All Episodes
Previous Next
June 8, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:40:25
An Imperium of the Mind
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey, guys.
Welcome to Left, White, and Right.
I am Gregory Hood, and I have a special guest here, Mike from Imperium Press.
Mike, thanks for joining us.
I mean, I gotta say, as a customer, I've been tremendously impressed by some of the stuff you've been putting out.
Oh, thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
It's always good to hear that people like what we're doing.
I guess it means we're doing something right, anyway.
Yeah.
Well, it seems like you are, especially with the expansion of the titles.
How did this all get started?
Every time I answer this question, I seem to trace it further and further back, because it all goes back to my own personal development and political journey and all that.
But as far as the company itself, it sort of, for the most part, started gestating when I began really in earnest reading old texts of Mostly counter-revolutionary, counter-enlightenment thinkers of the 19th century, but also guys like Nietzsche and things like that, that were a little bit different than French Catholic counter-enlightenment guys.
Basically illiberal thinkers.
When I started reading them in earnest, of course I have to get the text.
I'm the kind of person, I don't like to download a PDF or anything like that.
I like to have the physical thing in my hand.
I ended up buying books from things like the Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and even like Penguin Classics and things like that.
And I just noticed, especially with the university imprints, that they were dissatisfactory to me for a variety of reasons.
You know, I can take as an example reading, say, Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, the Cambridge edition of that.
It's a fine translation and everything like that, but it kind of rubbed me the wrong way when I first read the introduction.
At the end of it, it kind of says, in a nutshell, you know, Nietzsche's an important thinker, but he's a little problematic, so, you know, read the text, understand it, but don't take it too seriously.
And that just kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.
And, um, you know, continue to read, um, you know, a lot of these texts, because some of them are kind of a little bit obscure, you know, most people, um, who are into their like political history know who like Joseph de Maistre is, but he doesn't have a great number of like really high quality editions.
So you're kind of stuck with these university ones, uh, reading someone say like, um, Jean Baudin, who's a, Uh, an older French absolutist.
I read the edition of that and, and, you know, looked on the back cover and read the blurb and just see that they basically say the same thing.
They're like, you need to understand him for historical reasons, but don't take him seriously on his own merits or anything like that.
And at this stage, it's like, you know, a trend is starting to kind of form here.
And I'm sort of thinking that, uh, you know, wouldn't it be great to get a publisher that actually takes these texts seriously?
Whether or not they agree with it, that they at least try and present it sympathetically from the perspective that it's actually coming from.
And, you know, there's like – I don't have this edition but there's like a somewhat
recent edition of Kant's first critique.
And I mean Kant is no illiberal by any stretch of the imagination.
But basically, you know, puts out a kind of disclaimer at the front of the book that's
like, you know, he's got some problematic views on race and things like that.
So, you know, let's take this all with a grain of salt.
And it's like, again, this is a trend that's sort of starting to form in my mind.
And it's only going to get worse.
So I kind of thought to myself, OK, well, you know, there's some books that I would
like to see put out more sympathetically.
And I just sort of started assembling them and got in touch with guys who, you know,
mostly to begin with anyway in the neo-reactionary sphere but some others as well who would write
introductions that, you know, I'm very, very impressed with their blogs and how, you
their analysis of these ideas.
And a lot of these guys were writing better pieces than some of the university press introductions.
So I got in touch with a couple of them, got them to write up some introductions for me, put together some of these texts and started releasing them, and people started to kind of Get it right away and some of the guys who wrote introductions for me eventually wrote books that I put out and those Started to do well and the whole thing just kind of started to snowball from there So that's that that's kind of a lightning round version of how Imperium Press got started well, that's incredible the the tension between Catholic counter-revolutionary thinkers and then of course Nietzsche and some of the other people who Put out noticeably Jonathan Bowden
I saw him speak once and I still consider that one of the highlights of my life that I actually got to see him speak You know what an honor that is.
That's it.
That's amazing.
Yeah, I'm very jealous Yeah, you should be it's He was he was one of a kind and I think it's amazing that you brought out why I'm not a liberal but the first book I got from you guys was the ancient city and Which I found truly fascinating.
Why, why that book in particular?
Because I actually hadn't heard of that book before you put it out and before I read it.
And it seems like it's kind of getting to a lot of the core ideas that not just politics, but also just our conception of the state and the conception of the family and the conception of like any kind of organic society really digs into those issues.
Why did you pick that one specifically to put out?
Well, that one is a very foundational text for me, influencing my own journey and my own thought.
There's so many things that I could say about it.
First of all, the vision that it presents of the ancient family, the Indo-European family.
So we're talking about a people that, or a set of peoples that existed on the, around Ukraine, on the Pontic steppes, something like 5,000 years ago, a sort of like quasi-nomadic people, like partly nomadic, partly agrarian.
The vision of the family that it presents in the first two or three books of that book is just, as far as I'm concerned, the polar opposite of everything that liberalism is and stands for.
It is the complete and total antidote of the worst aspects of modernity.
For people who haven't read this book or are not familiar with that culture, What it is, is effectively, the family was essentially a religious association.
So even before it was a blood association, the constitutive principle of the family was the ancestor worship.
So basically, you would have a family father, who was essentially like a little absolute monarch over his family.
And he would lead the worship of a line of ancestors reaching back to the gods.
These families would trace their lineages back to, like, the high gods.
And basically, what this did is it created a kind of corporative principle that would reach across the generations.
So the family was not just the mom, dad, and two kids.
It was mom, dad, and probably like six or seven kids.
and all the aunts and uncles and all of the grandparents and whatnot.
And presiding over this family was a kind of what you call the family father.
The Romans would call him the pater familias.
And like I say, he was like an absolute monarch.
He was the high priest.
So he's basically like the little pope of this family.
Uh, he would be the supreme magistrate.
So he would alone be able to judge his family, uh, whether they had transgressed in terms of, uh, you know, a crime or something like that.
Uh, he would also be the sole proprietor.
So he would be the owner.
Everything in, on the property belonged to him, but actually that's a little bit of a misnomer because Everything in the family property belonged to the ancestors, and he was just a steward of it.
And the ancestors themselves were essentially present to the family, because the father would worship them, and it was gathered around a sacred fire that was a kind of symbol for the continuity of the family going back through generations.
So basically the family was not just, you know, a nuclear family, and not even just an extended family, it was a family extended back through time.
And this extended family through time effectively is a kind of little ethno-state.
So it's fascinating to – and that's just a very rough sketch of it.
The writer Foustel de Collange gives a lot more detail.
They were also highly formalist.
So they didn't really – in celebrating their – or carrying out their rites and their religious worship,
it was not so much about the spirit of the thing.
It was more about the letter of the law, which made these and the ritual and the text, uh, and the liturgy that they would, and all these families would have their own rites and the liturgies would go on for so long that in some cases, uh, words would have It would have been so long that the language may have even changed and they wouldn't even know what the words meant anymore, but they were so conservative, so preservative of their family rights that they would still be saying it even though they didn't understand it.
So that's how conservative they were, that's how much they respected the past, how much they respected their ancestors.
And the last little point I'll make here, just about this, is That each family had its own worship, so there was really effectively no religious tie between one family and the one on the farm over next door.
They were all effectively little mini-ethnostates that just had their own worship and effectively had very little to do with each other.
So I see in this, actually, in Embryo, kind of everything that comes later whether it's in the sort of interwar period in the 20th
century, shall we say, whether it's in the rise of the alt-right and then the
subsequent dissident right, and even the romantic nationalist period in the 19th
century, all these things are kind of distorted versions of this
pure original family structure that was essentially built the whole world,
because I mean two out of five people alive today speak an Indo-European language,
so these people were clearly doing something right, and I think their family structure had a lot to do with
that.
There's a lot more I could say about the book in terms of how this structure eventually built everything up and then it collapsed and the way in which it's collapsed.
It's very eerily reminiscent of how things are collapsing today, but I'll just kind of throw it back to you there because, yeah, there's so much in this book.
I could go on about it for hours.
Yeah, I would definitely recommend anyone who's listening to this purchase that immediately.
I'm somebody, of course, who was impacted pretty heavily by Evola.
And so the idea of the sacralization of everyday life, but also the importance of the right, which he speaks about in great detail.
I was fascinated by the way it was described in that book.
And as you say, I think that it's not just The ancient city, it's actually an embryo of how we could begin today.
And it has some ideas that it shows us a way of being that is decidedly, it's not anti-liberal, it's just non-liberal.
Liberalism just doesn't exist in this moral universe in which these people are operating.
And I think that's the most important thing that people need to be doing.
It can't just be, we're against the current thing.
It's gotta be, we're building a whole new way of being, or rather, rediscovering the correct way of being that our ancestors knew.
But you've also, of course, pushed some very modern text.
I wanted to get into some of the more ideological stuff, but I just gotta ask, how did you get the Jonathan Bowden, Why I'm Not a Liberal?
Well, I mean, that one, there's a video of it up on YouTube.
It's, there's quite a few cuts that have been made to it.
It's basically excerpts from a Q&A session that he did with some of the guys in the British New Right.
It's the best Jonathan Bowden video out there as far as I'm concerned.
I found myself coming back to it before I ever published anything and listening to it And if you look it up on YouTube, I think it's just called The Jonathan Bowden Interview.
And like I say, it's an excerpted version of the text that's in this book that we've put out.
And it is him explaining his worldview, basically.
Like I say, it's a Q&A session, so you can get the sense of these guys that are sitting around this living legend, this absolutely just titanically erudite mind.
putting to him all the questions that you would ever want to ask him, really.
Now, of course, recorded in 2012, so there are some—many things have happened since then,
and he, of course, can't weigh in on that.
But, you know, a lot of what he says is very, very applicable to today.
And this is a part of the reason why he continues to live on and people still listen to what he's got to say.
And it's just fascinating to listen to him kind of weigh in on that.
Like he clearly, I mean, he couldn't have planned any of this because it's a Q&A session.
But for me, this is the one video that I point people to when they're like, who's Jonathan Bowden?
What's this guy all about?
I point them to that video.
And so I just found myself doing that often enough and eventually discovered Well, it was obvious that because of the editing in the video that there's more there.
And we eventually got hold of the entire transcript of this talk or the Q&A session that he gave and put it out.
And it has actually since been one of our most popular titles.
I think it is really this and the one that we put out second to most recently called The Populist Delusion.
Those two are really the best entry points into dissident right thinking.
So I thought that was what I wanted to do.
I wanted to start out this series that we've done called Studies in Reaction by having a text like this
that is a kind of, it's a place to dive in to dissident right thought.
It does seem that you're putting together the kind of political philosophy, almost like horse,
the sort of thing that we would be learning if colleges and universities actually didn't do more harm
than good.
But with Bowden, especially, it's interesting because, as you say, it's not like he could have planned this and everything he ever said seemed he seemed to just be drawing it in as he was speaking.
There didn't seem to be any forethought of it, but he just knew his stuff so well and he had such a presence that it would just come to him.
And so it's very interesting to see it in written form and actually See that even though he seems like a very emotional, almost euphoric speaker who's just going off, there is actually a very systematic worldview behind it.
And I think that's one of the biggest problems our side has is, you know, again, in this temptation to just oppose the current thing, there's not a lot of grounding.
And what you've done is essentially provide a way for people to establish that grounding for themselves.
That said, I got to say, when you have someone like Joseph Dimitra, And then, of course, you've got Bowden.
The question of Catholic counter-revolutionary thought.
Obviously, you don't have to be Catholic to appreciate some of the insights here from the counter-revolutionary thinkers and the counter-enlightenment thinkers.
But do you believe that this is something that is still relevant to the battles For today, given that monarchy is not something that we've really had in America, or do you think that it's just a question of learning how to think, as a lot of people have said of the Maitre that he really teaches you how to think?
Or do you think that we have to go back the whole way and that we really should start talking about some of the ideas that might seem extreme in today's political climate, like monarchy or something like that?
But, you know, of course, Given the left, how extreme, their most extreme ideas become law within five years.
So maybe we shouldn't be talking about radical alternatives.
Well, I certainly would never shy away from talking about radical alternatives.
But I do think some of the, you know, older thinkers have a lot to teach us and lessons that have kind of been forgotten or sort of rediscovered in different forms, but like in some cases kind of reinventing the wheel.
So I'll take I'll come back to de Maistre, but I'll go back to someone
like a Robert Filmer, for example.
So this is another book that we put out.
We put out his book called Patriarcha, which is – Robert Filmer is an English political
theorist from the 17th century.
So this is about the same time as the English Civil War.
And he is an absolutist.
So absolutist being that the sovereign is effectively unchecked and that the sovereign
must necessarily be one man.
So it's a monarchist view of the world And he has some very very important things to tell us about say the rule of law So we can we can see in 20 from 2020 on to now at least and certainly going back Beyond that that the rule of law just kind of isn't a thing Uh, law doesn't constrain anything.
It doesn't constrain, uh, the, it doesn't constrain the executive, uh, and it doesn't constrain these private NGOs.
And it basically is, it's, it's not really ultimately a check on very much at all.
Now that's not to say that, you know, there's the law doesn't matter.
Of course it does matter, but.
In the end, there's something above the law.
The law can't rule.
And one of the things that Robert Filmer points out back in 1680 or 1650 or something like that, is that of course the law can't rule.
It's a piece of paper, right?
Only men have will.
Only men can rule.
And he says something like that If you believe that the law can take up the sword and sit on the throne or, shall we say, wield the executive in more modern terms, then you might as well say that the hammer can build a house.
The law is not an agent.
The law is a tool of an agent.
And so, if properly understood, this kind of gets us away from some of this silly, you know, business of The idea that everything's just like a social contract, or that we can just rely on the Constitution to solve all our problems, and it's just a question of interpreting it.
Government of laws, not men.
That kind of fiction.
That's right.
Yeah, exactly.
And this kind of goes to the heart of the lie that basically underpins the center-right, which is that, you know, Effectively the Constitution can rule and that you don't need to have men.
I mean, of course you need to have an executive, but the executive is basically carrying out the will of the people as framed through the Constitution or the idea that the judiciary say, you know, like the Supreme Court is effectively just interpreting What's written on a piece of paper?
Well, no.
The Supreme Court is very straightforwardly writing the law and making law as it goes along.
And if you have this philosophy of, you know, that the law is king and that the king doesn't make law, then you're going to just be confused.
It's going to be very hard for you to sort of understand why things happen the way they do.
And you're just going to get steamrolled by people who do understand these things.
Basically, the left Even though they obviously would hate Robert Filmer and would not accept kingship or monarchy at all, they certainly have a more absolutist view of the world.
And frankly, it's a more truthful view of the world.
And I think the thing that they fear the most is not a kind of conservative, traditionalist right in terms of, you know, It just basically wants to do things the way that they've always been done, and this and that.
Of course, you know, you need tradition, and I'll be the first to argue for it.
But at the same time, if you kind of understand how power works, if you understand what sovereignty is in the first place and how it works, you understand that the sovereign basically is above the law, and that the sovereign is not bound by law.
And if the right ever was to really digest this observation by a 350-year-old English jurist, it would be a big, big problem for our enemies.
And so this is kind of why I wanted to put Robert Filmer out, you know, to get this out there and to get this sort of into the right wing Yeah, in many ways, he's more modernist than a lot of the more modern conservative political thinkers.
It reminded me a lot of, of course, Carl Schmitt, where this problem, the friend-enemy distinction, the idea that the law having no force in and of itself, I mean, this was a criticism that some libertarians used to have of the Constitution where if the Constitution is not being followed, then it failed to restrain the government and wasn't worth very much.
And if the Constitution is working as intended.
Why do we want it to preserve it?
Because it's all gone wrong.
And I think there have been some hopeful signs of people moving toward this understanding of politics where they say, OK, it is about the friend enemy distinction.
It is about an agent.
It is about the idea that all power is ultimately Personal and it's not just derived from abstractions it does seem that the Anglosphere is particularly vulnerable to this Fiction of the law having an independent force of itself and the law being even sufficient to restrain the sovereign Do you think that this is something that
We can never really break away from because obviously with the continent you have a different model of conservatism and I would say a more mature understanding of politics.
Whereas the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, we have this kind of naive understanding of law and it's leading us into a lot of problems because these governments are becoming more and more restrictive.
But people seem to be going along with it because they have this Yeah, I mean, it is something that we need to break away from, basically.
It's, of course, America is, and this is probably not going to go over well with some people, America is effectively, it's an English society.
It's a part of the The English world that there's a there's a very very strong.
Of course, you could just read the Albion seed.
Are you familiar with that book?
Oh, yeah, definitely another everyone who's listening.
It's another one.
You definitely want to get I mean it really shows you how different migration flows from different parts of England shape the entire history of this country and Demographics is destiny.
Even if you break it down beyond race even beyond nationality.
I mean it shows you There's another book, The Cousins Wars, by Kevin Phillips, which really shaped my thinking on this.
Have you ever heard that one?
It's about the English Civil War.
I'm not familiar with that one.
It's good.
Kevin Phillips was a formerly conservative political strategist who developed the emerging Republican majority theory, where they basically helped put together Nixon's winning coalition and then Reagan's.
But then he turned to history and he wrote about In this book, he confronts the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and Civil War, and essentially shows that it's the same sort of battle being fought over the centuries with the same groups involved.
And the ideological labels change, what they call themselves change, but there's a common thread running through all of these things.
You often see this now where you have a modern election map.
And then you put it next to some map of political divisions from the 14th century or whatever was going on.
And it's pretty spooky how sometimes these maps just completely parallel each other.
The thing with the Anglosphere is that, especially with the United States, we don't even have a symbolic sovereign.
When people take an oath, they are taking an oath to the Constitution.
They are taking an oath to these abstractions.
And in a weird way, in this country, we've elevated that Constitution to something of divine writ.
That it does, not just that it has power, but that it has a kind of sacral quality.
And while it's useful in some ways, because the Constitution preserves some of the few freedoms we have left, it's also retarding Right-wing political thought because everybody's still playing by the rules of this rigged game.
Whereas as you point out, the left seems to have a much more mature understanding of politics and they just barrel through pursuing their end.
Understanding that the means is not important.
The end is what's important.
Whereas for the center, right.
It always seems to be about protecting the means, not the end.
Yeah, exactly.
And it is a much more mature view of the world.
And I think ultimately, to sort of pick up what you were saying before, that we need to go back to a view of the
world that is more realistic.
Essentially, we need to go back to a time when we had a healthier view of the world.
And I don't mean we need to go back to wearing pantaloons or buckles on our hats or anything like that.
We need to filter the best of the older view of reality, the counter-Enlightenment, pre-Enlightenment view of reality, through the modern world.
People like Robert Filmer and Joseph de Maistre still have a lot to teach us in that respect.
You mentioned Carl Schmitt, how Filmer reminds you of Carl Schmitt.
That's a good observation, because Schmitt and Filmer, and before him, Jean Baudin, who I mentioned earlier, they are all effectively in the same lineage, the same intellectual tradition.
Schmitt is absolutely an absolutist in his thinking.
And there was just a kind of, like, you know, few century interregnum in the, you know, well, the Germanic world, shall we say, in being able to think clearly about these things.
Like, Baudin pointed out, even before Filmer, that the law can't restrain someone, or that the sovereign can't be restrained because For the same reason that a hand can't restrain itself.
A hand can't hold itself down.
Something can only be bound by something outside of it.
And as Filmer points out, it can't be the law, so necessarily it has to be the sovereign, has to be effectively unchecked, unbound.
And of course we get the sort of, you know, people always say, well absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It's kind of a, it's a non sequitur, because Absolute power is just the nature of power.
Absolute is just the way that sovereignty works.
And Maestro himself points out at the beginning of his book called The Study on Sovereignty, which is an extended reply to Rousseau's Social Contract, he points out that, like, how can you have, he basically sort of destroys popular sovereignty in like a single sentence when he says that the people themselves are sovereign, but what are they sovereign over?
Well, they're sovereign over themselves, apparently, so they must be subject as well, and the whole thing just
doesn't make any sense.
The whole thing is just a complete confusion of how sovereignty works, who has sovereignty.
Basically, what he's doing here is he's just saying, like, look, popular sovereignty isn't a thing.
Necessarily, sovereignty is wielded by a minority.
It's wielded by some and not others.
And Filmer goes through a big argument for why that has to be one person.
Maybe it does.
Maybe it doesn't.
But at the very least, We need to get rid of the idea that the people are sovereign.
Now, this is not to say that the people don't matter.
Of course, the true sovereign will always rule in the name of the people and for the people, but it just isn't necessarily government by the people or of the people.
And what I'm doing here, I'm striking at very, very deep convictions that That Americans and, you know, by extension, everyone in the West has held for centuries now.
But these are things that have led us to where we are today.
We are where we are, not because we fell away from constitutionalism or popular sovereignty or any of these ideas.
We are where we are because we held on to them and they have basically led us down the path that we're on.
As a logical necessity.
So this is something that we basically need to rethink, and I think part of the reason why the radical right, why the dissonant right, the alt-right, whatever you want to call what we're doing, is so hated today, is because we are actually over the target.
We're kind of striking at the root of these problems, and we're doing so in part by going back to pre-Enlightenment ideas, but we're also doing it by going back to ideas of Say, the family and what makes a people, what makes a state, what makes a folk or a nation that are far, far older.
They even go back to the Indo-European period where a people is necessarily an association of a blood relation, for example.
This is something that you're not allowed to have.
Going back to the ancient city, these people were very, very tied to the soil.
They would only leave their family property if absolute necessity, basically war or famine, pushed them.
They were tied to the soil because their ancestors were buried there and that was part of their religious structure.
Essentially what we have here is a kind of embryonic blood and soil.
So these things are, what we're doing as a movement, Uh, even though it's kind of, it's, it's, it's a little bit incoherent now, it's kind of working out the bugs.
It's kind of moving towards something much, much older and much deeper and much more perennial and eternal than the, uh, what is frankly a kind of a silly philosophy of the enlightenment that really just needs to be discarded.
And the fact that we are kind of stripping away some of these poisonous ideas that have led us down the primrose path to where we are.
is dangerous.
It's very, very dangerous.
And that's why society hates us, basically.
I couldn't agree more.
I was actually getting more and more excited as you were talking, because it's something that I've been trying to argue for a long time, that ideas get taken to their logical conclusion.
And so even if we have something that you could take, obviously, the most famous sentence in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal.
You could say, OK, well, in context, he meant it this way.
And Thomas Jefferson had this whole view of Anglo-Saxons and a whole philosophy about how this should develop that was rooted in much deeper things than just kind of enlightenment attractions.
Everything he wrote has to be interpreted in that way.
But once you cut through all that nonsense, the sentence is still there.
All men are created equal.
And eventually it gets taken in directions that he himself would have disagreed with.
But He's still ultimately responsible for it, because it can only go that way.
I mean, what happened to the American dream?
It came true.
Like, this is it.
We're living it.
Right.
It couldn't have ended any other way.
And the premises that the polity was founded on and that the modern West are operating by, It's amazing when you really get into it, how shallow it is.
I remember the first time I read Marcuse, and I thought to myself, man, this is the new left's big thinker.
And reading his essay on repressive tolerance, where he basically said, well, we have to do all this stuff because otherwise everyone will be fascists overnight.
And I thought to myself, really?
That's it?
That's the basis of your thought?
Then you look at the center-right, and we're still operating on these kind of blank slate, rationalist, Enlightenment ideas that were frankly stale at the time they came out.
I mean, Joseph, and I always butcher his name every time, Joseph de Maastricht, I mean, he essentially disemboweled it at the time it was happening.
Not just saying, not just Burke's, because obviously Edmund Burke is considered to be I put the more respectable conservative, particularly within the American conservative movement, because Russell Kirk, who had a big role in kind of creating the curriculum, shall we say, for American conservatives, really focused on Edmund Burke.
But I always thought the maestro had the better of it because he was grounding it in something a lot deeper.
What you said about how it's a bit incoherent, but we're kind of working out the kinks now, but I think we're.
We are moving towards something like there is a, an ideology here, not an ideology, but a way of thinking that is, is slowly being developed because a lot of these people who you've published, even though they're writing from the time of thrown an altar or even far before have a very modern understanding of politics.
It's, it's something that could come from James Burnham and at the same time, They're also talking about this idea of the sacred, this idea of something beyond just everyday contracts or legality that grounds the state, that grounds the family, that grounds the people.
It comes from a divine source that's beyond question.
And so you have this sense of legitimacy and authenticity.
And I think both of these things are really missing now, because one, the center right is still Essentially playing by the rules of a rigged game and wondering why they lose every time, particularly when the left has no problem breaking its own rules.
And also because we're still trying to hold to this social contract idea where everything that we do is justified on the grounds that it's good for the economy, or it's basically A rational exchange between economic actors, and that's not enough to hold the people together.
That's not enough to hold the society together.
Demetrius has been getting kind of a second life, obviously because he just has so many great quotes that even people who have never heard of him know some of his quotes.
For example, you know, every country gets the government it deserves, that kind of thing.
Do you see any kind of union possible between, shall we say, capital T traditionalism?
And the more modern, very secular understanding and institutional understanding of politics as exemplified by somebody like James Burnham.
I haven't read it yet, but.
The book that you just put out on populism and how it's essentially impossible because there's always going to be a ruling minority.
This seems like another one of these steps towards something that could combine these these views of analysis, these views of the world into something that's coherent.
useful and eternal and that we can actually use to interpret every new situation that comes our way
Yeah, so what the what the newest book that we put out is the populist delusion what it is is it's essentially an
updated version of
the Machiavellian so the the book that was written by James Burnham
Yeah, excellent.
Absolutely essential for everybody.
For sure, yeah, oh definitely.
That is really, really a very important book.
What this book that we put out does is it recapitulates that book and a lot more.
Basically, so that book was him explaining the Italian elite theorists including Mosca,
Pareto and Michels and a few others as well that of course, because of the title, it traces
itself back to Machiavelli.
These people are all basically Machiavellian in their thinking.
And of course, by that I don't mean that they are ruthless or insincere or cynical or anything
That's actually a very bad misreading of Machiavelli, I think.
But what they are is they basically view politics as essentially an elite-driven thing, and That the sovereign has a role to play in shaping the society itself.
And what the populist delusion does is it basically explicates the three thinkers I mentioned, plus Carl Schmitt, as well as Bertrand de Juvenel, whom people might be familiar with through a book that we put out years ago, as well as Burnham himself.
and Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried.
Basically, he just sort of draws a line of lineage between all these thinkers that effectively,
it just is a complete demolition of the idea of populism, as the title might imply.
But this all sort of goes back to Machiavelli in his thinking.
And when I say that the idea of Machiavelli as being cynical or just overly secular, I
mean, what Machiavelli was is effectively a political scientist.
He didn't really, he advocated that the ruler do certain things that may seem kind of unscrupulous, but it's effectively in order to achieve a goal.
It's not necessarily to do that because it's moral to lie or it's moral to use devious
means to repress uprisings or anything like that.
Effectively, what he's doing is trying to analyze power and how it works just for its
own sake, like the way that a scientist would, in a value-free way.
But at the same time, he is also, in The Prince, quick to point out in many, many cases that
what seems like it is unscrupulous at the time is actually very often done in order
to minimize the amount of bloodshed and strife in the long term.
So something like crushing an uprising, absolutely, uh, you know, tyrannical, not tyrannically, but just, just crushing it completely is often more merciful than kind of like, you know, just pussy footing around and, and, and, you know, taking half measures and all this.
Because it's only going to flare up again, it's going to get worse, and it's going to be harder to control, and then more people are going to end up being killed.
So Machiavelli, he certainly does have moral convictions, and sometimes they come through, but for the most part it's value-free analysis.
Here's how power works, here's how to wield sovereignty if you want to achieve X, Y, and Z. It's basically an instruction manual.
Now, contrast that with something more like a religious worldview, and I mean whether you're a Christian or you're a pagan or something else, the basic idea is that there's something outside of society, and certainly outside of the individual, that's dictating ultimate moral considerations, and that this, in a similar way to what we talked about where constraint has to be something that
comes from outside, you know, the sovereign can't constrain himself, society can't constrain itself,
society has to be constrained by some exterior force. That might be scripture, it might be the rites
that come down from the ancestors, as in the Indo-European tradition, whatever it is, there's
something that actually constrains society from the outside. And I think that these two things,
the Machiavellianism and this more traditional view of the world.
They can be reconciled in that one is subordinate to the other.
Basically, the Machiavellian ultimately has to be subordinated to the religious worldview, to this sacral worldview where the world is shot through with meaning and ultimate purpose and value.
And this is something that our ancestors, going back through the Christian era, back
through the Greek and Roman periods, and in the Northwest, Northwestern Europe, through
the Germanic periods, basically all of the Indo-European branches had this sacral view
of the world.
And this is something without which society basically falls apart at the seams.
And part of the reason why we are where we are today is because of this desacralization.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And this is something I really want to bring home to everyone.
One of the biggest weaknesses of the right, broadly speaking, is that you don't have the same kind of, on the surface at least, you don't have the same kind of analytical framework as, say, Marxism.
Marxism, of course, has been redefined a million different ways, but ultimately the left has a tool that they can use to explain history, to interpret history, to Make predictions about what comes next, and just because they have a system of analysis doesn't mean that they don't have actual goals.
I mean, we certainly know what the left's goals are.
We may argue that they can never be achieved, and maybe that's part of the reason why they're so powerful, because it's a messianic creed, and that actually inspires more fanaticism than a more realistic creed.
But they have that intellectual advantage.
And turning to what we have, it's not that we don't have it, it's just that it's been ignored.
And it seems, and I hate to pick on the Anglos being Anglo myself, but it seems that a lot of English-speaking political theorists sort of wish away power.
And they just say, well, we're uncomfortable thinking about this, so we're just going to pretend it's not there.
And then we're going to create all sorts of elaborate legal structures and constitutions and various decrees and everything else.
And then it all falls apart.
Burnham, of course, called the Machiavellians defenders of freedom.
And he argued that understanding politics in this way, as you say, I mean, he was a political scientist, probably the first real political scientist, at least, you know, after the classical world.
Understanding politics in this way, It's not cynical, and it's not something that is inherently evil.
It's just seeing the world as it is, and understanding that politics is about power.
It's not about what people are saying, and it's certainly not about what political actors say it's about.
It's about power, and rulers put forward political formulas that allow them to accumulate more power.
And there's an entire school of thought Uh, from Machiavelli to Pareto and beyond that really destroys liberalism's foundations.
And I think one of the things that really has, has hit me as I go through these thinkers, liberalism itself doesn't seem to have many defenders left.
Am I, am I wrong in saying that?
Because right now.
The sort of movement you see coming from the left, particularly with their form of identity politics and their form of victimhood culture, is essentially our new moral structure.
The premises of liberalism that people are rational, that they can debate ideas and make choices based on their beliefs, that they're capable of governing themselves, it seems like the left has Without putting it in so many words, because they still use the words democracy, they've sort of abandoned the things that supposedly underpin democracy, because we can no longer look at information because we might come to the wrong conclusions.
So the algorithm, or whatever, has to be modified so we only see certain things.
We can no longer have self-defense.
We can no longer have freedom of association.
We can no longer even be trusted to Do democratic politics because they say that there are certain figures like they said Trump who would essentially challenge the whole political order when you were talking about how halfway measures are often the worst.
Now, obviously Machiavelli was writing at a time when a rebellion meant that you might have to sack a city and burn it to the ground or something like that.
But I couldn't help but think of Trump when he came in in 2016 where He had the political world at his feet, but all he did is he did just enough to infuriate everybody and rile up incredible opposition and essentially create a far more effective and motivated left, while at the same time not actually doing enough to.
It's not just a question of firing up his own supporters, but creating a whole new infrastructure that could enforce his ideas.
So it's actually, if you're going to do something, you have to go full clemency or all the way.
And if you go halfway where you just infuriate your enemies, but don't do enough to protect your friends, you end up in the situation that he ended up in.
And I feel like this is the story of the post-war right throughout the West, where they'll quibble with the methodology, they'll quibble with maybe the way things are being done, but they have no sense of What is central?
What's essential?
What sovereignty really is?
And we have this entire tradition that is available to us.
And insofar as there's a philosophical project that I think we need to be thinking about, it's how can we combine this very modernist and very amoral, at least in terms of analysis, Machiavellian school and Frankly, whether we should change the name because Machiavellian has been so tarnished by it.
So in a strange way, the reputation of the word Machiavellian is sort of an example of his thought in that he was advancing these views, which were not just to be amoral.
He had a specific political goal, and his specific political goal was to get the foreigners out of Italy.
That's the dedication and the prince that everybody misses.
He argued that rulers use political formulas and ideologies to, not ideologies, but certain arguments to stay in power that weren't related to what they were actually doing.
And the way his name was tarnished, even at Shakespeare's time it was tarnished, I think is a classic example of that, where he's explaining the way politics works, and it's very dangerous if People who are not in the ruling class start reading this stuff and start understanding the way they're actually being governed.
And yeah, absolutely.
That that I think is why he has the reputation he does, because it's not that he's advocating something that rulers aren't doing.
He's simply pulling back the curtain and saying, hey, this is actually what's going on.
And rulers don't like that.
It's the same sort of thing where somebody will say, oh, we're supporting the rules based international order when condemning Russia or something like that.
Meanwhile, we're drone striking some random country based on no authority or anything like that.
But we still just kind of defend it with these vague terms that are considered unassailable like democracy.
And I think Machiavelli and more broadly, the Machiavellian tradition is invaluable to us because if we don't understand The way this is operating.
And if we keep kind of having these really pointless, stupid verbal battles with the left about, oh, you're being hypocritical or you're you're doing think.
Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot.
Like, can you believe this?
Which seems to be the way we own the libs these days is just by complaining about double standards.
It really misses the point.
I mean, we have celebrating your own beatdown, basically.
Right.
Hypocrisy is not.
It's not a gotcha, hypocrisy is the point.
It's a victory lap.
Right, the fact that they will allow their guys to do certain things and not allow you to do certain things,
that's not, if you show that to them, that's not a way of combating it.
If anything, you're just immoralizing your own side because you're saying, hey, look, the system is unfair.
What you have to do is say, this is not the system failing.
This is the system working as intended.
And if this is the system working as intended, maybe we should start thinking about a different system.
But as you say, you can't, and I think this is maybe the whole Machiavellian tradition is something that needs to be modified or at least rethought a little bit.
You have to understand the way politics works and approach it as a science of power, as Byrne put it.
But at the same time, that's not enough to really motivate people.
They have to, like, no one's going to go out there and say, well, because we're cynically deploying these arguments, we're going to go out and try to gain more political power.
I mean, people actually have to believe in what they're doing.
And it has to be something that, it has to be a faith, it can't be something that's Just defended on reason, because real politics isn't about debate.
Real politics is about power.
And if you're trying to have people make sacrifices, if you're trying to have people who really, truly believe something, it has to be something, I'm not going to say beyond reason, but rooted in something other than reason.
Well, something deeper than reason, something that prior to reason, which of course all axioms are, right?
Axioms are things that are not arrived at by rational means.
They're things that are just given.
things that are usually handed to you by your tradition, ultimately.
Right. I mean, even reason itself, you're making an assumption that you can interpret the world
that way. You're always making an a priori assumption about something. It's just a question
of what you're willing to accept. Yeah. And the idea that a person can just be a kind of abstract,
rational agent that sort of is reasoning from nothing or reasoning from self-evident principles
is kind of an enlightenment idea.
This is something that was, I think, understood more deeply before that, before the Enlightenment.
But before I punch the Enlightenment too hard here, I want to kind of circle back to what you're saying about Machiavelli.
Where, yes, absolutely, we need something that is, you know, not power just for its own sake.
It needs to be something that, beyond ourselves, that we live for.
Something higher, basically.
Right.
Something higher.
Life beyond life.
That kind of thing.
Exactly.
And this is where the sacral comes in.
But Machiavelli certainly does have a lot to teach us.
And one of the things that a very useful distinction that he makes in his work is between foxes and lions.
The foxes being essentially like great men.
I'm sorry, the foxes essentially being sort of like bean counters and people who sort of get by
in terms of persuasion and lions being the ones who get by in terms of force.
They're much more straightforward and the lions are plain spoken and kind of say things as they are.
We live in a world of foxes today, basically, and they do not like it when you speak the truth plainly, when you're plain spoken about things.
They sort of like engage in this devious gentleman's game of not naming certain things that shall not be named, right?
Or not pulling the curtain back too far to reveal the machinations of what's actually going on under the hood.
And one of the reasons why, probably the most consequential reason why Trump was a big threat, and I think he will go down as one of the most important presidents in American history for this, is that he was the one who came along and didn't play by the rules.
You know, for all, for what little he achieved in terms of actual policy or change, he certainly changed the way that That we speak about politics anyway.
And he was the one that came along and said all the things that you're not allowed to say, that all of these sort of what we call cuckservatives a few years ago would just absolutely not touch and talk about.
You know, he had that sort of three-part policy planks, the three main policy planks, which was basically anti-war, anti-immigration and protectionism.
These things resonated very very strongly with the American public and these are just these are things that you're not allowed to say basically certainly not together, but not even Individually either and he came along and he won a presidential election on these platforms and so this is this throws the It throws the deep state into an absolute Allergic reaction to him and I think that this reaction this hysterical reaction is actually not a It's not evidence of power it's evidence of fragility and Right, right.
This actually is a real white pill for us But absolutely he showed the nature of the regime.
I mean, it's not just he showed the nature of the regime It's that he prompted them to show themselves I think right and and It alerted Americans to the fact that there is such a thing as the regime.
I mean, exactly.
The idea of the deep state, I think, actually originally came when people were talking about the way the Turkish political system operates.
And you would hear people say it like everybody else.
It's so cliched, libertarian to alt-right pipeline.
But when you were in my libertarian days, you know, occasionally you would hear people talking about the deep state and it was kind of this conspiratorial thing.
And you're thinking to yourself, well, What does this really mean?
Who's in it?
When President Trump was in office, you had editorials in the New York Times saying the deep state exists and it's good.
I mean, he, he really, it's not just that he prompted them to show themselves.
It's that they basically announced what they are and what they're doing, all and sundry.
And the only way you can not see it at this point is if you're Falling back essentially on tired political myths that the law, the Constitution, that these chestnuts from the 1700s are really what's going to save us.
And I think that's why the biggest problem we have, and really have always had, is the center-right.
Yes, I was going to say the same thing for sure.
I'll let you hammer him in a sec, but the way I would define it.
Just in terms of my conception and then you can tell me what you think about this I would actually define the center-right as a political force that plays by the left's rules while rhetorically opposing the less ends and that of course is By whether it's intentional or not.
It's inherently controlled opposition.
It can't win It's not designed to win.
The system is set up in such a way that it is not possible for it to win.
And I recall a speech Jonathan Bowden gave.
I think he was talking about where he said.
The two things that liberalism cannot assimilate are the quote unquote far right and religious fundamentalism, because in both cases, you're you have a source of authority that is outside liberalism.
And the center rights insistence on treating politics like it's a lawyer's squabble where we're just talking about these abstractions.
I think that also it's not just that it's mistaken and.
Objectively wrong in terms of the way the system actually works.
It's also that it leads to a particular kind of activist that is due to failure.
Someone who essentially approaches politics as a market transaction.
Because if you're a conservative, and if you're a center-right person, and you see it in all material terms, well, the big money is on the other side.
So why wouldn't you just defect?
Or why wouldn't you see your self-interest as policing the so-called far-right, so you can continue to have your position as essentially the controlled opposition, which the system does need?
I mean, if we didn't have the center-right, if you could somehow eliminate that as a political category or overwhelm it with a more robust, shall we say, right-wing movement, the system can't operate if it's in plain view.
Yeah.
Because when people see it, something kind of clicks in their head and they say, oh, wait a minute.
All those things they told me about the way the system works, you know, the, the constitution, the schoolyard rock idea of like the constitution and the way laws are passed and everything else.
We realized that actually has nothing to do with it.
It has to do with these institutions that have power in a different way.
And also with the regulatory agencies that constantly ratchet society to the left, even though nobody voted for them, even though they have no real.
Authority that we would recognize in the American system yet.
They still have the power Yeah, we're an agreement on on the center, right?
What what did what to do about the center right question?
well, I I Think ultimately to give you the punchline kind of up front I think I think what we need to do is basically attack them and not the left the the center right is Basically, from a structural standpoint, the only purpose that they serve is to consolidate the victories of the left and to enable new ones.
That's it.
They're not there to provide genuine opposition or to do anything.
They're of course a conservative force, but they're not conserving tradition, they're not conserving anything that's good and true.
They're just conserving what the left has basically done already.
And sometimes they defend it even more than the left does themselves, because the left will have contradictory principles in its own action that could destroy liberalism.
And then the center right steps up and says, no, no, no, no, no.
The biggest problem with you guys is you're not defending the system, the leftist system enough.
We're going to be even more robust in defending this thing.
There was a really great paper that was written in 2018 by a scholar by the name of Ziblatt.
Z-I-B-L-A-T-T.
I forget what the name of the paper was, but if you look up Ziblatt 2018, you'll probably find it.
Basically what it was saying here, and it was published as an article in one of the big newspapers, that effectively What the center-right is, is it's the bulwark that holds liberalism up.
And the liberalism and everything that's kind of wrong with modern politics is buttressed by this thing.
And it's only as healthy as the center-right is.
As the center-right goes, so goes liberalism.
So if you want to get rid of this thing, It's not Antifa that you need to get out there and punch in the street.
It's not even the left intellectuals that you need to go on to like campuses and debate.
It's the Ben Shapiro's of the world.
It's the Jordan Peterson's of the world that need to go.
These are the things that are holding the system back from having any genuine opposition and moving to its logical conclusion to where we could oppose it in broad daylight, basically.
These are the people, the center-right that is, that are the true defenders of classical liberalism and classical liberalism being A product of the Enlightenment is extremely pernicious, and to think that it's our tradition in the West, whether it be in Australia or in America or in Great Britain, is part of the problem, because what the Enlightenment effectively is doing is abstracting man and making him into the epistemic authority as
Basically, man's sort of shorn of context.
So, you know, you take the sort of, like, key metaphysical and epistemological text of the Enlightenment, which is of course the critique of pure reason, and basically what Kant is doing in deducing the categories of reason here is he is taking man and abstracting away all his particularities, all the things that make him really what he is.
Because what makes us what we are is not Man in the abstract, it's the concrete man.
It's you born to your parents, in your country, at your time, in your religion, these things that you don't share with other people.
It's the things you don't share with everyone in the world that make you what you are.
And what the Enlightenment wants to do is it basically wants to universalize and abstract man away from all of his particularity And basically make of him a kind of empty vessel, an empty shell that you can pour anything into, and this is kind of where you get the inessentialism that comes out of it.
Now, sort of the inessentialism that leads you towards something like a transgenderism and transhumanism and all that seems to be kind of far removed from the Enlightenment, but viewed as this transcendental move to abstract away all man's particularity, Well, that's the same move that the Enlightenment thinkers were making in the 18th century, and it's the same move that the transhumanists are making in the 21st century.
So there is a very, very strong and, I think, clear line of intellectual lineage between all of these things.
And that this is kind of, I mean, the Enlightenment is not sort of like the root problem, but it's at least, that needs to be solved before anything else can really be solved.
And that this is why I think what we're doing as a publishing company is, in my humble opinion, important, is that we're excavating some of these pre-Enlightenment thinkers that thought in a much more clear way about man as he actually is.
Like Maestro says, in the considerations on France.
Oh, you just beat me to it.
Yeah, that he has met Frenchmen, he has met Englishmen, and he has even, because one of the Enlightenment thinkers
told him, he has even heard that there can be a Persian,
but he has never met man.
And that anything, any constitution that is written for man is written for nobody,
because there is no man.
There is only Frenchmen and Englishmen and so on and so forth.
So I think it's it's it's recapturing some of this particularism That it is kind of this is the first step in the right direction Of course particularism is kind of at the heart of what the alt-right was about what nationalism is about basically nationalism is a kind of It's like a halfway house between the particularity of hyper-individualism and the universalism of the human race.
And basically it's sort of like the sensible reality of the state, well not the state necessarily, but the people are kind of the fundamental unit of society.
and not the individual and certainly not man in the abstract or humanity.
It's the people, the folk, that is the basic unit of society.
And this is something that was actually discovered by others as well,
by the Italian fascists and by other far-right figures in the 20th century.
The idea that it's not the individual, certainly, that is the unit of society,
which is kind of a more liberal and libertarian and individualist way of looking at it.
And it's not all humanity, which is kind of...
I guess what we sort of have moved towards today, talking about human rights and so on, it's the folk.
It's the people that is the fundamental unit of society.
And this is something that we, it's the starting point.
This is kind of where we begin from in thinking about society and politics.
And this is a much healthier way to begin, and it's going to lead us in better directions.
So I think what we're doing as a publisher, Yeah, we have been on the wrong path for a very long time.
out some of these more healthy views that will actually enable us to oppose liberalism
in a principled way and in a more fundamental way than has been happening for centuries
until the last decade or so.
Yeah, we have been on the wrong path for a very long time.
A lot of people say, well, it was 1965 Immigration Act or the 1964 Civil Rights Act or Civil
War or whatever you want to say.
But really, no.
I mean, you can make a coherent argument that even in the American founding, the seeds of our doom were implicit in that.
That once you introduce these principles, they are going to go this way.
And there's nothing you can do about it.
It's like rolling a boulder down a mountain.
I mean, once it gets going, there's no way you can stop it.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, and it's it's unfortunate because we're still I mean the most brutal thing and I did not come up with it But I use it.
I don't know who came up with it.
The most brutal analysis of America is that America's a corpse and we have one side that's rooting for the corpse and we have another side that's rooting for the maggots and that's essentially what we've been reduced to and the The problem the reason why it's dead is because it was animated by false ideas that led it to its destruction So if you're going to try to have some sort of revitalization or at this point create something new, you can't just go back to the same old principles.
You can't just dust off the Declaration of Independence, put on colonial hats and try again, because you're just going to end up in the same place.
Exactly.
And this is something that I try to get across to people and is even, you know, not always accepted on the radical right or the dissident right.
The idea that ideas decay over time, that they start out pristine and pure, and then they get kind of, you know, muddied and less clear and less pure over time, that's like a Hesiodic view of the world that is just not true.
The fact is that over time, ideas get more and more refined, they get more and more purified, they get more and more extreme, until they reach, effectively, like, you know, Take the most crazy straw man of the idea, and eventually, if you just take it literally, more and more literally, more and more seriously, more and more fundamentally, like fundamentalism, that's what you're going to get.
Yeah, slippery slope remains the undefeated champion in terms of what's happening.
And you eventually end up with liberalism arriving at, like what you said about before, Marcuse's idea of repressive tolerance, which is just basically a contradiction in terms.
It's almost like somebody took that Oscar Wilde quote where he says, I can resist anything except temptation, and they take it seriously like it wasn't a joke or something, right?
It's just a straight contradiction in terms.
But the left is absolutely earnest about it.
And this is kind of where this abstraction, taking man and abstracting away everything that makes him what he is, this is where it kind of leads.
And the idea that we just made a mistake, like we forgot to carry the one at some stage, and that we fell off the boat, that's just nonsense.
No, we are more liberal than we have ever been, at least in terms of the enlightenment. I'm certainly not saying that we're more
about personal freedom necessarily, but what the core of liberalism is, I think, look beyond
the surface. It's not just about freedom, it's about these transcending categories of particularity,
of concrete man as he is.
Self-creation and the idea that you can be anything.
Exactly. That's what it was about in the first place, and that's what it's about now, only more
So, going back to that is not going to solve anything.
Yeah, it really is a fundamental distinction between two ways of looking at existence.
The first being that you are an autonomous being, a consciousness that can self-create, and you can recreate yourself countless times over your life, even now, With your, with your sex, with your identity, with some of the crazier things out there, uh, which I'm not even going to name, but which will be mainstream in five years because you know, this, the, the ride does not, this ride doesn't end.
I mean, it's just going to keep going in this direction until it's wrenched off the tracks and put on a different track.
Yeah.
And contrary to the idea of self-creation is the idea of become who you are, where there's the, everything in history had to happen from the beginning of time for you to exist.
And there are certain things inherent to you, inherent to your duties, to your responsibilities, and you have a fate and it's, it's essentially a question of becoming the best version of yourself rather than I'm going to recreate myself atom by atom for novelty, for attention, for some sort of self-expression, which actually doesn't really express anything.
And this is tough for Americans to to get through because we're so our sacred founding is not a God or even a myth about the people who came here.
It's it's so tied up in legalism and documents and premises that were flawed from the beginning.
And while I think the American founding on balance, there's a lot of That's still keeping us what little we have.
We still owe to the founding and there's enough there that I'm not prepared to reject it in total, but it's not surprising that we ended up where we did.
And even though other countries are arguably worse and further along this path than the United States is, the United States is the global hegemon.
And the reason the world order is the way it is, is because what some have called the global American empire rules.
With Marcuse with repressive tolerance, I think he meant repressive tolerance is what he exists now under evil right-wing rule.
The liberating, liberating tolerance is the, I believe liberating tolerance is the one where you get to restrict all ideas from the right while allowing all ideas from the left because basically he said so.
Sounds a little more like anarcho-tyranny to me.
Well, that's exactly what it is.
And I think anarcho-tyranny is, I've always like thought about that phrase and it's a compound phrase and I'm thinking, is there another way you can frame it or call it or something?
But it does seem to be solidifying into an actual form of government.
It used to be even 15 years ago that you would say, Oh, look at this community and immigrant community in France where there's a no go zone and the police aren't, don't go into these areas.
Look at that.
That's anarcho-tyranny.
But now, You've got very public examples, for example, with the trucker protest in Canada, where you had people not only being arrested, but having their finances frozen.
In the United States, of course, you have the selective justice between January 6th, people who were basically let in, some people at least, who basically were let into the Capitol, walked around and didn't do anything else, having the full fury of the federal government brought down on them.
While people who literally burned down cities in 2020 just walked away and were actually rewarded by corporate America.
This kind of cognitive dissidence does seem to be hitting with more and more conservatives here in America.
So there's some ground for hope.
But as you say, the center-right just doesn't get it.
The good news, and this is why internet free speech is so important, Is that when some of these center right figures make claims, people are actually pushing against them.
So I think I believe it's Jesse Kelly, who I think is some sort of talk show host, said something along the lines yesterday of.
There are no racial differences are physical, but there are no differences in intelligence, and that was like a bat signal to Steve Saylor, who came like swooping into the replies and and all these other guys burst in.
Uh, Kool-Aid man style with like statistics and every, you know, saying this is basically the most consistent finding of social science of the last 70 years.
And nobody's been able to create a test where it, everybody performs equally.
How are you defending this?
And then of course he falls back on the, well, it's not race, it's culture.
And it's okay.
Well, a, how are you separating race and culture?
And B, if it is culture, what exactly do you propose to do?
I believe Scott Greer said something like what you're going to ban rap music and make them do geometry at dinner or something.
What what exactly is your solution here?
And of course, there's there's no real answer.
And the center right going after the center right ideologically and dismantling their arguments, they're even less coherent than the left in many ways.
And it's sort of like pushing an open door or pushing a door that looks like it's locked, but it's actually not.
You can just kind of with a very little pressure, it'll fall in.
We saw that with President Trump's campaign in 2015, but I think that's why they've had to rely on censorship so heavily.
And I think the center right actually benefits from censorship more than the left, because if a movement that can actually address the central questions is allowed to arise and can dismantle them so easily, And also show that there's really no link between the so-called conservative movement and the people it claims to be leading, that they've lost touch with their own constituency.
The only way that their position can be preserved is if they're the only game in town.
And we've seen so many content creators that I think would be far bigger than, say, Ben Shapiro or something like that.
If we still had the same kind of online environment, but we don't.
But I think because of that, sometimes censorship works.
Propaganda certainly works.
But underneath the surface, there is definitely.
A broader movement within the American right that I've never seen before, where people are finally starting to question the institutions themselves and questioning the legitimacy of the system.
Because they're noticing that it's not just double standards anymore.
It's not just hypocrisy.
It's the overt declarations that our side gets to do this and your side does not.
And furthermore, we consider your side an enemy.
And while I think American conservatives are perhaps too nice because they're genuinely good people, they can't conceive of the idea that somebody would use the state to harm them.
Because they would never do such a thing.
But I think they are starting to realize that they're in this kind of Carl Schmitt friend-enemy political battle, whether they want to be or not.
And people like Mitt Romney or people like Larry Hogan in Maryland who position themselves as reasonable Republicans who want nothing to do with grassroots hard right stuff.
But are going to work with the Democrats at the end of the day, these people, they're not offering anything that is capable of solving the real problems that we have.
Because even if you had these kinds of people take power, which may happen in the midterm election, simply just because Biden is doing so poorly, nothing essential is going to change.
In fact, they'll probably just be more capable defenders of liberal democracy than the Democrats are.
And.
I don't.
Criticizing the center right is good.
Replacing them is even better.
We will replace them.
And the biggest problem, though, of course, is and I guess I'll kick it to you for this question, because it is important.
We have limited time.
We have limited resources.
Is it worth engaging in the Democratic political system running against center right candidates, for example, or even forming a spoiler party deliberately to make sure guys like that don't win?
Is it worth participating in this system, or does participating in this system grant more legitimacy to it, and strengthen it, and inadvertently cause our side more harm than good?
Well, ultimately I think the answer is yes.
We do need to participate in politics.
It would be a mistake to cede that ground to the ultimate enemy, which is of course the left.
But the proximate enemy and the one that we really need to be going after being the center-right, but the fact is that democracy is dying.
It is negotiating its own decline right now.
Like in 2017, there was a poll taken of Republican voters saying, you know, what would, you know, Would you support having a strong leader who doesn't have to bother with like elections and the legislator?
Basically, would you support autocratic government?
And a majority of Republican voters under 50 said, yes, we would.
We would support that, which is a real wake up call.
There is an appetite for something that is a little bit stronger meat than the kind of classical Republicanism that we've had for so long.
Uh, certainly normal people, the man in the street is, is sick and tired of it.
And this is one of the things sort of tying it back to the Machiavellians that we talked about before.
Uh, one of the observations of Pareto is that when, like, even though like politics and just governance and sovereignty is top down, when the elite gets far enough away from what, uh, when, when the rulers get far enough away from the values of the ruled, There is an unstable situation that's created, and this unstable situation ultimately leads to a cycling of the elites.
Basically, his idea of cyclical history being that elites eventually get replaced.
Uh, because of this mechanism and that the situation that we're entering into is something very much like that now.
And there are anything can happen.
Think of what the political landscape looked like in 2011 or 2013 or something like that.
And then think of what it looked like in 2016, 2017 and their light years apart.
And even today, light years apart.
Um, I think the sort of like normal, like MAGA.
voter in 2016 was still kind of under the spell of some of this like, you know,
liberal bromides and things like that. But in the post-COVID world, normal
people have been completely disabused from that. They understand what's going
on now. They understand that we don't live in democracy because, well, maybe
democracy cannot exist.
Maybe it always is this kind of absolutist state, this state that is so clearly shown to us today.
And the fact that the elites are so far away from what normal people believe and think has created this really incredibly unstable situation.
You know, as we were saying before, the beast is kind of dying.
It's not strong.
It's reacting allergically and hysterically because it's weak.
And this creates opportunities.
Opportunities that could be exploited by parties outside of the sort of bipartite political structures that we've had so far.
So I think that people who are of our persuasion, our political persuasion, absolutely need to engage in politics, but it needs to be Strategic.
It's the kind of thing where I don't think entryism into the Republican Party is really going to do it.
Although, you know, some people have actually been making good inroads and headway and able to get things out there.
But things are happening.
Basically, the political winds are starting to blow for the last five years or so in a different direction.
And this creates opportunities that can be exploited.
But basically, What needs to happen sort of before any of that will really come to fruition is organization kind of needs to happen on the more local level.
People forming essentially something like manor bunds or, you know, this is basically... No, I agree.
I mean, this is the thing I've been saying when people ask, like, what is to be done?
That's essentially step one.
I mean, I always say basically form a tribe, I guess would be the best way to put it.
I was just going to say, yeah, the same thing.
But you could also do it even for conservative Christians out there.
You could also, it could be done via church group.
When I say tribe, I don't mean, I'm just using that as the best term as a, that approximates what we're talking about, but certainly it could be done through church.
It can certainly be done through groups of families.
There are, the form it takes is not, And even what religion or anything else that's less important than the idea of having some sort of structure between you and the state and something where you actually have physical, economic, and essentially social protection at the local level.
Not something online, not, you know, e-celebs fighting or whatever.
but something that actually exists in the real world, and that's something everybody can do right now, and that's also something you don't need to talk about online in terms of what you're specifically doing.
I think one of the more optimistic things that I've seen over the last few years is people are spontaneously doing this, and there aren't websites about it, there aren't reports about it, because there wouldn't be anything shocking about it.
It would essentially be groups of families I'm sure they could find a way if they wanted to.
The left would find it very hard to demonize because it's all, it's all about building.
It's not about destroying.
One of the things that I've been, as I was going through their titles and everything else, cause obviously post COVID and, uh, how do I put this?
I'll just put a bluntly post a libs of Tik Tok, a Twitter account.
The idea of sending kids to public schools does not seem to be a good idea for anyone on our side, if you can get out of it.
And a lot of these books that you put out could be the foundation of something really interesting, which would be sort of a political science curriculum that would allow people on our side to truly understand the alternative to what's happening now and to identify The problems with the existing system, because, as you say, it's not just that we don't live in a democracy.
It's that there never was democracy.
Democracy isn't a thing.
It's sort of like how I say, there's no such thing as a journalist, because journalism is the tactic.
It's not a profession.
So, with that in mind, I'm going to let you close it out.
What are you hoping to accomplish long term with this?
What's coming up in the future?
And do you have any advice for people who are approaching these books or people who are trying to get the message out and set up some sort of an education system with this?
So, yeah, there's quite a bit in there.
As far as what we're moving towards, I think what you could say is that we're creating
a kind of alternative syllabus for self-education in the 21st century.
Basically what I hope Empyrean Press looks like in a couple of years is a kind of college
course or a series of college courses, books that – shall we say books that could be
used as – for self-education courses.
I'm not saying that we're going to put out courses, but that one could sort of take
this and build up a little library that would – you'd be able to sort of disabuse yourself
of some of the bad thinking that's been around for centuries.
And we are actually working towards – this is a long-term project that we started a couple
of years ago.
We're working towards putting together an actual syllabus.
So basically a series of...
Um...
a list of texts to educate yourself on various topics that will keep you away from, you know,
anything that will kind of lead you back to these liberal structures that have been so
poisoning our thinking for so long.
And I'm very encouraged to see the homeschool movement starting to really pick up steam.
I think that this is something, the self-education and educating your own children is really an important way forward.
And it's part of a broader movement towards localism and devolution of power down to the local level.
Basically, you know, what we call subsidiarity.
And this is really what libertarianism should have been about in the first place.
And to an extent actually still is.
It's about making decisions happen down at the local level.
Towards, again, at the level of the particular.
This county and not that.
This household and not that.
Rather than flattening everything out into a kind of one size fits all education system.
Where, you know, people in Alaska are learning in exactly the same way that You know, people in Texas versus people in Maine are learning.
I mean, these are different places.
They have different needs and different cultures, ultimately, I think, even if they do share an American culture.
But this move towards the local is really important.
And to sort of touch on what you were saying before about the tribe, one of the things that I have been saying for a long time is that we need to revive the clan structure as a sort of
family structure, to revive the extended family, to bring it back to what we started with, with the
ancient city, that this is a model for us.
Again, like I say, what's in this book, the ancient city, in the first two or three books of it,
I see everything that is good and true and right and just about nothing that is wrong here.
And what these people had was the strongest possible clan structure imaginable.
What we need in terms of strategy going forward, political or metapolitical, is to form social structures whose existence does not depend on the state, because the state is not our friend today.
Sad to say, and hopefully at some stage, maybe in our grandchildren's future or whenever, that that will change, but right now the state is not our friend.
Family association, any social structure that we build needs to not depend on that.
And I think the fact that the Deep State is getting so hysterical, it's obviously trying to crack down on all of this, but it's having a lot of difficulty.
And everything that came in with the COVID regulations and everything was an attempt basically to retcon
or meme that into reality basically to make it easier for the state to sort of reach
into these local structures and to just ban them basically.
But they're losing that battle ultimately.
I think that the power of the state is not going to continue to centralize forever.
It's kind of reached a point where it's so complex that it can't get any more complex
without actually breaking down.
And that there are going to be opportunities created in the future for people to really kind of go their own way
in a way that we haven't seen in a long time.
So I'm hoping that Imperium Press, in a small way, will be able to help people educate themselves and take themselves on a sort of course to divest themselves of this bad thinking.
So that when they educate their children in 10 or 20 years, they'll have a good basis for that.
They'll be able to sort of start from a really solid intellectual foundation Well, I think you're already making it.
founded on these pre-Enlightenment, pre-liberal structures that are really just, they're perennial.
They are reality.
So I'm hoping that that's the contribution that we'll be able to make.
Well, I think you're already making it.
I can't recommend Imperium Press enough.
And I think the big takeaway that I'd like everybody to have is that these aren't just
books that you should read that'll help you understand modern politics.
But these are things that you can actually do.
These are not just abstractions.
These books come with practical applications that you can use right now along the lines
of what we just talked about.
And so I would encourage you all to go out there and read some of these books, perhaps
like we can talk again about some of the specific books.
I feel like there's just so much we could probably do this for like 12 hours.
But I think that if we as people are ever going to get out of this hole that we've dug
for ourselves, it's not going to be by just continuing to dig.
It's not going to be by just continuing to follow the same track that we've been on or trying to, I don't know, reset it a hundred years ago and then see if the same result doesn't happen somehow.
It has to be a totally different way of thinking.
And the fact is our ancestors already solved the key problems for us.
There are some problems of ideology we need to work out.
There are some problems of analysis we need to work out.
But the system is already there for disassembling what we live under now.
And it's just a question of getting it out there to more people and having people act on it.
And I think Eurean Press is one of the most valuable institutions out there in terms of that effort.
So I'll let you have the last word if there's anything you'd like to say to the audience.
And I can't thank you enough for being on.
Well, thanks for having me on, Greg, and yeah, it's very gratifying to hear you say that, that we are making that difference.
I guess, you know, what would sort of sum up what we're about in a short tagline is basically to quote Evola and say his worldview was just what was considered sane and normal before the French Revolution, that this is But this is how we view the world as well, and it's a more
truthful way of viewing the world.
So hopefully people will sort of pick up on that through the books that we put out. I think they
will. They've had a huge, huge response so far, and that it would be wonderful to see people
going and reading into these texts, whether you get it from us or not.
A lot of the texts, because they're old, are available in the public domain.
So I just want people to read them.
It would be great if you got one of our books.
You can do that from imperiumpress.org.
But just read them.
Find the time.
They're very, very much worthwhile.
And I think that the major contribution that we're making is basically selecting the best of the best.
So yeah, I would love it if Pleasure was all mine.
Thank you so much.
Everyone, please check out Empyrean Press.
The editions are beautiful.
It's definitely worth the purchase.
these people and Bowden and all that, if that's all we did in the world, we would have made
a difference.
So thank you for having me on.
It's been a pleasure.
A pleasure was all mine.
Thank you so much.
Everyone, please check out Empyrean Press.
The editions are beautiful.
It's definitely worth the purchase.
I know some of them are public domain, but with new introductions and just the quality
It is worth supporting Empyrean Press.
And it's always important to support businesses because we have to ultimately develop an economic network where we keep the money within our community, because that's an important step to being a sovereign people.
So thanks again for being on.
Thank you all of us for joining us.
And Gregory Hood, left, right and white.
▲
Export Selection