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Feb. 11, 2024 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor

01:26:34

20240211_Sun

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	Hey guys, Gregory Hood here, here with Paul Kersey.
	Welcome to The View from the Right.
	It's Super Bowl weekend, and unfortunately the next election is probably going to revolve entirely around Taylor Swift, because that's how democracy works.
	So that's what we'll be talking about today.
	Super Bowl Sunday is, and people have suggested this, as close to a universal American holiday as actually exists.
	There's always like an attempt every year to try to give people the day off afterwards.
	Football is one of the few things that America can really claim to be our cultural expression.
	You know, for the rest of the world, it's soccer, and that's always like a big fight.
	People trying to signal against America by saying, actually, that's what football really is.
	And it used to be something that was core to the definition of the right wing.
	Certainly, we remember it wasn't that long ago that Rush Limbaugh was an NFL announcer before he got forced out by speculating about black quarterbacks.
	And now, of course, it seems that the NFL has been totally politicized.
	And the question is whether that's the fault of the right wing or whether this is just another example of conservatives falling into this oppositional subculture and basically showing an inability to be normal.
	What do you think, Paul?
	Well, I love football.
	You know, it's funny what you just said to start that off.
	First off, thank you, everyone, for joining us again on View From The Right.
	This is our third episode, Mr. Hood.
	Yeah.
	Real, real, real simple.
	I love the sport of football.
	I would argue that baseball is probably the quintessential American sport, but it's kind of died off in a lot of ways.
	The popularity, there's too many games, 162 games.
	Football is different, you know, and like you said, Super Bowl Sunday, there's one definitive winner from each conference and then, you know, this cultural phenomenon that is the Super Bowl.
	I think this is what, Super Bowl 53 or something?
	I'm not even sure what number it is.
	57, 58?
	Again, who cares?
	It's San Francisco versus Kansas City, the Chiefs versus the 49ers.
	And what's fascinating, I believe there was a study done not too long ago, about a decade, I believe NFL fans were the most conservative.
	Do you remember this study?
	Yeah, a while back.
	Yeah, one of the big things is that you see in a lot of these sports now Obviously, I think NBA was like one of the more liberal And interestingly enough.
	I remember WWE or WWF if you're old like us Was actually far more left-wing that I originally had thought but apparently that's how it goes but I think that what's really changed is I Conservatives have essentially been driven out of all the institutions that we could have it.
	That's what there's a larger argument about why that's happened.
	I do think that I Believe in Hanania's thesis even more than Hanania himself, which is basically that civil rights legislation Creates an institutional reason within every single company that exists to just not hire conservatives because there's always a rationale to Dedicate all your bureaucracy toward diversity in order to avoid lawsuits, in order to kiss up to activist organizations, and most importantly, if you're an individual worker in these organizations, it's the best way to take out rivals within the company.
	Certainly, we've seen that.
	Let's go real quick.
	Hanania is, of course, Richard Hanania, who is a pretty big force on Twitter, and wrote what you believe is one of the better books of 2023.
	Right.
	And the title of that was?
	The Roots of Woke.
	And I think that what he said, he gives obviously a lot of criticism and, you know, you and I have talked about this.
	I mean, he's doing a bit, which is why I never get upset by any of it.
	I mean, if you're the type of person who's going to get upset where he's like, oh, you shouldn't have a culture of victimization and collective identity.
	Only losers do that.
	You should be more like the Jews who don't do anything like that.
	I mean, if you're going to fall for that bit and get upset by it, I don't know what to tell you.
	He's doing this thing, let him cook.
	He's caveman.
	Yeah, he's caveman.
	To borrow a term from WWE.
	There are obviously some things that he's just wrong about, but who cares?
	I mean, the essential argument is that there's real power being exercised within these organizations because of civil rights legislation.
	This general shift away from institutional power for conservatives.
	It's not something that just happens It's not an accident.
	It's nor is it just like the natural inevitable flow of things This is this is happening for a reason and it comes for certain Organizations and certain businesses and certain industries more slowly than others But eventually it does get there for everything and it has gotten to football now part of it is Is the reasons we're discussing but part of it is also and I think this is where Ananya and a lot of other people would probably agree is that the right has essentially lost normal.
	People and I don't think that's because part of it is because you fall into this oppositional Subculture and and a culture of victimization and being you know, everything's against us So we're just gonna reject the entire thing and say everything is politicized That's part of it.
	But part of it is also just an outgrowth in the first thing that we talked about which is that once The people with power in media and academia in politics and bureaucracy are all left-wing because that's the source of their power and legitimacy and You're naturally going to align people who in the upper classes with those beliefs and so even people who were in normal Suburban neighborhoods the kind of neighborhoods that when I was younger might have gone for say George W Bush or somebody like that are going to be voting for Obama and then Biden because
	Fundamentally, their economic interests are aligned with the kind of system that exists now.
	Now, you could argue that a lot of them are not going to be fans of, let's say, the more extreme elements of left-wing culture, transgenderism.
	Certainly, when it comes to race, they don't want to be living in diverse neighborhoods.
	They don't want to be sending their kids to majority black public schools.
	They don't want to be living with high crime.
	But a lot of that is operating on kind of a subconscious level.
	If you look at like the actual polls, there was a poll a couple days ago on on X that got a lot of traction where they asked educated people, you know, do you believe in genetic differences between blacks and whites for intelligence?
	Now, this is something that many of us would just consider to be yes, obviously.
	And if you look at people who are knowledgeable in the field, yes, I mean, it's there's no debate to be had.
	But this opinion is not shared by anyone within The upper classes, even though if you really believed this, the way you would live your life is like the complete opposite to the way most people actually do live their lives.
	But I think having a high IQ and having being of a certain class is part of it is actually the ability to incorporate that double think and to actually live with these contradictions and sort of reconcile them within your own mind and not let them do and not let yourself be troubled by them.
	And One of the reasons I think we're kind of in the mess we're in is because to the people who actually see this and sort of autistically freak out about that, you know, you guys are living hypocritically and you guys aren't living according to the principles that you should be living or according to the truth.
	Most people just don't think that far and we kind of have to take the culture as it is and understand that most people are just going to follow the signals of cultural leadership.
	And even with something like the NFL, one of the things that we've seen over the last few years is that even quote unquote normal people who just want to grill, who just want to drink beer, who just want to watch the game, They really will come around to accepting anything.
	I mean, let's talk about the NFL specifically, what's happened in the last few years.
	You have transgender cheerleaders.
	You have the black national anthem being sung before football games.
	So now you have like racially segregated anthem.
	You have a lot of the Black Lives Matter stuff going on during games.
	You have explicitly political things happening during games.
	You have...
	If you go back to 2020, Mr. Hood, you have to remember just like what happened over in
	Europe in the Premier League and the soccer leagues where, you know, end racism everywhere
	and stand against racism.
	During the George Floyd stuff, you had all sorts of insanity prevail when it came to the NFL being submerged in that racial reckoning, where they stenciled in the end zones things like end racism.
	The exact same slogans we used to look at and just think, how in the world is Europe, Western Europe, so cocked?
	And then, of course, they allowed, in 2020, the players to wear names of those who had been black victims of quote-unquote
	police violence on the back of their football helmets.
	It was very, very weird to go back and think about that season when only a few seasons
	prior, maybe 2016, 2017, Colin Kaepernick was basically forced out of the league.
	A, he wasn't that good of a quarterback anymore if you look at his statistics, but because he took a knee and created the whole fiasco that turned a lot of people away from professional football for a few years.
	Yeah, there was a reduction in ratings and they were actually losing some money for a while.
	Yeah, think about what think about what the great Papa John Said when he was one of the big sponsors.
	I'm sorry.
	I forget his name Papa John.
	I think it's John something.
	Yeah I'll look it up here in a second, but he famously was they were one of the biggest proponents and
	commercials on NFL games that were on CBS Fox and and one other whatever other channel
	Has football games and he got really mad during a press conference and said John John Schnatter. I think his name
	is Yeah, that's it. He got really mad and said hey listen, you
	know people aren't ordering pizzas as much they used to anymore
	I mean he had Peyton Manning on there doing commercials With with him and they were they were spending exorbitant
	amounts of money on the NFL games and he just said hey This is turning people off. We're losing money here because
	people a they're not watching the games So be when we're running commercials, they're not seeing
	our commercials for pizza. And of course, then he would infamously
	basically be force of his own company because he used the n-word on a
	Well, it was a corporate diversity training when they was he was by the way, it was with the Hanani book was the
	origins of woke up I don't know.
	I said roots the origins of woke, but this actually illustrates the point I mean the reason he was in this Corporate diversity training is it was like an exercise where essentially he had to say something like basically This is what you should not say and because he said that therefore he got fired and lost this whole company and we've seen this with a number of different companies now and this sort of furthers my point that one of the reasons that Wokeness if we want to call it as this kind of shorthand is so ubiquitous especially in upper class schools is it's sort of the equivalent of sending
	A young aristocrat to a school to learn, I don't know, dueling and upper class manners and dancing and all these sorts of things that you used to be able to take out a rival at court with an expert, you know, repartee or or being able to embarrass him because he isn't keeping up with style or literature or something.
	Now, the way to do it, the best way to scheme is to execute a politically correct strike on somebody for being transgender, for not being sufficiently transgender, bowing to whatever the new thing is.
	I mean, when we look at these schools, there's kind of this boom or take that.
	Oh, well, these kids who are learning just about racism and gender studies, they don't understand the real world.
	They're not going to be able to get a job.
	Like, no, those are the people who are going to determine whether you get to have a job.
	Those are the people who get to determine whether plumbers and electricians and marketing executives and the people who actually do things.
	Those are the people who actually get to tell you whether you get to have a job.
	That's what it means to have power.
	That's what it means to be an aristocrat, essentially.
	And the fact that ruling class justifies its legitimacy in the name of fighting for the downtrodden doesn't change the fact of what the function is and the function is to exercise power over other people.
	That's what happened with the Papa John's thing and more broadly with the NFL.
	You know, let's compare what happened to Kaepernick where, yeah, he didn't get hired and occasionally they still complain about this.
	But, I mean, let's face it, he wasn't that great a quarterback.
	And it certainly was the best thing that ever happened for his career.
	He got the sponsorship with Nike.
	He became this international celebrity.
	Everybody had to listen to what he said.
	Contrast that with somebody like Tim Tebow.
	Who was one of the best college quarterbacks and then when he made it to the NFL basically led his team pretty far into the playoffs rather unexpectedly and he was just And they just never they just never and you know There was a there was a kind of a cultural boom Lent where people were buying his jerseys and people were getting money I mean, this is kind of the counter-argument to the the thing where though.
	Well, they just want the money.
	They'll they'll Back any player that has a certain cultural cachet because they want to bring in new fans and stuff I mean this was a guy who was tapping into a subculture which is very sizable in this country You know tens of millions of people tend to be have some money to spend Families who maybe wouldn't normally go to these games.
	He was rallying these people and they wanted nothing to do with them.
	I Increasingly wonder what the country would be like had that team gotten a little bit farther had he been able to because it was fairly close when they When they were forced out.
	They won their wildcard game and it was 2011 pretty sure it was 2011, 2012.
	You know, cause he was drafted pretty high by the Broncos.
	And I mean, again, he was such a unique player.
	It's so sad what happened.
	Of course he got a chance to come back and play for his college coach at Jacksonville
	as a tight end years later.
	And he's still beloved.
	He's still a renowned individual when it comes to the cachet he built up as a Florida Gator
	quarterback in the SEC.
	Again, when we're talking about football, we have to be very careful because there are
	two unique subsets in the United States.
	That's college football fans.
	Yes, of course.
	And you're right, I mean, the Tim Tebow situation was a phenomenon.
	And then he had one opportunity to go play for the Patriots, a team that when Tom Brady was the quarterback, and Bill Belichick was the coach, they infamously would try and find unique talent at the wide receiver position.
	And that was overlooked.
	Julian Edelman, Wes Welker, Chris Hogan, Danny Amendola, they always would have A number of very talented white receivers that were overlooked.
	And I think there was, you know, Tim Tebow, one thing you haven't mentioned is how outspoken he was about religion at a time as Christianity, Mr. Hood, at a time where that was anathema.
	That was that was really the beginning of the cultural shift away from Christianity, certainly after.
	The backlash against George W. Bush, where Christianity went from, you know, the default religion of the country to a marginal force and something that it was very easy to attack.
	But again, to get into this sort of oppositional subculture idea, this was why Thiebaud was a hero to so many people, because he was a, I mean, he wasn't politically all that conservative except on abortion, but he was seen as sort of a cultural totem.
	For white Christians, uh, even though like a lot of these evangelicals, he was always running around, you know, doing third world charities and stuff like that.
	But I mean, you know how racial politics in this country works.
	People, especially whites are just, and especially white Christians are just so desperate for anyone who can even be somewhat interpreted as like their guy, or at least somebody who doesn't actively hate them.
	And so there he had quite a following and you saw people buying the jerseys and get ready to go to the games.
	People just wanted, the teams just wanted nothing to do with him.
	He was basically just kind of spat upon by the league and that was the end of it.
	This is one of the best college players there ever was and that was it.
	Kaepernick was not as good, certainly didn't even really have as much of a comeback as Thiebaud did, but it didn't matter because as a cultural force his influence only grew once his football Career ended and certainly in terms of politics.
	He's won because the idea of I mean and it was never obviously if he had all these sponsorship deals after he left his career It's not that it was ever anything where you had to sacrifice anything the funny thing with Nike for example Is the ads would say something like stand for something even if it costs you anything, but it's like it didn't cost him anything He just got paid millions of dollars for like being a leftist like well you forget none of these people have ever liked anything You also forget, just to show you where the NFL was before, this was before George Floyd, Colin Kaepernick sued the NFL saying that teams colluded to keep him off the field because he led protests over the National Anthem saying, of course, it was racist.
	And I think he even wore Didn't he wear pig socks or something in one of the games?
	Something like that, yeah.
	Against the cops, yeah.
	Yeah, and so he actually settled along with another black player, Eric Reid.
	They each received a little less than $10 million in a settlement in 2019 to not go over this collusion.
	And, you know, another story that I recall, you'll probably remember this.
	One of my favorite coaches because back in the back in the 1990s, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, they had a white guy named John Lynch playing safety who just got inducted the Hall of Fame.
	He's also, I believe, the director of player personnel for the for the 49ers.
	And Mike Allstop was a tailback slash fullback white guy who was just so much fun to watch.
	The coach was John Gruden, Mr. Hood.
	And I'm not sure if you remember this, but John Gruden actually had to resign from his head coaching job with the Oakland Raiders.
	They had just moved to Las Vegas.
	Yes.
	racist emails that came out during this investigation into Dan Snyder.
	These were from like 2011, where in all of the mainstream media reporting, it said, oh
	my God, these racist remarks, you know, these horrible things.
	And you never actually saw what was said.
	It just implied that there were racist remarks, which ipso facto, there is no defense against
	that.
	You're gone.
	You're going to do a mea culpa, and he resigned.
	And he's still not been allowed back into the league, even though John Gruden is one
	of the more successful coaches.
	And he had an amazing tenure, I want to say on Monday Night Football, as an analyst.
	And he's basically been blackballed from the league over emails.
	So it just shows that this, like you said, this idea that conservatives have no place
	or no voice at all.
	And it's funny that we even think about this because you and I love movies.
	Uh, Oliver Stone made a film called any given Sunday, uh, about, uh, about professional football.
	And it was basically about the black quarterback phenomenon, Jamie Foxx playing a black quarterback.
	Um, I want to say his character's name was Willie Beeman.
	I don't know why I remember that, but Charlton Heston actually was cast as the NFL commissioner.
	Uh, and of course he's one of the more famous, um, when he was alive, conservative, uh, individuals.
	I would actually argue that Roger Goodell, Mr. Hood, who is the commissioner of the NFL in real life, he's a white guy.
	He's one of the more powerful people on the planet.
	And I hate to say that, but he's basically in charge of a league where all the franchises are, you know, they're all worth about $5 billion each, if not more, uh, I'd say on average.
	And, you know, basically you think about the cultural, the cultural power that the NFL has, uh, you mentioned the Taylor Swift stuff.
	And I mean, I've read stories that tomorrow, uh, Sunday's game we're, we're, we're, we're recording this on, uh, February 9th, 2024.
	Sunday's game is going to be the most watched, uh, episode or, or, you know, program in television history.
	And a lot of it is because you have this fusion now of Taylor Swift, arguably the most prominent female on the planet, who's dating one of the white football players, Travis Kelsey, for the Kansas City Chiefs.
	And again, you just said the word to start this program off.
	And I think a lot of our listeners in the United States and around the world, it's interesting that people might say, oh, my God, Normie's watched this stuff.
	Hey, you know, it's OK to be normal.
	In all honesty, it's okay.
	You can that's that's sort of the the main issue is what is considered how quickly normal can change and essentially how I think there's sort of a vague sense of occupation that somebody who was if you want to call it the leftist cultural avant-garde would.
	feel when talking about something that's Super Bowl 20 years ago, which I think maybe like a normie Republican might feel now.
	So, for example, just kind of a quick, as an aside, I think it was Back to School.
	It was one of these movies, like some teen comedy from the 80s, which I remember seeing, and there was, it might have even been Robert Downey Jr., one of these people who had kind of a bit part, and he was playing kind of this campus liberal guy, and he says something about like, oh, I'm giving a A presentation on in my class about how professional football is actually a militarized adoption of a fascist society preparing its people for thermonuclear war or something like that But it was kind of a but it was a common take I remember even in college, you know, occasionally you'd get these kind of snarky professors talking about how we should destroy the athletics budget and all the money should be going to like theater or something like that and
	You know, isn't it terrible that kids want to grow up to play football instead of, like, writing poetry or reading or something like that?
	Now, certainly nobody wants to talk about, like, literature or poetry or something like that.
	That's almost been coded as, like, far right at this point.
	People who read too much are almost seen as dangerous.
	Witness the reaction of, you know, shock and horror to Vladimir Putin in the interview with Tucker Carlson yesterday talking about history and everybody acting like a world leader talking about history is just Crazy, because you just shouldn't do that.
	By the way, Mr. Hood, he's still talking about history.
	Yeah, yeah, the interview is still going on.
	It's just him in a room talking by himself.
	But the thing with football is that now, I think, if you're a normal, if you were a cop, say, some small-town cop, and you're watching professional football, because in the Northeast, certainly, more than the South, it's professional football, not college football.
	Of course.
	You know, okay, you sit down, here's your tranny cheerleaders, here's the black national anthem, here's the guy who's talking about how great cop killers are, like getting a commercial, here's all these people screaming at you about racism.
	The Taylor Swift thing, which is what, and I think a lot of the controversy about this is a little fake, but we'll get into that.
	But I think the bigger takeaway here is that here's something which people sort of assumed would be normal and apolitical.
	And it's been made political in a different way.
	Not that it's been made political where it was just wasn't political before because everything is political, but it was there was a default culture of patriotism, respect for the military and law enforcement.
	The idea of this being a masculine space and you're seeing athletes like do these things.
	All this is just gone.
	Occasionally, you know, you would even see leftists complain that football is a problem because, you know, occasionally you'd have a flyover of jets, right?
	Before, especially before the Super Bowl, you might have some sort of military display.
	That was seen as like the kind of thing to protest.
	Now, you have something that I would consider to be far more Extreme in terms of like we're gonna have a separate national anthem for this particular race And there's no reaction against it and furthermore if you protest it if you even notice it if you say that there's a problem with this You're the weirdo You're the person who's on the outside and unlike the people in the leftist vanguard there aren't gonna be favorable references and academia to your cultural grievances because there's no space for right-wing dissidents in media or academia and
	Which is to say that they're the only actual dissidents that exist.
	Now, if we look at, say, the Taylor Swift thing, I mean, she is a cultural figure.
	It's interesting because if you consider how she started, I mean, she was originally a country artist.
	I think one of the one of her early songs was this thing where she would sing as an insult.
	You're so gay.
	I don't know if you remember that.
	Do you know who signed her, by the way?
	Do you know who found her and signed her?
	Oh, yeah.
	Talked it signed up courtesy of the red white and blue.
	That's who signed her up even though he just died Toby yeah, you know it's funny Toby Keith by the way. He
	just passed away just passed away. Yeah, February 5th of a horrible bout a very courageous battle with stomach cancer
	You know kind of like what Norm Macdonald did he wasn't too public about it. I didn't even know about it
	I was at lunch. I was at brett fix and all of a sudden his great song that he did
	beer for my men whiskey beer for my men I'm sorry whiskey for my man whiskey for my beer for my
	horse. Yeah, yeah with With with Willie Nelson
	It's an amazing song that actually was attacked as being a very right-wing because it talks about
	Well, yeah, I mean, and that's also to get into her role with this.
	And it's a great song.
	But Toby Keith was an amazing American.
	And I think in a lot of ways, he is that quintessential.
	He's what you would think as your typecasted white sports fan, football fan.
	Am I wrong in that?
	Well, yeah, I mean, and that's also to to get into her role with this.
	I mean, she was originally signed up for his tour.
	And there was an interview that was going around on X where, you know, it's her in like 2006 talking about how starstruck
	she was.
	And she met.
	Yeah, when she met Toby Keith and was saying like, oh, you know,
	there's this power there.
	And, you know, there was this aura around him and, you know, speaking all about Toby Keith.
	Now, of course, you know, since he's died, there hasn't been a single comment.
	A couple of people have actually, you know, quote unquote, called her out for it.
	But, you know, why would she say anything?
	There's there's no reason for her to say something.
	There's nothing to be gained from her saying anything, because the the kind of audience that she had in her and you see this certainly with a lot of different celebrities, musicians, even political figures, certainly people on the right.
	The audience that gets you started and that gets you going in the beginning is not the audience you want later on, because, you know, the the sort of people that Toby Keith Was singing about and singing to these people.
	It's not that they've been marginalized.
	It's that it's actively poison to your life to be associated with them in any way.
	And so if she said even just some throwaway comment like, oh, he gave me.
	He helped me out early in my career and I'm very sad that he died even something that isn't that would just be the end of the world because she would be accused of Islamophobia and you know somebody would say something like oh in 2007 he didn't like gay marriage enough and by the way this is what you were singing in 2006 and why haven't you apologized for this and everything it would just become a giant thing for her staying silent is actually the right thing to do and from a purely mercenary careers perspective and When we talk about, you know, whoa, these right wingers, they're mad that Taylor Swift is suddenly involved in the Super Bowl.
	It's like, well, it's not so much that there's the right wingers are being weird.
	Although that's, I think there is something to that.
	We'll get into that in a second.
	But I think it's more that when the culture is shifting under your feet and it's being done so deliberately and artificially from the top down.
	Where these sorts of things are pushed and you can see it coming.
	If you have eyes to see, I mean, you'll see like a spate of articles and you'll see a spate of movies or a theme that gets brought up in a sitcom or something.
	And you're like, okay, this is where we're going to be in three years.
	When you see something like that happening and you see it within the lives of individual people and in the careers of individual people, where they basically come to represent the opposite of what they once represented.
	You sort of tend to react when you see it coming for something that you care about.
	Now, I'm not particularly obsessed with football.
	I don't think I am to the extent that you are.
	I haven't been following it in a long time.
	But of course, when I was younger, I would go to football games all the time.
	I was a Giants fan.
	I used to watch Super Bowl all the time.
	It's certainly, I used to love playing.
	It's not the kind of thing, I'm not, I've never been one of these people like, oh, sports are for peasants.
	Sports are a good thing, but it's like, but I do think I'm being extreme enough and maybe I'm an example of one of the things where people say that the right has fallen into this oppositional subculture where I can't, I'm not going to make a thing of it if I'm at a bar or something, but I'm not going to go out of my way to seek out like a Super Bowl party, whereas that's something I would have done 10 years ago without even thinking about it.
	But the fact is, if people think that people are going to quote unquote normal people, normal conservative people, you know, guys who are in the sports are just going to stop watching this.
	The NFL is going to pay.
	That's absolutely not true.
	The NFL is stronger than it ever has been.
	It's making more money than it ever has been.
	The turn to the political left was probably the best decision it ever made.
	And the fact is the type of people you want as consumers are the type of people who are basically the modern Taylor Swift fans, you know, people who are sort of media addicted, lots of money to spend into whatever trendy political causes and whatever else this is, this is who you want as consumers.
	Um, and also to be blunt, you don't really want, I mean, you want, I think one of the subconscious reasons, not subconscious, but one of the things that's kind of more buried in marketing research, one of the reasons that I think major corporations favor non-white immigration and non-white consumer basis so much is because they really are kind of the model consumers.
	Yeah.
	They spend without regard for how much money they actually have.
	They go heavily into debt.
	They're very easy to manipulate.
	You can just kind of push a button and move them around on the board wherever you want them to go.
	You know, now you're getting, if you wonder, one of the big truths of the advertising industry is that most advertising is targeted at young women, because they're the ones who actually spend the money, and they're the ones who actually direct consumer spending in married households.
	Now you're bringing those people into professional football.
	How could you not want this to happen?
	If I was an NFL executive, this is exactly what I would want.
	This is exactly what I'd be pushing a lot of resources for.
	So, you know, there is a cultural shift Happening, and I think people who are paranoid and freaking out about it are actually right to be paranoid and freak out about it the same way that everybody in one of these trends tends to be right.
	The things that are right-wing conspiracy theory tend to be accepted as universally true 10 years later, but it's also being driven purely by self-interest.
	And at the end of the day, the There's not going to be any particular loyalty to an existing consumer base from a professional sports league any more than there's any particular loyalty to a local sports base from a franchise that moves, that abandons the city and abandons all its fans based on, you know, another state offering them a free stadium or something.
	You can't expect anything from these people.
	That's a great example.
	We just talked about Las Vegas Raiders, the Oakland Raiders left for Vegas back in, I want to say 2021.
	You know, the Oakland A's, the Major League Baseball franchise.
	I love the A's, you know, being being somebody who was cognizant of baseball in the late 80s.
	The Oakland A's were amazing.
	Canseco, McGuire, you know, Ricky Henderson, Dennis Eckersley.
	It was fun to watch the before.
	Of course, I fell in love with the Atlanta Braves being from Atlanta.
	But the Oakland A's, of course, are leaving Oakland now.
	And you talk about as the country is collapsing.
	Again, you know, Oakland, Mr. Hood, I don't know if you've heard this story.
	Clorox is actually based in Oakland.
	110 years Clorox has been based in Oakland, and they've actually had to hire security guards to escort employees to and from the BART there, the subway system, and to their cars because of how bad crime is getting.
	Daytime muggings.
	And it's just so fascinating to think as our country at the micro level, even the macro level, as we're just seeing our major cities just completely devoid of anything that could be remotely called civilization when In-N-Out Burger is closing for the first time in Oakland.
	You know, there is no loyalty, obviously, like you said.
	If you were to look at the rosters of the two teams in the Super Bowl, I don't think anybody's from San Francisco or anyone's from Kansas City.
	Again, it's like hiring mercenaries with a salary gap to then have these teams.
	And yet, we're all going to be watching these games without really contemplating, you know, what's actually transpiring?
	In San Francisco, you know what's actually happening in Kansas City?
	What's actually happening?
	We're just we're just watching these two teams that are really just.
	As you just said, Brand NFL was a book that I read a number of years ago about how the NFL had basically become the ultimate marketing machine.
	And really, you're just watching these games and you don't care really the cities anymore, because it's really not the city.
	It's just the brand itself.
	The NFL is what sells.
	I mean, you said you're a Giants fan.
	A lot of people will base their identity off of these teams.
	But we're at a point now where people are just a fan of professional football, the NFL.
	And it's, it's, it's, it's incidental.
	It doesn't matter.
	It's superfluous what teams are playing.
	You're going to watch because you're programmed to watch and you accept it.
	And I gotta, I gotta be blunt.
	I have not watched a Superbowl.
	Probably since the Falcons lost in that pretty famous game to the Patriots.
	When the Patriots came back from being down, I think they were down 28-3.
	I can't remember what they were down.
	They came back in that improbable victory.
	You might remember because that was, I believe, when Trump had just been elected, and a certain friend of ours tweeted, White America's team has won, and it became a big story.
	But my point is this.
	I'm actually kind of excited to watch the game this year because The 49ers are starting the first white tailback since John started for the Redskins, McCaffrey's son.
	And the 49ers, again, it's... Go ahead.
	Well, there's an argument that, I mean, let's get into sort of the argument that You have Taylor Swift and her boyfriend here are essentially coded as the type of people that
	The right would sort of adopt as theirs not long ago because let's say I mean if we can if we get down to like what Taylor Swift is like your dad's like a banker or something you know she comes out of country music obviously she's kind of tacked left with the culture and and what's her best economic interest but she's not you know trans or whatever else she's not certainly if you if I had a daughter I would be More comfortable with a daughter listening to Taylor Swift than certainly other things that are out there right now.
	It's not the kind of thing that I would freak out about.
	There's nothing repugnant about Taylor Swift.
	No.
	There's nothing that, like, even as a parent you would, like, lose your mind over.
	You wouldn't be thrilled about anything, but then you look at the alternatives and it's like, okay, well...
	You know, given that a normal 13 year old girl is not going to be sitting around reading Jane Austen novels all day like she's listening to Taylor Swift, that's probably OK.
	And at the end of the day, I mean, most of the songs are the kind of things that you probably Want little girls thinking about you know, getting married and having kids and stuff like that.
	Yes.
	I know before everyone jumps down my throat.
	There's the the stupid, you know, here's the video she did with like a black boyfriend and multiracial kids and whatever else keep in mind.
	This was after a campaign of years generally from like 2015 2016 because we all remember Before AI, but certainly not before Photoshop, when Taylor Swift wearing the MAGA hats was, like, ubiquitous during the 2016 campaign on Twitter and things like that.
	I mean, there were fake photos and stuff, but she was basically sort of the symbol of, like, young white girls who were, like, right-wing.
	And you had Countless stories.
	I did not one but I think two articles for American Renaissance because there were like these coordinated media freakouts with people just like screaming at the top of their lungs that she needed to condemn Trump and she needed to condemn this and she needed to condemn that and she actually didn't do it for quite some time and then a couple years ago she did some documentary Where she made it because she's like from, uh, I think she was in Tennessee and she did some big show about condemning, uh, Senator Marsha Blackburn for not being sufficiently celebratory of homosexuality and tried to get her, uh, voted down and then for reelection, but of course Blackburn won.
	So, I mean, people talk about like her political influence, but she didn't have that much.
	That was one of the early racial things.
	I mean, it's interesting when we think of how the politics of it has changed, because if we think of Kanye West now, if you were like, what political figures are most associated with Kanye West?
	You'd say Donald Trump and Nick Fuentes.
	And if you think of like what Kanye West was at the time when Taylor Swift Uh, won that award, I guess it was a Grammy, right?
	It was a Grammy, yeah.
	Yeah, where he, Kanye, comes up and goes on a rant about how actually Beyonce had the best video of all time and everyone perceived this as sort of like a coded racial battle and there was all this talk online and everything else.
	Now the positions have kind of switched, but this also leads to some of the debate about this stuff now because here, if we look at The archetypal, you know, what is the winning all American couple?
	What would it be?
	It would be the star quarterback and the head cheerleader, which is something that you can kind of mean Taylor Swift into basically being, you know, blonde, tall, white girl.
	And here you have this couple, which Ten years ago, even, I think everybody would have understood, you know, you wouldn't really think of it as political, but if you had to code it one way or the other, you would consider it as, broadly speaking, on the right, you know, small c, conservative.
	And now these are the people that the right has been successfully incited against.
	You know, these people are scum.
	These people are infiltrators.
	These people, this is all a plot.
	This is all an op.
	This is all a way to get Biden to get independent voters or something like that.
	Now, I think there may actually be something to it in the sense that, you know, it's not new that she is been working for Democratic candidates. She endorsed Biden
	last time and like I said, she tried to do stuff against Blackburn and she did it on
	kind of cringy cultural workgrounds.
	But I mean, what could be more boring and predictable than, you know, female celebrities
	going nuts about transgenderism and homosexuality? I mean, that's like par for the course now.
	I mean, those are also like the best consumers. But the ultimate consumer.
	Yeah, the ultimate concern.
	I mean, the whole life is defined by consumption.
	The whole identity is defined by consumption.
	But how, as you pointed out, I mean, how true is that of Americans in general at this point where you don't really have an identity aside because everything is up for grabs, right?
	If you have like an inherent identity, an identity that you are born with in the sense of this is your race, this is your nation, this is who you are.
	These types of things are poisonous and fascist.
	And so, you know, it's much better to be something where you're sort of free floating and autonomous and free.
	I mean, if media and music, especially music, has one overall meta message that they're trying to give us, it's that you want to be free, that nobody can hold you down, that you're defined by your impulses and what makes you happy and do whatever you want.
	And if you do anything other than that, that's wrong.
	So, and if anybody tells you that you shouldn't live life a certain way, that's wrong.
	So that, that kind of free floating culture is sort of what defines American identity at this point.
	And certainly the idea that you should be able to feel that way, but also be materially successful and live a life that's conventional enough that you still celebrate like all the bohemian and degenerate stuff.
	But you don't actually do it yourself.
	And that's kind of the model for what it is to be an educated, successful person.
	I mean, this is not Charles Murray wrote about this.
	And I think, um, is that we're quite a or no, well, yeah, well, this was, that was coming apart.
	Um, let's stick with Murray.
	I mean, one of the things that he talked about was he, It was a study of whites in the United States and he limited it just to whites.
	So you don't get into various racial factors and whatever else and talked about how the you see the white working class and the white upper class essentially moving toward two different cultural patterns and to people be blind.
	I mean the white working class are basically behaving the way we think of blacks is behaving kids out of wedlock, you know, they're Personal lives are chaos drugs and alcohol running around, you know, sort of sexual behavior.
	That is not certainly what we would consider to be conservative or respectable or the kinds of things that we would take for granted 50 years ago.
	Certainly not the kind of things that I think you and I would consider to be like white behavior and yet.
	The people who are more likely to say that they agree with conventional morality or the people who are more likely to adhere to certain identities are precisely.
	Those more struggling people, whereas the people at the top, they're the ones who are more likely to be open to sexually libertine type identities and to say, well, you know, we need to undermine reactionary social norms or we need to undermine Christianity or we need to undermine all these types of things.
	But they're actually more likely to go to church.
	They're actually more likely to live.
	The way a stereotypical villain out of like The Handmaid's Tale or somebody like that would actually live.
	Where you actually practice conventional morality, but you don't believe in it.
	And this is not a new phenomenon.
	This is not something that is even particularly original.
	There are a lot of other people who have been talking about this for some time.
	But I think it's become, the double think is becoming far more internalized now and it's sort of self-replicating.
	What we have now is it's You already know, for example, when you're on the right, like what they're going to come at you with in terms of insults, you know, like you're white trash, you're redneck, you're poor, you're all these types of things, which is curious coming from a movement that is supposed to be all about championing the workers and the poor and the marginalized.
	But the biggest insult they can usually say against you is, well, you're poor.
	Or if you're not poor, we're going to get you fired from your job for saying the wrong things and we're going to make you poor.
	You're actually going to have to go to those diverse schools or live in those diverse neighborhoods, which is a fate worse than death.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, like the way you are successful in America, like what success in America is, is you talk about the right social beliefs so you don't have to live with any of the consequences.
	That's what it is to be successful.
	I think you may have just coined the new Joe Soberan.
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, well, Soberan famously said, yeah, you go to college, have the right opinions about minorities and the means to live as far away from them as possible.
	But if we look at, say, like the Taylor Swift and her boyfriend situation now, and this is something that Richard Nonia brought up in a, you know, and again, I know it's bait and a lot of stuff, but what can I say?
	I, I, I enjoy, I enjoy his bit for what it is.
	And every once in a while I read the stuff.
	And one of the things that he said was that the right has sort of fallen into this trap where there's now an anger against success as such, where we're now in a position where we're raging against the star quarterback and his celebrity girlfriend.
	Both of whom are fairly conventional looking, both of whom are fairly conventional presenting.
	And like, okay, yeah, there's some trendy lefty beliefs, but I mean, come on, like all the Hollywood starlets from like the golden era of Hollywood, like they were all lefties too.
	I mean, who cares?
	Mr. Ridd, if I could stop you real quick.
	Paul Travis Kelce is our quarterback.
	He is, of course, the tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs.
	So, no, I'm sorry.
	It's okay.
	And by the way, I should point out... I'm a Giants fan.
	What can I say?
	Yeah, we haven't mentioned this yet.
	He actually dated exclusively black girls.
	No, I know.
	He did.
	And his brother, by the way, is one of the top sinners in the league.
	He plays for the Philadelphia Eagles and he married a girl, this beautiful white woman, that he met on, of all things, Tinder.
	They have a pretty funny podcast that they do.
	And they have three beautiful daughters, three beautiful blonde haired daughters, Travis Kelce.
	I actually think it's amazing that she's dating Travis Kelce because he is a Hall of Fame player.
	Yeah, you're right.
	I don't know why I thought quarterback for some reason.
	But yeah, the and obviously I would you brought up about his prior relationship history, too, which is also interesting.
	But the point is, it's not so much, you know, literally quarterback, but there's sort of that motif, that idea of like the star football player.
	It's basically the homecoming queen and the homecoming... Right, right, exactly.
	And now you have people sort of raging against it.
	Now, I would respond that when you are in a society where, you know, obviously on a large scale, IQ kind of trumps everything and talent will usually win out, but let's face it, In a society like ours, you have to have the right politics to be allowed to succeed.
	We could certainly give many examples, but let's bring up just what Donald Trump is going through with the state of New York, with the Attorney General going after his real estate business.
	Yeah.
	Now look, there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that he's going to win the case.
	The Trump Organization is done.
	There is no chance whatsoever it will survive.
	It's done.
	It's over.
	At the same time, there's not a person in the country, including every single person who's bringing this case, every single one of them, knows none of these charges would exist had he not come down the escalator in 2015.
	No chance whatsoever.
	The only reason any of this is happening is because he ran for something.
	He would still be chilling.
	He'd still be doing the Trump Fantastic Ties.
	The hysterical people on The View would still be falling all over him.
	All the celebrities who are having nervous breakdowns would still be talking about how great he is.
	You succeed at a certain level because you're allowed to succeed.
	This is even true in athletics to a certain extent, because we can all think of certain people where their career just sort of ends.
	I mean, heck, for that matter, if we want to talk about, like, music, let's talk about Kanye.
	I mean, nobody cared when he said President Bush doesn't care about white people.
	Nobody cared when he did the Taylor Swift thing.
	Actually, actually, Mr. Hood, he said, George Bush doesn't care about black people.
	Doesn't care about black people, yeah.
	Back in Katrina.
	Yeah, that was a Freudian slip on my part, yeah.
	Well, George Bush didn't care about white people.
	That was the problem.
	Like, he did actually care about black people too much.
	He actually said, George W. Bush said that the worst day of his presidency was when Kanye West accused him of that.
	Worst day of his presidency.
	Worse than 9-11.
	You've just nailed, what you just said right there is pretty much why the whole NFL thing is so fascinating to think about, because in the long run, George W. Bush, who was arguably one of the worst presidents we've ever had, everything that he did.
	He looked at a day, and I guess it was a telethon, when Mike... It was Mike Myers, which is one of the greatest clips of all time.
	I agree.
	Seeing the look on Mike Myers' face as Kanye's going off, and Mike Myers looks like he wants to be anywhere else on the planet.
	And that's what George Bush said was the worst moment of his presidency.
	You know, two, two.
	Some random black rapper like telling him that like, oh yeah, you're a racist.
	As if he had never heard that before.
	But it like really bothered him.
	And the interesting thing about Katrina is that, you know, Jared Taylor, my boss, I guess our boss
	in some sense, wrote one of the most widely circulated columns of all time, which was Africa in our midst
	after Katrina.
	Because in Katrina, you had a breakdown that was so complete
	That it almost reads like one of the sections from like those really terrible like white nationalist apocalyptic novels.
	Like it was actually that out of control.
	Where like the black police just like instantly abandon their posts and just join in the looting with everybody else.
	Like the city government like disintegrates and the black mayor is on the phone crying and screaming.
	There's one more.
	The Huffington Post was publishing columns by these black columnists, like, two days after the levies had broke, saying, like, white America can never be forgiven for this because the blacks have given in to cannibalism.
	Well, I mean, hey, Chris Kyle, the guy who was canonized in American Sniper, he famously claimed that he was on the roof of the Superdome.
	Sniping people during I actually that's one of the conspiracy theories that I actually totally believe in the Cynthia McKinney You know the black congresswoman also made claims like this that there were all these bodies buried in the swamp I was talking to a guy who worked for One of these private military companies a few years back and you know, I mean people tell stories, right?
	So who knows?
	No, I'm not gonna give his name or say which company but he was telling stuff saying like yeah actually, you know during because YouTube wasn't really a thing then and you wasn't I don't think it was a thing at all actually and And ubiquitous video wasn't a thing.
	Same way like you don't really see a lot of videos from like 9-11 itself, right?
	Just because it wasn't a norm that everybody had cameras in their pockets.
	And with Katrina there were all these reports where people were basically setting up barricades across the bridges to make sure the blacks couldn't come out because you had these reports of blacks just like going crazy and killing people.
	Yeah.
	And then you also had the reports, uh, which only really appeared in the British press because these poor Brits got stuck in New Orleans in the, uh, Superdome, right?
	Yeah, there's actually a book.
	So it's funny you mentioned all this because someone just full circled the NFL.
	Yeah.
	Somebody just contacted me and they said that they were trying to do some research about what happened at the Superdome where all these whites basically United Europeans, you know, basically it was like the remake of the battle of Rooks drift or something.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Basically all of the articles that I had cited in a number of pieces.
	They've been scrubbed from the internet Oh, yeah, and and that's why I think mr. Taylor's piece African or admits is so important because so many things that were happening I mean God you go back to o5 and and you talk about the right and how pathetic the right really is in a lot of ways because Alex Jones is The Infowars was saying, Oh my God, Katrina happened because it was a harp.
	You know, the whole conspiracy that there's some sort of, there's some sort of weather modification, um, apparatus in Alaska and this was done or, Oh, the levees were blown.
	And it's, it's, it's like, no, we got to see the biological reality of what happens when black people are left to their own devices.
	And then, Whites who were smart enough to leave.
	I mean I was at I was in college at the time And I remember I was just fascinated by what was happening I was actually I remember calling Jared and giving a couple articles Ideas that I had found because it was just it was one of the most mind-blowing Experiences and then of course just to talk about how crazy professional football is if you think about what happened at the Superdome that's where the That's the venue, the Dome Stadium, the New Orleans Saints play in, Mr. Hood.
	A couple years later, they had their first game since Katrina.
	And I cannot remember the guy's name, but there's actually a statue of him.
	It's a white guy who blocked a punt against the Atlanta Falcons.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Steve Gleason.
	Yeah.
	Steve Gleason.
	Yeah.
	Steve Gleason.
	And that was important because Steve, that was a Remarkable occasion for the City of New Orleans with Steve Gleason blocking that punt and then of course a few years after that Steve Gleason ended up getting diagnosed with ALS and now you know he's kind of best known for his fight against ALS.
	Which is one of the most, you and I are both fathers, it's the most harrowing documentary I've ever tried to watch.
	If you've ever seen that documentary it's it's unbelievable especially because ALS is a disease that tends to strike down elite athletes for whatever reason.
	But what's, to just steer it to the main thing here, what's interesting about that is how Katrina was sort of, and I understand why you would have to frame it this way, right?
	Katrina and then the aftermath and the blocked pond and football and the Saints and all these things were sort of portrayed as, you know, the city clawing back from the brink and all this kind of stuff.
	And it's like, yeah, and it's like your city completely disintegrated.
	Upon the slightest contact with reality all of your institutions completely failed the race of people that was in charge of everything just immediately turned upon themselves in almost hilarious fashion and Nobody learned anything from this.
	In fact, the only thing that anybody took away from any of it is From the only thing anybody took away from any of it was basically that white racism somehow caused this and that, you know, maybe the Navy like blew up the levees because they just like don't like black people or something.
	And in the aftermath, I remember there were all these hilarious stories were like.
	I think New Orleans like city employees or the cops or whoever it was were like given a free vacation because they had been too stressed and you had these crazy claims about like New Orleans being a chocolate city and that's why we need to keep like immigrants out because they were bringing all these immigrants to to rebuild you know parts that have been destroyed because God knows the blacks aren't going to do it and they They just doubled down on everything and nothing was learned.
	And then, of course, in the years since in New Orleans, what did they do?
	They took down the remaining Confederate statues.
	They went on this little crusade against Southern history.
	They, you know, went crazy about, oh, look at the history of racism, sexism, and all this other stuff.
	And of course, crime went through the roof and it's just another disaster now.
	And it's, that's all it will ever be.
	But that's, but the thing is, we're all content with that, like as Americans.
	And this sort of gets back to this idea of the oppositional subculture, the bitter subculture, the resentful subculture, to some extent, like what it is in America, what it is to be successful is to, you actually have to have a willful ignorance where you, you refuse to see these problems.
	And more than that, you actually interpret these problems as the opposite of what they are, like the correct, Response to Katrina if you and I looked at it objectively and you said hey, you know this black run city where they literally have all of the political power was a complete disaster and they Massively failed on every level and all their own people died.
	Don't you think that's a problem?
	Like the correct response is to actually say no actually white racism is to blame but at the same time I You're an even bigger loser if you're somehow culpable or responsible or tied in to any of these black failures.
	Like, you need to have that opinion, but you also need to be exempt from having to deal with these people in any way.
	I mean, God knows I've been in New Orleans quite a few times and I've stayed with people who have property there and everything else, but what do you do?
	You're in the French Quarter or whatever and you're like looking down at the peasants from a balcony or something because that's what you do.
	You don't go like trawling around the bad neighborhoods at two in the morning trying to drink or something because you know how that's going to end.
	You always have to be in this position of lording it over everyone living in sort of blissful ignorance through wealth.
	That's what it is to be American.
	You surrender to the zeitgeist without swimming in it.
	Yeah, and that's sort of, not to be too crazy or schizo about Taylor Swift
	or something, but I think that's sort of what, that's sort of esoteric canonism.
	That's sort of like what the main takeaway is, which is that, yeah, the NFL is no longer
	sort of an automatic American institution in the way we would have thought of it like 20 years ago.
	It's trainees and separate black national anthem or whatever else, but if you're freaking out about it and you're protesting it, or even if you really notice it, the fact that we're even talking about it, you're already kind of off.
	The correct thing to do is actually just see it and Participate in it and not notice that there's even been a change like you actually have to like not notice like really truly not notice not even be aware of it because once you notice that there's even been a change you're like damned at some level and This is sort of the problem with the right now because we've sort of lost that that striver archetype the people who want to be successful who want to get ahead who want to and
	To be rich, who want to be influential, who want to be directing the culture from the top down as opposed to driving against it from the bottom up.
	I mean, even if we think of what Trump is compared to what he used to be, I mean, Trump originally was the archetype of what the New York City business tycoon.
	That's what he was.
	Now he's the champion of middle America.
	Which is the last thing you want.
	I'd actually stop you right there if I could.
	Trump wanted to buy into the NFL.
	A hundred percent.
	And then he wanted to do, and then, I mean, there's an interesting subplot with this too, which is, of course, the big lawsuit.
	The, uh, was it the USFL?
	USFL Trump bought into, uh, back in the eighties.
	Uh, yeah.
	And, but of course there was a major, there was a major lawsuit and, uh, the art of the deal, uh, one of my favorite books, uh, when I was younger, believe it or not.
	It's a great book.
	Art of the Deal.
	And of course, you know, but to give another quick example, the guy who kind of ghost wrote it for him, of course, is, you know, having been having a neurotic fit ever since Trump ran for president and spends all his time condemning it and apologizing for being alive and all the rest of it, because that's how people are.
	But one of the things he talks about with this lawsuit against the NFL is he essentially the lawsuit was essentially that the NFL was a monopoly and was freezing out competition.
	And if you want to get into the The legal history of these things, there's always been sort of a separate doctrine for professional sports leagues when it comes to monopoly laws and antitrust laws.
	Yeah.
	Same thing with baseball, same thing with everything.
	And you know, you could argue it kind of makes sense because you can really only have like one sports team.
	But Trump and the other owners basically, they wanted to go toe to toe.
	They had a league that played at a different time of the year.
	Didn't work out.
	They filed a lawsuit.
	They actually won the lawsuit, but they only got token damages of like a dollar.
	It was a dollar.
	That's exactly right.
	And so, you know, for all intents and purposes, they actually lost and they had to fold everything up.
	And some of Trump's, you know, old football connections who still have his back kind of come from that time.
	But if we kind of extend this metaphor and extend where it is now, I mean, what is Trump doing now, except on a much broader scale?
	Essentially the same old lawsuit instead of you try to buy your way in to the existing thing You try to buy your way in to the ruling class.
	You try to play by the rules.
	You're frozen out So what do you do you launch this sort of insurrection?
	and you Try to do it through the law, but you also try to do it through direct competition and you may even succeed and you may even technically win, but you don't really win because there's no real power behind it.
	There's no real money behind it.
	And so you lose and everything that you tried to build up is destroyed.
	That's sort of like where we're at in the country.
	And if we think of the Superbowl and we think of the type of people who are being Brought in as sort of like NFL consumers as opposed to the people who might be feeling on the outs You know the aforementioned and I know we're just kind of creating a straw man here But you know if you're like a small-town cop or soldier or something like that Yeah, I mean like guess what you don't get to like sit down and watch football anymore without feeling at least to some extent sort of insulted but you know Dems the brakes welcome to America and You're sort of left with this choice.
	I mean you either just sort of suck it up and say well I'm going to win In the system that exists now, even if that means I have to flip on a couple of my views or my cultural identity or how I present, you could argue that this is basically what Taylor Swift did when she went from country music and, you know, being the opening act for brought to you courtesy of the red, white and blue to singing songs about, you know, whatever it is now.
	Do you do that or do you try to do this sort of like oppositional?
	I'm going to take the culture over from An insurrectionary point of view.
	And we've sort of seen that that's almost impossible to do.
	I mean, again, to use another music example, let's look at Kanye.
	Kanye just dropped another album, I think last night.
	It was a very eventful night last night.
	And Kanye dropped another album on this.
	It's got some kind of like black metal aesthetics and stuff.
	He's actually, Ozzy Osbourne is attacking him.
	Because Kanye wanted to use a sample from one of Ozzy Osbourne's concerts or something and Ozzy said, no, Kanye did it anyway.
	And Ozzy Osbourne is having a hissy fit because he's accusing Kanye of like doing heartbreaking anti-Semitism or something like that.
	You can sing about like the devil and Satan and all this stuff all day, but you can.
	Oh man.
	Oh yeah.
	Yeah, of course.
	No.
	Yeah.
	But that's, you know, piss on the Elmo.
	That's fine.
	But if you, uh, you know, you might give somebody like a big frowny face and we can't have that.
	You know, if I could, but I mean, you know, look at just to close the point, I mean, think of how much money Connie was a billionaire.
	Yeah.
	And they just like took that away instantly because of the lines you crossed.
	I mean, that's, that's what it is to have real money and real power.
	And this is, this sort of gets to the, the whole argument about, well, you shouldn't be losers.
	You shouldn't be resentful.
	You should be celebrating success as such.
	It's like, yeah, but it's all, it's all to some extent artificial.
	Because even if you really are there because of your athletic talent or your musical talent or because of your ability to attract an audience, say, to if we wanted to use like a social media metaphor, all of that is at the sufferance of somebody else.
	And we've even seen with Trump that even if you can be president of the United States and literally have no power.
	Yeah.
	I totally agree.
	I mean, again, Trump and why I brought up the NFL and Donald Trump, Mr. Hood, back in 2014, he tried to buy the Buffalo Bills.
	Yep.
	Yep.
	And he was he was unsuccessful.
	And Doug Flutie was one of his big connections in the USFL.
	And of course, Flutie has a long history with that organization.
	Doug Flutie played for the Boston Boston College.
	And then he got dragged by the USFL.
	I want to say the Renegades.
	Don't remember exactly.
	But they were, yeah, they were good friends, along with Herschel Walker, unfortunately, who Trump ridiculously endorsed to be the Republican nominee for the Georgia Senate.
	Lost in an election that easily should have been won.
	But the point is, you know, Donald, of course, didn't didn't get the Buffalo Bills.
	I want to say Rush Limbaugh tried to be a minority owner also for a football NFL franchise.
	And it's funny.
	Think about this.
	What if he had been successful in getting that franchise, winning and getting the bills, and then having that authenticity or that then seat at the table, Mr. Hood, where he's one of the owners of one of the 32 NFL franchises.
	Basically, you're the elite of the elite in the United States if you own a franchise.
	You know, Dan Snyder just got forced out, basically, because he wasn't upholding the standards.
	He was the owner of the Washington Redskins.
	I will never call them by their buffoon name that they forced on him.
	The Commanders.
	Yeah, what the hell does that mean?
	But I mean, owning a franchise is an NFL franchise.
	I mean, my God, that's... Yeah, that's basically the highest.
	I mean, if you want to talk, that's about as close to being like a Roman aristocrat as you can be.
	I mean, the modern equivalent of, you know, gladiators dying for your entertainment is watching your celebrity athletes who all these people throw themselves before.
	I mean, that's about the heights of power and glory that you can get if you're a businessman.
	And why I bring this up is, what happens if he had been successful?
	He never runs for president.
	Yeah, I mean, that's, you wonder how much, because one of the things, somehow it all comes back to Trump, doesn't it?
	One of the things that they always say about him, Is that he was something of an outsider, you know, cause they'll say, well, his father was wealthy or something, but it's like, yeah, but they were, they were basically like successful real estate guys in Queens, you know, they weren't like New York old money.
	They were from the boroughs and he was always kind of forcing his way in.
	And he was in that as well.
	Yeah.
	And they, they basically, They never quite forgave him for that.
	And you also saw this with a lot of people will say this is what was driving and this is arguably his biggest flaw.
	The reason why he's in this mess he's in now is the whole point of running for president initially, because everybody was laughing at him.
	And we all remember the, uh, what was it?
	The correspondence dinner where the late night comedians were all making fun of him and he was just kind of sitting there stewing.
	And so it was basically like the greatest revenge tour of all time.
	And, The idea, I think, was that this would show his, like, media and celebrity friends that he is to be taken seriously.
	I mean, after all, he's the president of the United States, and yet somehow it didn't happen.
	And you could see this even when he was president, where He would make a nod on gun control or he would say something to some Democrat, even on amnesty, he would say some comment like, oh, we're going to do something that's going to make everybody really happy or something like that, because he still yearned for the respect and approval of these people.
	He still wanted to be accepted by the system.
	It goes back to Hanania's concept of acceptance.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it really does come back to this.
	I mean, the, The fatal flaw, and I guess this is sort of a good way to close it, and it's interesting that the conversation went in this direction, because this wouldn't have been something I would have thought at the beginning.
	The problem with Trump, I mean, the reason they're going to take his business away, the reason he has to be president, or they're just going to throw him in jail and throw his family in jail, and it doesn't matter what he does at this point or what he ever did, the reason he's in this position Is because he actually wasn't all the things that they accused him of being.
	He wasn't trying to overthrow the system.
	He wasn't trying to overturn American democracy.
	He wasn't even trying to be an outsider.
	He just wanted the people who were on the inside to give him respect.
	And he thought that he had played by all the rules of the system and won the game by their standard.
	And now the rules said that he gets to run the show, but that's not what the rules said.
	That's not how the rules actually work.
	And now he basically It's because of his moderation that he's lost everything.
	If he actually did any of the things they accused him of doing, he wouldn't be in this mess.
	And I'm not even talking about like January 6th or something like that.
	I think he would have won in 2020.
	I mean, if he had gone, if he had fought against deplatforming, if he had brought the bureaucracy under control, if he had purged all these people from day one and filled the administration with loyalists who would rather be killed than talk to the press, I mean, he wouldn't have been dealing with all these constant betrayals from day one.
	I mean, let's not forget Nikki Haley, who's now his biggest opponent in the Republican Party.
	That was somebody he hired.
	He gave a job.
	That's his responsibility.
	That's on him.
	And you could argue like, well, why wouldn't you just align totally with the system if you wanted respect, if you wanted to be on the inside?
	It's like, yeah, but...
	You don't, you're not really allowed to do that either.
	I mean, what we do, what we have in this country, and I don't think this is obviously true of professional sports, obviously, but it's true to some extent within certain limits, and those limits are getting narrower all the time.
	And I think it's definitely true when it comes to celebrity culture and even music.
	I mean, there's a reason that Nobody would say that Kanye West is, or he, whatever he goes by now, is marginal.
	He's still obviously famous and influential, but he's not a billionaire anymore.
	And he's not a billionaire because of the political statements he made.
	Taylor Swift is a billionaire.
	She's a billionaire because of the political decisions she made.
	Like, if she was still a country singer, she would not be a billionaire.
	She probably wouldn't even be famous anymore.
	Yeah, she supplanted the Nashville roots that she so Yeah, that she was so passionate about and now she's so, uh, not dismissive, but like you said, she hasn't mentioned anything about, um, the late Toby Keith who gave her her start.
	Yeah.
	And, and if she did like that would be, I mean, I'm sure at some point somebody in her circle or advisor or manager or whatever said like, Hey, he died.
	Should we say something?
	And at some point they probably were like, no.
	And, I'm trying to be as understanding of that as possible.
	It would probably, from a career perspective, it probably would be a bad thing for her to say something.
	Because now you're aligning with a homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, who supported lynching, or whatever they say about her.
	Here's the best thing to say about the 2023 NFL season that's culminating to an end with the upcoming Super Bowl between the Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers.
	Travis Kelsey's a white guy, he's in his mid-30s, and he's dating Arguably the most prominent female on the planet and Taylor Swift.
	Again, they're both white.
	They have, they have, they have a child that is going to be the biggest story on the planet for, for a year.
	She's pregnant.
	And, you know, unfortunately we do live in a celebrity driven culture, Mr. Hood.
	I, um, I'm shocked sometimes to be on TikTok and see Facebook reels and just see what people watch.
	And people are, influenced by those from the top down.
	Dude, it's grim.
	If you ever go on, like every once in a while, if you're trying to find something on, I don't know,
	YouTube, well, YouTube, I guess would be the best one, where you're not logged into a profile or something.
	So you go in sort of like YouTube vanilla, if I can call it that, like what the average person would get.
	Dude, when you just see like, this is what normal people are watching.
	I mean, it's, it's a nightmare.
	It's like when you go to a dentist office or something and you're in the waiting room and you have to see like what normal television is like.
	But that's the thing.
	They're going to say like, yeah.
	My algorithm here, here, here's my algorithm.
	It's Chris.
	Chris Hearn video, Mike O'Hearn videos, this big bodybuilder out in California, pickleball videos, girls wearing yoga pants doing workouts, white girls, and then Seinfeld or Home Improvement clips.
	Facebook has me pegged.
	But the thing is, the thing is- I don't have Facebook or TikTok, so I can't be held accountable to this.
	I don't have TikTok, but my point is this, there are going to be millions of young white girls who are seeing this romance play out.
	I hope, by the way, I am cheering for the 49ers, but it would be great to see the Chiefs win
	and Travis Kelsey propose to Taylor Swift.
	Yeah, I mean, this is the flip side of it, and this is sort of the more optimistic way to end it,
	is if you were trying to, because every once in a while we talk about kids,
	and we talk about families, and we talk about what you would want
	to be like a positive role model or something.
	.
	You can change the explicit political and social attitudes by changing the elite.
	And obviously, if we don't do that, we're going to lose anyway.
	But how we get there and whether it's possible and various strategies, that's a whole other conversation.
	But in terms of social behavior, that's actually a bit simpler and also a bit more subtle.
	And frankly, if these two Got engaged and had kids.
	That would probably be the single best thing you could do for the white birthrate in this country.
	You would actually probably get like a baby boom and you would probably get, you know, if you had the idea of just like a normal couple, successful couple getting married and having babies, like that's a good thing.
	I mean, you sort of, it's sort of like when you see these things where, uh, after Prince William and, uh, It Middleton got married and started having kids.
	And there were all these reports every time, oh, there would be a little baby boomer for that
	and the type of things that they would buy, the royal kids, like the toys or the clothes or whatever,
	like these things would have a surge in sales because everybody wanted to be like these people.
	And frankly, if you're going to be imitating something, this is probably the best thing that you wanna imitate.
	Now you could say, well, this is all a trick and she's gonna endorse Biden and whatever else,
	but the fact is the idea of celebrities aligning with the political left, that's been there for a long time.
	And that's, and as far as like losing kind of the upper middle class striver subculture or whether the right has fallen into sort of conspiracy theories or saying everything is an op, I think that can be summarized very simply and I can, without going on a huge tangent, I can just describe it real quick.
	The left is defined by a series of interlocking institutions that allows it to put forward a united narrative through media, through academia, and through government.
	And so what is considered to be truth and what is considered to be a quote-unquote conspiracy theory is essentially a product of who controls those institutions.
	I would consider white privilege to be a conspiracy theory.
	Like as a, if you were just like, what is it?
	Because what you're saying is that the reason there are group disparities is because whites through some mysterious thing that we can't actually track, rig institutions so that blacks automatically lose and somehow Asians automatically win because we're that crafty.
	Like that's, you have to believe that.
	That's what it is.
	And Indians.
	And Indians, yeah.
	And, and yeah.
	And also like Jews are oppressed, but they're also in charge.
	You know they're wealthier than like whites, but also they're still they don't actually count as white And it's anti-semitic if you say that like Israel is white supremacist and all this kind of stuff like you you have to believe all these things like at the same time even though they all like contradict each other and But that's not a conspiracy theory But if you say you know fake news in the obvious sense like you know Taylor Swift holding up a Trump sign in 2016 which never happened, but I remember seeing images like that all the time and Yeah, that is like a conspiracy theory, but that's because the right doesn't control these institutions, and so you kind of have to come up with your own narratives and your own explanations for things from the bottom up, which means you're going to get some more creative thought, but it also means you're going to get a lot more nonsense about lizard people running the world or whatever.
	You and I both know a lot of the individuals who were proponents of this PSYOP.
	Which is just ridiculous.
	These are clickbait guys on Twitter and on social media.
	Well, if I was just trying to make money, that's what I would say.
	If I was trying to make money, I'd be like, oh yeah, it's a site.
	I mean, I would just be giving conspiracy stuff all day because you don't get censored.
	Here's the thing.
	Here's the thing.
	I don't care about that.
	I actually enjoy watching football.
	There's a lot to take from it.
	And you know what?
	I'm very glad that Taylor Swift is not dating a black dude.
	She's dating a white guy whose brother is one of the most beloved players in the NFL.
	He's a center for the Eagles.
	He has three beautiful white daughters, a beautiful white wife.
	And I'm telling you, it will be an amazing, crowning achievement if Travis Kelsey proposes
	after the game or at some point in 2024.
	Who cares about the election?
	This is about the election, guys.
	Again, the NFL is the most incredibly marketed entity probably in the history of whatever
	the nascent concept of marketing is when it comes to a brand.
	Brand NFL is a great book.
	It's true.
	I mean, there's a reason why people are going to be flocking to their neighbor's house this coming Sunday to watch the game.
	A lot of them are going to watch the commercials.
	And that's a testament to the fact that the game, in some ways, takes a backseat to everything else that's ancillary,
	whether it's the halftime show, whether it's the commercials, etc., etc. It's a cultural
	phenomenon. And I'm going to end with this. My main point is this. Taylor Swift, if we're talking
	about this concept, she's probably the most, she is the most famous female on the planet.
	She's a white female who's dating a white guy.
	If they have children, they will be white.
	And there will be a lot of white girls out there who say they want to find their Travis Kelce, Kelsey.
	And it's fascinating to think about their ages, Mr. Hood, because Tim Tebow is 36.
	We were talking about that.
	And In a different timeline, perhaps he did stay in the NFL and became a hero.
	Could you imagine a better coupling than Tim Tebow?
	Seriously.
	But, but however, however, in our timeline that we live in, Tim Tebow got married a few years ago.
	Do you know who he married?
	Who he married?
	He married Miss South Africa 2017, a Afrikaaner.
	a AfriConner.
	There you go.
	Wish you an AfriConner.
	Happy ending after all.
	So there you go.
	You never know what's gonna happen.
	Well I think, yeah, one last thing I wanted to bring up with the Super Bowl and just with football generally.
	I think one of the big changes and certainly a sign of cultural decline as far as I'm concerned is the idea that white people get into fantasy teams now as opposed to being aligned with a particular team.
	I think that's one of the big changes is that With a franchise, even though, you know, as you said, they're all mercenaries and whatever else.
	I mean, at least there's like a theoretical connection with a city or where you're from or your family or whatever else.
	Whereas now it really is just sort of you create like a mathematical formula and a completely artificial team.
	And that's what you pay attention to with a football game.
	And one of the things that I think we're kind of dealing with I mean, just being white in this country, but I don't even think it's a white thing.
	I just think it's just an American thing at this point, is that people really feel totally atomized and deracinated and disconnected from everything.
	And so when you see people getting worked up about even the Super Bowl, I mean, like you, I have no particular, I'm certainly not against football.
	I mean, if somebody was like, hey, let's watch the Super Bowl, I'm going to do it, even though I'm not particularly obsessed with it.
	It almost seems like kind of desperate, the idea that we have to get worked up about this because like, this is all we have left.
	You know what I mean?
	Like these sort of artificial media spectacles, like that's all the country is now.
	And I don't know.
	I mean, if there is a happy ending, like you say, if it's somehow through media nonsense, it leads to like more people starting families.
	That may be the best we can hope for, barring, you know, the revolution that we all hope and pray for.
	No, I mean, again, you shouldn't live your life vicariously through the exploits of individuals who collectively represent a franchise who don't care about you.
	There's a great movie called Big Fan that you actually reviewed years ago about a white guy whose life is entirely centered around the New York Giants.
	Oh, big fan.
	Yeah.
	Um, and with that, the, uh, cause we, we got to wrap this up, but, uh, yeah, one, uh, I'll see if I can even post it in the links.
	One of the first articles I wrote years and years ago was about the movie, big fan, uh, Patton Oswalt.
	And I wrote that account occurrence might've even been geez, 2012, whenever it was and the equivalent then, but it was, it's an interesting comparison and a good note to close it on because that film was actually sort of left coded as They were comparing it to religion and at the time that was when you had the new atheism and everything else and it was very trendy to attack religion.
	It was very trendy to attack Christianity.
	And what was being done here was basically a way of attacking these guys as being sort of like Christians because they had this, this larger thing that they dedicated themselves to.
	And this was the danger of fandom and the danger of people being like looking to people who were strong or athletic or something like that.
	Like this was all very bad.
	Now it's been coded in a different way, and now it's being sold to us in a different way.
	And you do have to ask yourself, if you look at Big Fan, the guy in that film was portrayed as basically the ultimate loser having almost no identity himself but now we're essentially being told that if you're not like this guy that if you're not aligning with if you're not attached to the tv like now that's what makes you the loser it's the idea of of having a life separate from this stuff that's what makes you a freak that's what makes you weird because why aren't you watching the same tv as everyone else and watching celebrity a and celebrity b so
	If you're going to watch it this weekend, obviously have a good time.
	Don't drive drunk.
	Don't do anything stupid, but I'm certainly not going to be one of these people who tells you it's an op.
	It's just another media thing, and there are some good consequences, and there are some bad consequences, but do not live your life by what the media tells you.
	That's rule number one for surviving in the Kali Yuga.
	So thank you, Paul.
	Thank you everyone for joining us.

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