief that race and racial interests were ultimately the only substantive things a people had in common.
Obviously, he's probably going a bit overboard in the denunciation there.
Obviously, I think Senator Howley has a certain sympathy for Theodore Roosevelt expressed in the book, but he has to very sternly denounce Roosevelt's racial ideas.
But I think there's a bit of a cop out there because when he says, oh, well, there are other Sources of national meaning outside the state these civic neighborhood these civic associations and local governments and things like that Well, ultimately that's still just built upon the race the people I mean it doesn't get to the core question of what is America who are Americans because ultimately that has to be an identity and If it's just something that you get I recall the regular talked about I think Thomas Maine and
Is it Mon or Thomas Maine?
I think it was Maine.
I mean, he would always talk about this bundle of rights that we would receive.
And that was apparently what it meant to be an American.
You would get this bundle of rights.
But one, that doesn't seem like a very sufficient basis for a national identity.
Two, it's certainly not what the founders and what many people later thought.
And three, we don't even have those rights anymore.
I mean, even right now, they're very gleefully talking about scrapping the Second Amendment altogether.
Yeah, and Maine's book on liberalism basically is, he goes all out for, in the name of liberalism, taking away a lot of those bundles of rights that we have.
So it's become liberalism as racket, basically.
Right.
So yeah, we see this certainly with the discussion of media, because one of the most extraordinary things that we've seen over the last few years is this idea that what they call disinformation, which when it comes to race is usually the correct view, they argue that it drives people to vote the wrong way or sometimes to do violent things.
But the problem, of course, is that these these little pockets Of information that they disagree with are marginalized.
It's very hard even just to stay online sometimes.
And yet they credit.
These websites that they don't like with almost unbelievable power to overcome.
The mass media entertainment regime whose value and reach is almost you can't even put it into words.
We racists are really scary.
We have amazing powers.
We have the power, the occult power, to reach out from our leafy suburbs into the inner cities and to make black people consistently behave in ways that undermine their self-interest and their communities.
And attack Asian people.
President Trump didn't have the power to make black people vote for him.
But for some reason he had the power to convince them to attack Asians by blaming the coronavirus on them.
It's spooky.
Like you actually have to believe it.
Yeah, yeah.
I kind of like the fact that they think we're that scary.
I wish we actually were that scary.
If we were that powerful, we would live in a very different society.
We wouldn't have all these problems.
I mean, but it's the bigger thing is that liberalism has essentially dynamited its own foundations because now It has seeded the idea that the people are capable of governing themselves, and if you give them information, on balance, the people will make the right judgment.
Because once you say, for the good of the people, we have to protect them from the wrong information, what you're really saying is that the people are too stupid to govern themselves.
Yeah, but that has always been implicit in any political question.
Liberalism, Republicanism, and so forth.
It's always been implicit and we know from the iron law of oligarchy that that's how it always is.
But I think the fact that they're having to make it explicit is very interesting.
The fact that you had a White House attempt to create an office of disinformation operating out of the Department of Homeland Security.
That's extraordinary, when you take a step back and really think about the implications of that.
Because you could almost understand it if they said, okay, we're going to do this through the Surgeon General, and this is to make sure that people are getting the best healthcare information or whatever else.
That, you could say, okay, I still don't see what's really going on here, but at least they're trying to cover it up.
This, they are really taking off the velvet glove and showing you the iron fist.
That the system ultimately relies upon.
And I guess the question is, why do they feel the need to make these things explicit now?
Because they're losing arguments.
And they've lost arguments and they're tired of it.
I saw this happening 2015, 2016 on Twitter.
Oh yeah.
With the glorious first wave of the alt-right, the online alt-right, which Basically punctured this bubble that these liberal leftists were living in, where they felt entitled to have their views accepted without question by all the peasants out there.
And when they not only found people who were criticizing them, but beating them and humiliating them, A lot of them lost their minds.
They have such a sense of entitlement to rule that they become incredibly intellectually lazy and flabby and actually incapable of defending their ideas.
And they haven't tried to up their game after losing a thousand arguments on Twitter.
They've just resorted to censorship.
And they're going to continue doing that.
I think it's a confession of their weakness.
I agree.
I mean, I think that I've tried really hard to think from their point of view and think to myself, why would I do this?
Why would I create a target that is so easily That can be focused on by everybody at once.
Like, when you create a White House Office of Disinformation, I mean, you're basically begging the entire internet to say, come after this, because we're actually going to be the evil cynics that you say we are.
And I don't know what they were thinking, beyond sheer incompetence, other than we just have to break these people. We have to break them spiritually. We
have to make them see that no resistance is possible. And of course what ended up
happening was the exact opposite.
I mean it just collapsed within a matter of weeks and you had whoever was going to be the
leader of the disinformation board saying that her fall was the result of disinformation.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean she was obviously not qualified to fight disinformation.
Right.
If this is the end of her glorious career.
Exactly.
I mean, I want to come back to some of the more fundamental things about American identity.
But in passing, I would just say, I think this is why anonymous speech is so important.
I mean, it doesn't matter to me, right?
Because I'm already doxxed or whatever.
It hasn't affected my life really in any way.
There are always going to be people who have the freedom to say something under their own name or a name that everybody knows who they really are and everything else.
But the ability to speak anonymously, to communicate anonymously against your rulers, against the things being done to you, I think is something that can't be prized too much.
And we should remember, of course, that the founders used pen names all the time.
Absolutely.
What were the Federalist Papers?
Right.
And even before that, I think John Dickinson, what was it, Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, and a lot of the pre-revolutionary literature, they weren't written under their own names.
They were always taken from either, they called themselves a farmer or something like that, or they would take a classical archetype.
Exactly.
I think that Freedom of speech is one of the central issues that we have to rally around.
Right, and it needs to be defended.
We don't need, our side does not need to repress speech in order to win.
No, all we need is free speech and we will win.
All we need is a fair debate and we win.
I wrote an article on freedom of speech.
It was a speech that I gave at a I think it's okay to be white, too.
It's a good argument.
and I'm very proud of it.
It's up at Countercurrents, it's in my book, Toward a New Nationalism.
I think I reprinted it.
I'll find it, I'll find it, put it in the notes for this, so.
Yeah, I think it's in It's Okay to be White, too.
It's a good argument.
Basically, I say the reason why we need freedom of speech is because we need bad news.
Specifically, if our plans are going wrong, we need to know.
We need bad news.
Now, imagine the leaders of a society, if their plans are going wrong, they need to know.
However, they're also in a position to punish the bearers of bad news.
This is something that powerful people have done throughout history to their detriment, to the detriment of the societies.
Therefore, we have to have the right to tell people in power bad news.
That is for the good of society as a whole.
It's not really a natural rights argument in a way, but it's simply saying that an absolute right to free speech, meaning that powerful people can't shut you down because you're telling them bad news and you're upsetting them, is actually Necessary for the functioning of a society because knowing whether your plans have gone awry or not is crucial for decision-making and yet people, because they get angry at hearing bad news, will prevent that and therefore we have to make sure that we have a strong institution and a strong
Sort of cultural bias towards freedom of speech, especially towards the powerful.
We don't fear telling the truth to children or to inferiors.
We fear telling the truth to powerful people, specifically telling the bad news to powerful people.
And that's why we need freedom of speech.
And we have very powerful people running our society into the ground.
They need to know the bad news.
They need to know that diversity isn't a strength.
They need to know that globalization isn't working out well for everybody.
They need to know that their vaccines might not be working as advertised and on and on and on.
And if they can't get that information, they can't govern.
And if they can't govern, societies collapse.
This seems so obvious to me that you don't need to ground it in some abstract thing.
It's simply something that needs to be done for the machinery of state to run efficiently.
I mean, one of the things that people are talking about with the war in Ukraine, the initial failure of the Russian invasion, however things are going now, it's very hard to believe the Russian story that, oh, actually the first phase went exactly as planned.
But that raises the question, well, why did they operate the way they did?
Essentially, it's because everybody was afraid to tell Putin what was actually going on, or they had been put in that position because they were telling him what he wanted to hear.
And then when an operation was launched and it backfired catastrophically, he really couldn't blame anyone around him because, according to them, according to him, they had told him that this was going to be a pushover.
It's a systemic failure, and I think the real error is pretending that the United States today is in any way different in terms of this issue, because when it comes to the things that really matter, and I think as Elon Musk is learning, it doesn't matter how powerful you are, it doesn't matter how well connected you are, if you touch on certain issues, usually those having to do with race, but not always, But the issues that really define, more than anything else, what the future of the country is going to be, the system will destroy you rather than hear bad news.
Yeah.
And we have to be, one of the big weaknesses of the left, kind of drives them in terms of their political activity, but it makes it impossible for them to govern, is they can never think of themselves as being in power.
Even when they control everything, they always, in their own minds, have to think of themselves as rebels.
The conservative weakness might be that they think of themselves in power even when they're powerless.
Absolutely.
I think that's one of the best things you've ever said.
You wrote it in an article on countercurrents, this strange farce that we have in America where the left pretends that they're plucky rebels outside of power, they're always against the man, and the right, who are losing everything, pretend that they're the man, that they're really in power.
This farce can cargo called. Yeah. I mean you put on a you see some 21 year old working for Americans for tax reform
or something. He's like, well, I've got a Brooks Brothers suit on. I'm the aliens.
Like, no, you're not, you don't have any power whatsoever.
Some random anti fathers living on the street has way more power than you because he's got a free legal defense. If he
does something and you don't.
Yeah, the, but we who are thinking in terms of possibly either radically reforming this system, taking over the
system or creating a new regime altogether. I think we do have to seriously consider how we would behave with power.
And we actually we should make it clear that our commitment to freedom of speech is not it's not just a tactical thing.
It's not, oh, we need freedom of speech now and then we'll take over and then we'll shut up the other side.
No, we actually want freedom of speech not because we're grounding it in some abstract doctrine but because it makes you able to govern more efficiently and you need someone to tell you where there are problems so they can be solved because the classic failure of authoritarianism is that eventually the leader can no longer get accurate information and it looks strong on the outside but it's hollow within and I hope I'm not misquoting them but I recall Peter Brimlow saying something along the lines of the United States
May not just fall like the Soviet Union did, but for the exact same reason.
Whereas with the Soviet Union, they were getting false information about, say, their economic productivity or the safety of a nuclear reactor or whatever else.
We're getting false information about the behavior of people in our society.
We're being told that everything is going great when you have inner city schools that are turning out kids with 0% rates of proficiency in basic math.
And eventually, There's much ruin in a nation, but you can only have so much.
And once it piles up enough, the whole system falls apart.
Yeah, absolutely.
This is the great weakness of authoritarian societies.
They basically create a society full of flatterers.
Flatterers and sneaks.
There's a distinction between a flatterer and a friend.
A flatterer tells you what you want to hear.
A friend tells you what you need to hear.
And the trouble with powerful people is they tend to raise up crowds of sycophants and flatterers who tell them what they want to hear.
Look at Afghanistan.
I mean, in July, you had President Biden saying, the government is not going to collapse after we pull out.
or the globe, you need to know the truth.
You cannot live in a bubble of carefully maintained illusions
and that's basically the way our ruling class works.
And so- Well, look at Afghanistan.
I mean, in July, you had President Biden saying, the government is not gonna collapse after we pull out.
And less than a month later, I mean, within a matter of hours, America's longest war
ends in complete humiliation and disaster with I believe more than a, what was it, a dozen?
More than a dozen American servicemen killed, not to mention all the Afghans were trampled trying to get to the airport and everything else.
And you think to yourself, well, how could such a thing have happened?
And the only conclusion you can really draw is that all these intelligence officers and defense Yeah, exactly.
This is the great weakness of our system today.
we've got this under control, these guys will stand and fight, we'll at least get a decent
interview. They were lying. All right. You know, they're being lied to. Same thing with Vietnam, too.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is the great weakness of our system today. We have elites cocooned
amongst flatterers who tell them what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear,
and that means that they can't make rational decisions.
The people who need to make the rational decisions can't make rational decisions.
They set the system up so they can't get the information necessary for it.
And this is why I think that people in generally on our side of things who, I like these people, I don't want to criticize them too much, But there are people in our sphere who I think are a little too concerned about the surveillance state, the national security state, the massive amount of information that's being gathered.
Why?
Well, because isn't it fascinating?
Isn't it fascinating that they gather more information than ever before and yet the people who make use of it seem to have Nothing but delusions, right?
I mean, they have lots of information if they want to frame you for something or put a case together against you, but they don't have information necessary to make crucial decisions about the future of the nation or of the planet.
Right.
I mean, I think the real question, and this is something that obviously we've heard and something that we think about for a long time, which is that why Why do smart people who should know better go along with this?
Now, you could obviously say it's out of fear, but you could also make the argument that they simply just don't engage with this stuff because they assume the experts have it under control, and so then they focus on their careers or whatever else they're going to do.
But as we're learning, the experts really don't have this under control, and Well, I hate to sound like one of these e-celebs or something and just say, oh, the woke mind virus, because it's such an easy take to have.
There does seem to be something where our elite, it's not just that they're not allowing accurate information to spread.
It's that they're, even if they're presented with it, they deliberately avert their eyes.
That they don't want to know what's actually happening and that If they can censor it, that somehow in some greater way, it actually won't exist.
I mean, this seems to be the main function of a media run state, which is what we have now, which is that if it's not in the media, it's not actually happening.
So if the media doesn't cover, let's say, the dramatic rise in crime, both black on white and within the black community that has occurred, not just since 2020, but really since Michael Brown, then it's not really happening.
And the real problem is actually white supremacist terrorism or whatever else.
And you see the same thing too with a lot of the stuff surrounding the immigration debate, where you have the sort of things that this country would be willing to go to war for in the past, in terms of the involvement of cartels, in terms of foreign actors moving stuff across the border, in terms of the horrific toll that drugs are taking on the American heartland.
And yet, it's not even a story.
But somebody Has a garage pull at a NASCAR thing, and the FBI sent something like, what, 13 agents to try to investigate this?
I mean, despite all the information they have, it does seem like the left hand really doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and they don't have the competence to use the information they have effectively.
Yeah, yeah.
They might have every bit of information about everything you said, every time you swiped your credit card and stuff like that.
But in the end, it's all a bunch of federal employees who, it's three o'clock and it's quitting time, and they're all lying to one another and they're lying to their superiors.
So how dangerous is this?
You see this with the shootings too.
I mean, every single time we see one of these shootings, You always see buried a little bit later, like, oh, well, the FBI knew about this, but didn't do anything.
And it's like, well, then what are you guys for?
I'm like browsing the Internet and trying to set up people with ridiculous schemes and pay attention to the guys who are posting things on Facebook, like I am going to kill people.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
They'll say we have too many leads to follow up.
Well, there's all your information gathering, not Mounting to anything, right?
They have all the information in the world, and they can't make rational decisions, and society keeps lurching towards the abyss.
Well, here's the key question, then, because I want to bring it home, and I want to put you on the spot, because basically I want a specific answer out of you, because this is the question I've been thinking about.
We can think of what America could have been, and we can think of alternate paths it could have taken, but we are where we are now.
As European Americans, do we attempt to save America or do we attempt to carve out something separate from it?
Both.
I think that we need to have sort of a multi-purpose tool approach here.
And the things that we can do to save America are also things that would make it possible for us to carve out something new.
Uh, if, if that fails, I think piety requires that we try and attend to the wounds of our, our fatherland, our sick fatherland, uh, try and make it better.
Uh, it, that would be the best thing if we could fix what we already have, because there's a lot that isn't bad, uh, and a lot that I would not have to want to replace from scratch.
So yes, when you think of the magnitude, of this society, and you think of the problems and realize how often localized these problems are, I think that we should try and excise the tumors.
We should try and tend its wounds.
We should try and make it better.
However, the things that we're going to have to do in order to do that are things that would make it possible for us to create a new system if this system is simply doomed And what are those things?
Well, metapolitics.
So first of all, we need to know who we are, what we're doing, what's the most important stuff, we need to settle all those metapolitical questions.
But beyond that, metapolitics also involves creating institutions, creating communities, creating networks that can make ideas real, make and actually Uh, turn ideas, turn ideological progress into political progress.
If we do those things, uh, and we do them well, uh, we have a tool that can either fix America or failing that create something new.
Now, I do think that from a practical point of view, we should begin with the reformist fix America principle.
Why?
We have to bring the normies along.
We have to bring the normies along.
We have to mobilize millions and millions of white Americans to fix America.
To talk about being post-American and stuff like that to them just sounds, well it sounds like we're from Mars.
They don't realize the magnitude of the problems that we face that would lead people to say things like that.
They just don't.
They think that we have pretty Definable problems, a lot of them, you know, Democrats.
And we have to, we have to lead them.
So how do we lead them?
Well, we lead them to try and fix America and we lead them to make reasonable policy proposals.
Hey, why can't we have borders like other countries?
And then when their reasonable proposals get shot down over and over again, And then we noticed that the very reasons that were given to shoot down their reasonable proposals don't apply when favored groups, regime pets, want something of their own.
They learn something and we can radicalize and agitate that way.
The best way of radicalizing and agitating people is to get people to make reasonable proposals to people in power.
And then see them ignored, see them shot down, see the hypocrisy, see the corruption pointed out over and over again.
And so if we do that, sometimes these reasonable proposals are going to work.
And we're going to actually make progress.
We're going to actually make America a better place.
And sometimes we won't.
And if we don't win, we can use that as an occasion for educating and radicalizing people and making them more of a potent focused weapon that we then apply to the next problem.
Either way, whether the end game is an America that's made great again or something different on the North American continent, the same tools will get us there.
So I think that we just have to say we want to do both.
Depending on certain uncontrollable circumstances, right?
We don't know what the future is going to bring.
Therefore, we have to do things that will stand us in good stead for either possible outcome.
And fortunately, the same things will work in both eventualities, whether we fix America or find something new.
So we just have to get to work.
Yeah, I think that whatever happens next, it's going to be, whatever successor state emerges, if there is a successor state, it's going to claim the mantle of America, just because I think that even though our national existence has been relatively short, the impact may outlast the original project.
Just like you had the Holy Roman Empire existing long after Rome itself had fallen.
And to this day, you still have people claiming the Roman mantle or saying they're a successor of this or that or the other thing, the third Rome in Moscow, right?
And this idea that they have some mission that they have to go through.
I think that that premise is so ingrained in every single one of us here that even if we created something new, something on an entirely different constitutional basis, even, it would still be American and it would still cling to those old symbols.
They're with us for better or worse and in many ways we might find that frustrating because we may say to ourselves Well, look we we don't want to go down the same road again but I mean that's sort of one of the things we argue as identitarians is that to some extent you have a set fate and to some extent you You are because of who you are because of unchosen factors, and you don't get to just create yourself or discover yourself.
I mean, that's liberalism at its core, and that's what's led to the chaos of today.
What you actually have to do is accept what you are and fight for what you are and try to make the most out of what you are.
So I think that's true for individuals and political projects.
Yeah, I agree with that.
We are not going to have a situation where we have a blank slate where we can start over again.
Right.
As amusing as that would be.
As amusing as that would be.
However, that's what the left is trying to drive us towards.
They're basically trying to create a society where we were so uprooted from history that it would almost be tempting to just treat it as a blank slate for some constructivist rationalist projects.
But here's the thing.
As much as they saw away at our identity, try and dissolve our identity, etc.
We depend on practices that are basically their ethnic practices.
There are things that we learn through participation in the common life of our society.
We depend on these things, and as much as our ideology is inimical to that.
As far as we have strayed in theory from all of these practices, they're what we're depending upon.
They're what sustain us, and therefore we are never so alienated from the past.
That we can start over, refresh.
What we simply need to do is we need to learn how to come back to ourselves and recognize the identity that's already there and operative.
Because if it weren't already there and operative, we would be just drooling.
We'd be drooling imbeciles, right?
This is an argument that I get from Hans-Georg Gadamer, who wrote Truth and Method.
He was one of Heidegger's greatest students.
Gadamer was a kind of Traditionalist conservative and he said he made this point in one of his interviews that if practice is more fundamental than theory of tradition is more fundamental than theory that we and if we see that society is working
We know that our identity, that our traditions are alive because they're sustaining us, but what's going on is we've just become so alienated from what sustains us that we think we've lost it.
We think that we have been severed from the past and we're floating off in the void and we are in this void of freedom.
But that's not true.
That's just a false worldview.
It's the liberal worldview, the radical, expressive, individualist worldview that we've accepted that makes us feel like we're so alienated and we're so cut off.
Whereas in fact, we're depending upon the past in everything that we do.
Every time we speak a word, right?
What is language?
Language is a set of practices that we learn through participation in a common life in a tradition.
Every time we speak words, Uh, we are engaged in practical, radical conservatism, even with the words that we're enunciating are things like, uh, we are, uh, you know, it's like the, the, the Tumblr, uh, identity politics where people claim to be seahorses or toasters or whatever.
Uh, even the people who think that they have this radical power to just, to define themselves in and out of existence or whatever, uh, The very fact that they can articulate that in language means that they are deeply immersed in traditions and practices that go back to time immemorial, and they think they're free.
They think they're free, and they're not.
So, it's a matter of waking people up to the reality of our existence.
And that means the reality of our existence as Americans, for Americans.
There's a lot of thick, folkish American identity.
I've written some things about American ethnic identity.
I've written some things about American nationalism.
They're in my book, Toward a New Nationalism.
I took the side of the American nationalist debate a few years back.
Why?
Well, because it's just easier for us.
It's where we start.
We start as Americans.
And the people who want to paint the most bleak picture of Americanism They paint it in terms of ideology, and we are deeply divided by ideology.
We're deeply polarized, but the fact is that we actually have far more in common.
This sounds like horrible centrist swill, I know, but we have far more in common in terms of just practices and tastes and food and things like that.
These things sustain us as a culture.
And we have to wake up to that fact.
And I think waking people up to the thick, folkish, practical traditions that are very much caught up with ethnic identity in America is the way forward.
We have to build on that.
And it's a process of getting people to reflect on who they always already are.
I really can't put it any better than that.
I think that sums it up.
So, Greg, thank you so much for being on this.
I've been wanting to get you on this podcast for a while, and I think that you just very eloquently stated the mission that everybody needs to wake up to and undergo, the duty we all need to perform.
Is there anything else you want to add or any particular project you want to draw people's attention to before we go?
Well, no, I very much appreciate this.
Thank you very much.
I've enjoyed this a whole lot.
I recommend that you go to Counter-Currents.com.
If you don't go to Counter-Currents, you end up with some Marxist website in South Asia.
It's like some Indo-Marxist blog.
So you've got to be careful about that.
Counter-Currents.com is where it's all at.
Every once in a while we will get something That was for the other counter currents and one time one
time We actually ended up publishing it because we thought you
know it's not a hundred percent in line with our ethnic politics
But it's making some good points about capitalism and consumerism
So we put it up and then this guy wrote in just just in horror
That he had that his article it appeared on the white nationalist blog and so we we had to take it down
Aw, that's a shame.
Yeah, but anyway, he was feeling the full terror.
But yeah, Counter-Currents is where my platform is.
We have new materials five days a week.
Generally, a lot of original material, three or four things every day.
And we have an expanding commentariat.
We have expanding rosters of very talented writers.
And if you don't spend a little time there every week, you're missing out on a whole lot.
So check it out.
All right.
Well, Greg, thank you so much.
And thank you all for joining us.
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