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May 22, 2024 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:27:07
20240522_Wed
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Hey everyone, welcome to View from the Right.
This is Gregory Hood, and I'm here with special guest Hunter Wallace, aka Brad Griffin, from Occidental Descent, who recently gave a really important speech, I think, talking about the return of paleoconservatism from the margins to the mainstream.
I gotta say, Brad, it's kind of a tough thing for us because we're of a certain generation where we remember what it was like being completely on the outskirts, where you basically had no voice whatsoever.
Within the mainstream.
And there was kind of this feeling, was there not?
I mean, unless I'm just remembering it wrong, where we were basically just talking to ourselves.
It seemed for like a decade.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
That was my whole first 10 years in the movement.
It was completely online.
It was on online forums and listening to radio shows.
And we were like just totally on the outside Looking in, it felt like.
You know, Patty Cannon was on MSNBC.
He wasn't in, I guess, you know, he was, he was on in the same sense, like, back then as you would have, like, Never Trumpers on MSNBC.
Yeah, he was there attacking Bush.
Yeah, he was there to, like, attack Bush and, you know, drain off support from Republicans for Democrats.
And he was in exile.
Uh, on the outs, and it was not just him.
I mean, Peter was doing, uh, I had gone from National Review to start V-Dare, and Sam Francis had been fired from the Washington Times, and he was editing Citizen Informer, which was my father-in-law's organization.
That's right.
And I remember my father-in-law telling us, you know, how back, even back in the 90s, you know, we had a lot, we used to have a lot of, like, um, state representatives would come and speak at council conferences.
And how is, you know, the generations change that just dried up.
And we were like completely marginalized.
It was a real low point, early 2000s.
But it was also, you know, when people like me and you were just discovering this.
And one of the reasons I wrote that speech is I still think, even today, people who got started like this really have this, I'm a dissident mentality.
I'm a complete outsider.
I'm an alternative.
railing against the establishment.
And the point of the speech was just to show like how much conditions on the ground have changed
and how our self-image doesn't exactly line up with reality now.
It's a strange place to be in.
Well, you and I have been involved in this movement for as hard as it is to say decades now.
And we've seen a lot of changes and everything, but what, for those listeners who aren't familiar
with the speech, why don't you talk a little bit about what the speech was and what your main points were?
I would say, you know, I started this, James had asked me to speak at the 20th anniversary
of the political cesspool.
And it really got me thinking, you know, 20 years.
And it was same way for some other speakers who were there.
Our minds instantly went back to those years in the early 2000s when everything was, you know,
so fringe and I had my free speech forum at Auburn.
And, you know, reading all the, it was just, it was a time I remember just devouring
and reading all kinds of columns and books are coming out or had recently come out that I was finding in the library.
And I was just absorbing all this information and that was building my worldview really.
And the point of, you know, Yeah, and the point of the speech is I really came committed.
I mean I really absorbed a lot of it, pretty much all of it really, in fact, from Pat, even the stuff being critical of Israel.
Pat was critical of Israel as well.
And he talked about how whites had lost their racial identity, their confidence in their civilization.
He talked about the collapse of Christianity.
Yeah, that was the foundational book.
It wasn't just all these issues.
It was the reality that in our lifetimes, we were going to become a minority in our own country.
And the whole demographics of the United States in the Western world were going to rapidly change.
And I mean, it wasn't called The Great Replacement back then, but that's what the book was about.
That and cultural collapse and decline.
And that was the hook, you know, that got me in.
And it's, you know, it's always been an ever-present reality.
I mean, me and you knew about it 20 years ago, but it's distressing and like, at the same time, satisfying that, you know, We get to say, you know, at least we get the satisfaction of saying we were right, right as the ship is sinking.
Although people are aware of it now, I mean, one of the big things that's really changed is that I think people were sort of in a weird spot generationally, because on the one hand, you have people who remember when these sorts of things were mainstream.
I mean, Peter Brimelow, Pappy Cannon, Uh, Sam Francis, all these figures were, even Jerry Taylor used to appear on C-SPAN and such.
To a certain extent, there was a, there was an ability for them to operate within the mainstream for a very long time.
And Pat Buchanan was the authentic voice of the conservative movement, even during the Reagan administration.
I mean, that was his job, his job.
I mean, after Nixon, and he was obviously one of the great Nixon loyalists.
After Nixon, his job for Reagan was basically to be the ambassador to the American conservative movement and keep them on side.
And then you have the candidacies in 1992, 1996, which seem absolutely prescient in retrospect, but unfortunately they were defeated.
George Bush, the first, essentially squandered the opportunity presented by the conservative movement's victory and then the victory of the Cold War.
And then you got Clinton.
And in the middle 90s, Peter Brimlow talks about this, you had this, this brief period after the end of the Cold War, where the American conservative movement was sort of looking for a new role for itself.
And you had this brief discussion of racial politics, you had the bell curve, which was discussed by perfectly mainstream publications, you had National Review discussing immigration, you had people talking about foreign policy, you had Pappy, not just Pappy Cannon, but also Russell Kirk, who's like the original Conservative movement trademark symbol, intellectual Russell Kirk condemning the neoconservatives.
And I, to quote, I think he said, not a few of them think Tel Aviv is the capital of the United States.
I mean, you had this real paleo conservative moment and it was just utterly crushed and you and I came in basically right after that.
And particularly after nine 11.
When you had the Iraq War, the second Iraq War, and that was what defined the conservative movement.
I mean, you remember that Bush was right song and all that kind of stuff?
I mean, like, that's how grim it was, guys.
Like, you younger guys coming in, people complain.
I mean, it was dark.
I remember, you know, Freedom Prize, and I remember people driving around in their SUVs with a little W sticker on the back at Auburn.
You even had a little salute.
You remember that?
The three-finger salute?
The W salute?
Yeah, the W salute.
I remember Bush landing on the aircraft carrier with the banner, Mission Accomplished, and everything.
And I just remember it spiraling out of control.
And that's one of the reasons I don't think I'm as blackfilled as some people.
Me and you, like, I mean, how old were you during the 90s, right?
Do you remember vividly the Baltics?
Not very much.
I mean, like, my first memory is, like, the Persian Gulf War, and that was just, like, playing in the schoolyard, Iraqis versus Americans, and I had no idea what was going on.
I'm sure one of your most vivid memories of the 90s is maybe the OJ.
OJ trial.
Yeah, yeah.
Los Angeles riots.
I remember seeing that, but I didn't really have political views in the 90s.
And also, I've heard the same thing from Ann Coulter.
She said that, you know, you guys don't realize how open and free it was in the 90s after the L.A.
riots.
There was a brief moment in the conservative movement where you could talk about race without having freedom.
It lasted for about 10 years.
And of course, I don't remember.
I remember just forming my political opinions based not so much on people like William F. Buckley, but Rich Lowry.
Jonah Goldberg, David Fromm, Charles Krauthammer.
Patriotic conservatives.
Patriotic conservatives.
The whole neocon crowd that's today that today they've camped out there.
They've decamped to the Bulwark and the Dispatch is where you can find Al Afundit.
David French and people like that.
Yeah, those people used to rule the roost.
Back in those days.
And what's weird to me, and that was another point of my speech, is that even today when all these people are in exile, like Bill Kristol is essentially a Biden Democrat at this point.
And those guys spend most of their time trying to convince people who used to be GOP establishment voters to support Joe Biden.
You know, even though Bill Kristol is really kind of in exile, in Congress he's still doing the same things.
Bill Kristol was – it was thrilled when Congress passed the $95 billion for Israel and Ukraine.
And so there's like a time lag there where people – a lot of people in Congress are in a totally different generation.
Nothing has changed.
Nothing has changed.
I mean the – Nothing has changed.
If you think of, and this is something, I don't want to date myself to the younger guys, because I try to keep it, stay on the vanguard of this stuff, but it's important to know where we're coming from and to understand where we're going.
And one of the important things to realize is that there was a time, and I think Paul Godfrey said this, where he said, Pat Buchanan is our voice to the outside world, our window to the outside world, because You had these debates between paleoconservatives and neoconservatives.
You had these fights over staffing within the conservative movement.
You had fights that are rarely obscure to younger people, but had a big impact on, you know, people older than us, like Mel Bradford, supposedly getting a job with the Reagan administration and then basically getting purged.
And then they, that was seen as like the moment when the neoconservatives sort of took over the rise of guys like The fall of people like Russell Kirk, Pat Buchanan being kicked out and relegated to MSNBC basically just to embarrass Bush.
And then once that was done, you know, they got rid of him from that too.
But where we were is there were people who were coming in, like younger people, people in college, especially after 9-11, you were still discussing things like the clash of civilizations.
You were still, you still had enough of an immigration battle with men like Tom Tancredo, who defeated George W. Bush's attempts to push amnesty.
So there was sort of a spirit among the grassroots, but it just didn't really have anywhere to go.
And so you, you had these debates on college campuses in the years afterward, where you would see this anti-war protest, for example, led by leftists.
And you would say, well, should we counter protest it, even though we agree that we shouldn't be in Iraq, but we don't like these people?
And there is it like an anti-left protest?
Or is it?
Or should we be talking about the substance of things?
And it was like, either way you lose.
And there wasn't really an outlet for a lot of this until Trump.
And I mean, I think this is one of the things that's really lost about the the rise of the alt-right.
And what happened in the years before the alt-right became a thing is that the initial issue was not really race.
It was foreign policy.
Oh, yeah.
Opposition to what was happening within the conservative movement.
I mean, that's what got I wrote something under the name Kevin DeAnna on the original alt-right website.
I think the only other first columnist was Richard Host, whoever that is.
Who's that guy?
Yeah, I have no idea.
He's some obscure vanguard intellectual.
The article that I wrote, I mean, it was mostly at the time, it was like Ron Paul type stuff about libertarian opposition to the Iraq war and opposition to the neoconservatives, war being the health of the state and all this kind of stuff.
The race stuff was definitely there, but it didn't, it didn't define us the same way.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And I mean, a crucial, you know, part of this genealogy of this history is the whole You know, in between Bush and in between Trump is how everyone got on board with the Ron Paul campaign, in both 2008 and 2012.
And a lot of people were involved in that.
One of the stories I remember sharing at our political sales poll conference was the time that Jamie Kelso took us on a tour of the Capitol and went in Ron Paul's office and swiveled around in his chair.
That was just one of the many memories I have that I shared and thought about this weekend.
It is strange how... Yeah, but you're absolutely right.
The Ray stuff was there.
It carried on.
Because, I mean, when Trump attacked Syria, and in hindsight, you know, it was just a few rockets.
That was when a lot of us broke for him for the first time.
Right, because we take this foreign policy stuff.
Everybody that got in for Trump means died that day.
I mean, few Americans, you know, prioritize, like, foreign policy as one of their top issues.
But that has always been, as long as I can remember, one of our top issues.
And that came a lot from Buchanan and the experience of The interesting thing about conservatism then, too, is because one of the big things now is moral breakdown.
I mean I think they lost the whole generation when they did that. And it's really taken like 15 years to catch up with
them.
The interesting thing about conservatism then too is because one of the big things now is moral breakdown. And
when I came in, the right was very much explicitly Christian, although I would say it was more evangelical
than good.
But, you know, you had the same thing, which you kind of have happening again now, where you had the paleo-conservatives converting to traditionalist Catholicism.
Like, that was a thing, you know, 20 years ago.
And then it kind of went away, and then it's coming back, you know.
But these sorts of things, these moral concerns, were at the top of the agenda years ago because, if you recall, at the time the big fight was about gay marriage.
George W. Bush cruised to re-election in 2004.
Oh, now did he?
Yeah, because he explicitly ran on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
Not to, like, oh, well, civil union.
No, we're gonna, enough of this.
Every state where it went up, God, defeated overwhelmingly.
The evangelicals turned out in record numbers.
And then just immediately afterward, it was just, F you.
Like, you're getting nothing.
No, it's social security reform.
We're immediately pivoting to the surge and social security privatization.
Social security privatization got crushed.
Oh, yes.
And that's another important point.
It reminds me of what you were talking about earlier.
When I was looking at the history of polling data and stuff, the Republican base is, boy, I mean, even 20 years ago it was anti-immigration, right?
Yep.
They stopped.
I mean, if it wasn't all these attempts to impose comprehensive immigration reform, the DREAM Act and stuff would have passed.
Right.
I mean, there was there was a huge there was a huge push for that amongst, you know, establishment Republicans, business Republicans.
But even back then, you know, we were Republican base was anti-immigration and wanted lower immigration levels.
And if anything, actually, like public opinion It's changed on that issue that the Democrats used to be a lot more reasonable.
Now, they're just totally insane on immigration.
Yeah, if you see the biggest change since the rise of Trump is the collapse of support for immigration enforcement among Republicans.
I mean, this is before our time, sort of, but during the Clinton administration, there was the famous Barbara Jordan Commission.
Now, Barbara Jordan was the first black woman to ever address to give the keynote address.
at the Democratic National Convention.
So this is about as progressive an icon as you can get.
And she shares this bipartisan thing on immigration and the recommendations it comes out with.
I mean, had they implemented these things, we just would not have an immigration problem.
It just wouldn't exist, right?
It's far more restrictionist than just about anything that's been proposed by anyone except Trump.
And of course, Trump didn't follow through on these things.
But And this was the Democrats putting this over.
It's just you had this group of politicians in both parties, Republicans who wanted their cheap labor, the Democrats who, I think the ethnic lobbies and the people who sort of were beginning to understand that if we just keep importing these people, we have a reliable voting base forever.
And that thwarted the majority of the American people in both parties.
But now, now the polarization is complete because There really is no support for mass immigration among the Republican base.
But at the same time, at this point, there's just zero support.
And it's far more monolithic among the Democrats for enforcing any immigration laws.
You know, illegal immigration, it's gone within the span of about a decade from illegal immigration doesn't exist or it's not a problem to it exists.
It's happening at a rapid pace and we need to do more of it because It makes things worse for white Americans, and that's the greatest moral good that exists.
I don't believe in God, I don't believe in country, I don't believe in morality, I don't even believe in the existence of objective moral principles, but I do believe the most important thing is to make life worse for white people and outnumber them, because that's what morality is all about.
Yes.
And that's far more shining and holy than any commandment that most priests or pastors have.
Oh, yes.
Anyway, where was I going with this?
One thing that – I don't know what else I want to say.
In the mid-2000s, I went back and I wanted to – I was writing my speech.
I really wanted to do a before and after to track how change has done through time.
And every survey I found was that maybe like 75% of Republicans were against mass immigration even back then.
One thing that's changed, though, is it's – I remember on Free Republic, they used to call people like us the border bots, in that it's become far more of a – people are always against immigration, but now they're even more against immigration, and it's then gone up to the number one issue.
Republicans in the past have been hostile to illegal immigration, but it hasn't been the absolute front burner top issue that gets them out to the polls.
It used to be things like guns, abortion, but now it's immigration.
And as for the Democrats, I went back and I was looking through these old Pew surveys.
And Pew will, every few years, they'll put out these surveys and it's like, it breaks down the parties by, you know, different factions.
And back in 2005, you know, this was the 20 year anniversary, so I wanted to look back then.
In the Pew surveys, there used to be like a huge block of conservative Democrats.
Who were anti-immigration.
And in the Pew survey, it describes how immigration is a wedge issue that really splits the Democrats.
And that was a huge, that's right there.
And that was when you get into the Obama years, that block of Democrats really broke off and then became independents.
And a lot of them became Trump voters.
Yeah.
I mean, even Obama had to say things like, As an American, it bothers me when I see people coming into the country and speaking Spanish, which is just an unimaginable comment now.
I mean, the question becomes what we would call, and I'm not sure we can argue about what does paleoconservatism really mean and all this kind of stuff, but bluntly, let's just call it Buchananism as just shorthand for people so they understand what we're talking about without getting into All these boring fights about stuff within the conservative movement that nobody... You're going to anger Johns in Iraq.
That's right.
But there's something to be said for Buchananism becoming the mainstream of the GOP now.
I mean, Buchanan himself gave an interview after Trump was elected where he said the ideas made it, but it didn't.
But to push back against it, someone, When you look at the votes for, and again, this could be a time lag, as you say, but when you look at the votes on, say, funding to Ukraine and foreign interventionism, there really hasn't been a majority within the GOP pushing back against that.
When it comes to Israel, of course, I mean, it's just monolithic.
There was a bill introduced, and I don't want to say this defines the whole GOP, but it was two Republicans, I think, that introduced a bill that would give That's the latest one.
They haven't even voted on that one yet.
And wasn't it a week ago?
They introduced one to defund the Department of Defense.
That one passed, I think.
Defund the Department of Defense unless it immediately released its aid to Israel.
Right, released the aid to Israel and everything else.
And this is happening at a time, and Trump himself, I mean, let's not try, there's occasionally this trend where it's almost like, oh, the czar doesn't know, where we say like, oh, the establishment GOP, but it's not Trump.
Trump, you know, Trump knows.
You know, Trump himself has shown some independence on the issue, has said some things.
You can find some comments that shows that he's not just totally simple minded on this.
At the end of the day, I mean, he's taken a stance of unlimited support for this.
And it's actually Biden who's trying and failing to walk a line where he simultaneously is like, well, I don't agree with everything they're doing, but also when it comes to anything that matters, he gives them everything they want.
It's not really Buchananism because you've got Certainly, the social conservative element is not there, as strong as it was under Pappy Cannon, who was, I mean, whatever one says about Pappy Cannon, I mean, this is a man who clearly believes in his religion, and as far as I can tell, practices it.
There aren't a lot, aside from a rambunctious youth, when he was like, part of an Irish working class clique in DC, I mean, there's not really a Any moral scandals attached to Pat Buchanan.
Donald Trump, a little bit different in terms of the way he's conducted himself over the years.
I mean, currently we're dealing with a trial because of payments, hush money payments to a porn star.
And that's like our leader.
And then you have immigration, where Trump is saying a lot of good things, but again, When he was there, we didn't get the law.
We didn't get the tax and remittances.
We didn't get even the executive order against birthright citizenship.
We didn't get a lot of the things that he promised in 2016.
And you and I were just totally done with him by 2019, 2020.
I think you and I were like two of the most like fanatically anti-Trump people.
Yeah, just totally black belt.
Potato Trump memes.
This guy's completely useless, stupid and cowardly.
Yeah.
To the point where in 2020 it just became like a almost nihilistic comedy act of him screaming in the bunker like Law and Order while Antifa was on the section.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, all he had to do was, you know, instead of doing a single blessed thing to stop everything that was happening across the country, he just kept tweeting Law and Order in all caps over and over again.
It's like, quick, someone tell them you're the president.
That's what's unusual about it.
There's one person in the country who can do something about it, and it's you.
What's interesting about Trump, in spite of him pretty much blowing his entire first term, doing all kinds of stupid things – you remember one of his last acts was pardoning all these criminals and black rappers?
Dead Black Boxer who supposedly… Running on the Platinum Plan.
And he really – but I mean the speech was about all this change in metapolitics.
And it's like he succeeded in spite of himself.
A lot of the stuff we wanted to happen, it didn't happen at first, but in the long run, now that you're in – I forget, what year is it?
You're eight, nine?
Since Trump came down the escalator.
A lot of that has come true.
The politics of immigration have changed.
But that's not – one of the hugest reasons for that is Biden has just let things go completely.
It's been such a radical shock.
It's still out of control.
There's just, I mean, the disaster of Biden on immigration was beyond my worst expectations.
No, no one could have expected, no one could have expected how bad he was on immigration.
Yeah, now conservatives are, you know, whereas they, the FCI used to be like great patriots and the military were our troops and everything and conservatives are just in lockstep in support of that.
Now there's like a huge suspicion about the military.
And skepticism about the military and, you know, outright hostility to the FBI.
This doesn't register.
This goes back to, you know, really, really the problem, in my opinion.
And that is, the people we have, not so much maybe Trump, but the people we have in Congress are just absolutely disconnected from, you know, where public opinion is at, where the priorities are at.
Like, for example, the Freedom Caucus.
In Congress, carrying down the size of the government – there are still people who are really fighting against the New Deal in Congress.
That's their thing.
They want to slash the size of government down, and a lot of that I agree with.
That's what animates the so-called far-right bloc in Congress.
It's really about the size of government.
It's really about Reaganism.
And then all these other – didn't have the Republican Party.
in the house, you know, voted for the Ukraine aid, roughly half.
And these people are just totally, and like there was an interview with Mitt Romney I
posted on my website, and he's like, oh, this is America first stuff.
This is the party of Reagan.
Now me and you, like, we don't even remember, how old were we when Reagan was in office?
I mean, you don't even really.
I consider myself practically ancient in this movement, and I was like five when he left
office.
I don't remember a single, there's not a single moment of my life where I remember Ronald
Reagan.
There was no point in my entire life where he was relevant to me.
But you've got to remember, for everyone older than us, their lives were completely shaped by the Cold War.
It was completely shaped by the ups and downs of the Reagan era.
There was this huge revolution.
It was the Reagan Revolution.
And by the time we get involved in politics in 2000, it was at the absolute peak.
And it's been like a slow decline of the last 20 years, although in Congress, it's all slagging.
Congress is a gerontocracy.
A lot of these guys are just absolutely ancient.
I mean, if you ever feel old, I mean, just take a look at – I mean, you see like Mitch McConnell.
Everybody gives a press conference and you're just like, what is happening?
Well, I'm sorry, who just clearly has no idea what's happening.
And I mean, you can barely read.
You can't even read the teleprompter.
I mean, this this debate between Biden and Trump, I mean, could be an absolute train wreck for everybody involved.
Even Trump.
I mean, Trump still you can tell that he still has that spark.
He's still funny.
He's still able to go off the cuff.
But yeah, as you say, he is losing it.
I mean, you look at him, you look at him in 2016 and what he was able to do with these just like hour long speeches were like every line was just an absolute banger.
But you even compare that to the 80s, when he's on talk shows discussing trade policy, and he's clearly way more on the ball.
And now we've just got nothing.
I mean, there's this palpable sense where nobody seems to have their hand on the wheel.
Nobody seems to be in control.
And I think a lot of it is by design.
I mean, there's this There's this real fear, and I've noticed this in the debate over Trump and the pitch that the left is preparing for the election, which I still think they might win, and we'll get into that in a bit, that the definition of dictatorship is any kind of strong personal leadership.
The reason Trump is a dictator is because he will put his own personal mark on policy, and that's bad.
Democracy is when Journalists and intelligence agencies and corporations just kind of do policy, and you go along with it, and they determine what's misinformation and what's not.
I mean, that was kind of a parody of it a few years ago, but now this seems to be what people actually think.
If you say, hey, 80% of people are opposed to this, we need to stop doing it.
They're like, well, that's dictatorship.
I mean it's funny when you look at like at El Salvador say where Bukele wins re-election
with like what 80% of the voters.
Something of a certain like oh he's a dictator.
He's an enemy of democracy.
What exactly does the word dictator mean in a sentence?
No one is saying that he's not popular.
Even his worst enemies say like he's got a majority but like somehow he's a dictator.
But if he wasn't a dictator you could just vote against him.
Dictator means people like us rule and people like you shut up.
There's this hunger for personal leadership on the right because we just kind of want to break the wheel and be done with this.
Yes, and I mean there used to not even be.
Even when Trump was president, in spite of all the spying on his campaign and the leaks and Russiagate and everything that was done to subvert his presidency, to get the policies they wanted, he would send out an executive order or something saying, we're going to withdraw the troops from Syria.
That was one classic example I remember.
And then Lindsey Graham and everybody went to work and totally won and got the day.
Totally imposed their view.
It was like that with Ukraine.
They were agitating for years to send in the weapons and start a conflagration there.
Trump got impeached over Ukraine.
Yeah, I mean the first impeachment was like totally forgotten.
Delaying an arm shipment or something like that.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Even though he had the perfect call with Zelensky, everybody says it's a perfect call.
The thing with the, you know, what they now call the deep state is that a lot of the – I've had this longtime theory about the way the conservative movement works is that they take What was then alt-right, and then you call it dissident right, although I hate that term, and a number of other things.
They take these ideas and they kind of cut off the edges and smooth it out and just make them dumber.
And then that becomes the conservative mainstream.
So a lot of, you take Sam Francis' ideas and you really kind of dumb them down and make them more conspiratorial.
And then you basically get like de Souza-ism.
And this is what's happened with this sort of idea of the deep state where People, I mean, Ron Paul was talking about this decades ago, and Ron Paul, let's not forget, I mean, this may be a shock to some younger libertarians, but for people who are reading the Ron Paul report, guys like Murray Rothbard and Sam Francis himself and people like that, kind of in that orbit, he very much came out of the right, out of the populist right.
He would talk about these sorts of things.
I don't think he would use the term deep state, but he would talk about these things, but they were in relation to specific policies and specific people who were pushing a specific agenda.
And now people in the Republicans, they talk about the deep state, but they talk about it the way people talk about the world economic forum.
It's just sort of this vague body of globalist elites.
And it's the fact that they're elites that are the problem.
And what they want is like, We haven't mentioned Alex Jones, but it's been translating to that Alex Jones kind of language and that's the way it's disseminated.
It's just sort of like vague conspiracy bait nonsense, and part of it I think is because…
STEPHAN KINSELLA We haven't mentioned Alex Jones, but it's been translating to that Alex Jones kind of language, and
that's the way it's disseminated.
It's not just with the deep state. It's with pretty much every white nationalist idea or concept or even…
It'll be diluted, it'll be taken out of context, diluted and distorted and retailed on a lot of these platforms and stuff by mainstream conservatives.
And it'll get out there, but in a dumb way that doesn't really connect and make sense.
It makes no sense.
You'll see things too.
Something like you'll see.
All right, let's let's take a very recent example.
So Biden gave a speech to, I think, a historically black college.
And, of course, these by itself are a complete joke.
The standards are laughable.
It's just like a money sink like you wouldn't believe.
But he gets up there and he gives the usual speech about how, oh, You know, these Republicans want to, they hate you and they want to make sure you don't succeed and that the law doesn't treat you equal.
When the very fact that this institution even exists shows that like their entire lives are essentially a gift to them from us out of misplaced pity.
But he says this to these people and the response is not from mainstream conservatives is not, look, this is just anti-white or look, he's inciting hatred against white people.
The response is, Oh, well, the elite's trying to divide us.
We're all Americans, but they're trying to divide us because they know that if whites and blacks unite against the elite, it's over for them.
What are you talking about?
And who is us in this sentence?
And certainly, a lot of people would say this about, I mean, even people would say this about some of the stuff I've written or stuff that Jared says or something like that, where you'll talk about the elite, you'll talk about they, you'll talk about whoever, and who's they?
Who's the elite?
What exactly do they want?
And there's always this tension about, A, how far you can go without being totally deplatformed, but also because what actually is the message?
Like, what is it that you're trying to accomplish?
For me, and we can get into our own divide here in a second, I've always said, you know, I just claim the title white nationalist at this point.
They're like, well, what do you want?
They'd be like, I want a state.
That puts the survival and upward development of the white race as the primary objective.
Like, that's what I want.
Everything I do is designed toward that end.
Race comes first.
Full stop.
Martin Luther King was a white nationalist at this point.
Martin Luther King was a white nationalist at this point.
Just like racists and now anti-Semite white nationalists who have been stretched wide enough.
Yeah, now it's anything.
I believe that was from...
Yeah, anything.
I mean, I'm a white nationalist in the sense I want nationalism for whites, but the way it's actually used means just about anything at this point.
Yeah, stuff that Bill Clinton and Al Gore were championing in the mid-2000s, that's like hardcore far-right white nationalism.
Right.
The Defense of Marriage Act.
You know, Bill Clinton, I think, didn't he ban – or didn't he sign that thing where he banned pornography?
He was a banner.
But Bill Clinton was a Christian nationalist.
He banned pornography, right?
Yeah, there were some steps toward that if you look at some of the early regulations about the Internet.
I mean, a lot of things that were sold for regulation of the Internet were, you know, they were covered in sort of a social conservative guise.
I mean, let's not forget the reason we had warning labels on, I don't know if they still do, on CDs and stuff was because of Tipper Gore, who was the wife of his vice president, then wife of his vice president.
They're divorced now.
But the point is that if you ask, what is the objective?
I mean, I think the goal is just get clicks, get eyeballs, make money.
Like what do they actually want?
If you ask them the question, someone could hypothetically ask me, like what is your goal?
What do you actually want?
I mean, I think the goal is just get clicks, get eyeballs, make money.
Yes.
And it doesn't go any farther than that.
I mean, a classic example of this being Matt Walsh.
Matt Walsh will go… He's probably one of the better ones, sadly.
He's one of the better ones.
He's one of the better ones, and he'll go really far.
He will come out and criticize Israel on the Daily Wire platform, which has got to be an issue.
He'll talk explicitly about the stupidity of the anti-white stuff.
And all that is great, and you know, it's great because we don't have a huge platform like that.
We're not, so I mean, it's better to have him get it out there than us.
But yeah, I mean, a lot of it is just, you know, you get the insense.
It's really about, he knows this is what gets engagement.
This is what gets engagement on X. And not only that, but I mean, they're really just throwing out the red meat like they've always done, and that's the kind of red meat people And it's fine as long as it's fine.
And you can give people all the red meat in the world and keep them on side and keep them happy.
And at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if Congress is off doing this complete different agenda with 30 votes on Israel in the span of two months.
And every day there's a new bill that's proposed or introduced.
The latest is about the International Criminal Court.
House Republicans already got a legislative response to that.
It's amazing how responsive they are.
Right, you're right.
It's amazing how responsive they are to that one constituency.
He doesn't even vote for them.
Yes.
Yes.
And I mean, I'm kind of wondering even about like donors and stuff.
I mean, one of the big things that we've seen, I mean, I don't want to get into this too much.
There's a couple of things I want to talk about, but yeah.
One of the things we saw with the universities, for example, certainly with Ivy League, is you remember when all of a sudden, in October, you saw the protests on campus, and yes, obviously the campus are motivated by anti-white stuff.
I mean, they just consider the Israelis white, and that's what's driving a lot of, yeah, driving all of this.
We actually know a lot of the campus protesters, like personally.
There was one in Charlottesville.
It was the one in Charlottesville, and it was like really the same people like who, you know, were against us.
It's the same people we've been dealing with for decades.
And so the idea that this meme of, oh, well, they're, you know, the new Nazis motivated by anti-Semitism.
I mean, it's just it's the same type of people who think America should be renamed like Turtle Island or something like that.
But at the same time, there's also no follow up with the idea that They're actually going to get rid of DEI because you remember there were all these people, people well connected in the conservative movement who were like, this is our opportunity.
This is what we're going to do.
This is how we get the big donors.
And this is how we get a bunch of people who normally don't take our side to take our side.
We'll get rid of DEI.
That did not happen.
All that happened was a specific carve out for Israel.
And there was, there's been no change.
None of these things have been repealed.
I think there might have been one small thing in North Carolina, but we'll see how that goes.
That may be exception approves the rule, but I admit I'll follow up on that.
But you haven't seen a real push.
I remember Richard Hanania predicted that there would be a big shift in the Jewish vote in 2024.
I don't think that's true.
Now, I could be wrong.
I mean, you know, it's up in the air.
I could be wrong.
I don't think that's going to happen, and the reason I don't think that's going to happen is because when you see a lot of the pro-Israel, old-school Democrats and liberal activists, none of them are changing their mind on Trump.
They're just doubling down on how he's the coming of the Fourth Reich.
And Trump himself, he expresses his views in a way that's almost designed to get the The big feature in the New Republic.
The New Republic?
Oh, that cover is so harsh.
That cover is so harsh, dude.
But it is my background.
It's like Trump with a Hitler mustache, and it's like, is this fascism?
Did fascism happen here?
They act like he wasn't president before.
Seriously guys, we can't let this guy get his hands on the nuclear cult.
He was already president and you're fine.
If anything, that's an argument for people like us not supporting him.
He's already been in power, he didn't do anything.
I'll turn on MSNBC and it'll be Nicole Wallace saying, am I going to be rounded up?
Am I going to be sent to a camp when Trump ends democracy?
You're not even going to lose your job.
I mean, it's more likely that People who work for a second Trump administration won't be allowed on TV, then you'll lose your job.
They'll immediately pivot to the midterms and the anti-Trump backlash.
Of course, of course.
How many elections have we been through when democracy itself was on the ballot and was on the verge of death?
I mean, that was midterms.
The exact same stuff.
2020, 2018.
Oh, yeah.
Remember Naomi Klein doing the, whatever, 13 signs of fascism or something?
And, like, 10 of them already happened!
I mean, they did the exact same stuff with George W. Bush.
They did the exact same thing about Christian fascism.
They did the exact Christo-fascism and all this kind of stuff.
Christo-fascism, yeah.
Yeah, they did the exact same thing after the gay marriage ban about how we were going to go into a theocracy.
Kevin Phillips?
The Pope goes on television and says, you know, America must welcome all these migrants and stuff.
He basically became a libtard and started writing about Christian theocracy and how they were a secret group of
Christians who were running America and all this stuff.
None of this stuff has happened. We have trained kids being indoctrinated in public schools.
The pope goes on television and says America must welcome all these migrants and stuff.
He also floated the idea that people are fundamentally good.
That's a new one coming. That's a new one.
It's like, you know, Christians don't even understand Christianity anymore.
Well, I think as somebody who was raised Catholic, and this is as an aside, but even as somebody who was raised Catholic, I think Calvin had it right when he talked about total depravity.
But also the idea that, well, you know, the idea that people are inherently good and the
idea that human nature is perfectible, I mean, that's like a core premise of liberalism.
That was a really big turning point.
We could get into a whole – we could just sprig out on history if we wanted to.
We probably will do that.
Maybe we'll do a separate podcast just sprigging out on history.
But real quick, I want to return to where we started, the idea of Buchanan versus Trump.
I mean, the lack of follow through with Trump and Buchanan.
Because with Buchanan, let's assume in some old history where Buchanan somehow, maybe not in 92, but maybe in 96, where he did win New Hampshire and there was some real motivation, there was some real momentum, and there were bad decisions that cost him everything.
But let's say, you know, Buchanan wins in 96.
You are going to see the attention to policy.
He's smart enough to know how the game is played.
He understands policy.
He has decades of political experience.
He has good connections.
This is somebody who could have actually implemented things.
Trump is not really interested in governing.
He delegates, that's why his staffing decisions are so important and also why they were such a disaster in his first term.
We'll see if he's learned anything.
But you're not seeing any, you're seeing public, it's almost like a critique of the entire idea, beloved of so many in our community, although I hate that word, of metapolitical change.
Because the metapolitical change has taken place But there hasn't been any actual political change.
And Trump himself even says things, and this is the point I wanted to make about his stance on Israel.
I mean, it's so funny.
He'll say these things to American Jews that he's trying to win the support of.
And he does it in such a way that it's almost like calculated to defend him.
Like there were these Jewish guys who were talking to him outside, I guess, you know,
Palm Beach or wherever.
He repeatedly accuses Jews of not being loyal to Israel.
Well, yeah.
I mean, well, he'll say something like, listen, I gave you guys like everything you could
want on the West Bank and you don't support me.
What do you do?
Or he'll say things like, if you don't support, if you don't support me, you don't support
Israel and you need to have your head checked because you're bad Jews.
It's like you're basically like taking the things that they call anti-Semitic tropes,
accepting them as true and then restating them publicly to accuse them of being traitors
if they don't support you.
Israel used to totally own the Congress.
You dropped the ball.
Even if all these things are true, you're not going to win them over by saying this.
Right.
I mean, I mean, I mean, this is why I think he gets them angry.
You know, a lot of the people who aren't paper should be having his back because of if you looked at something like, say, if your number one issue, say, was Israel.
Let's take Bill.
Let's make it specific.
Bill Ackman.
I hope I'm pronouncing his right name correctly.
But he's a major.
I mean, he's Jewish, major financier to financial donor to Democrats historically, although he showed some independence in recent years.
But he was a big, I believe he was a donor to Harvard.
And he was one of the leading guys who was criticizing Harvard after the recent protests.
And basically, you know, he's shocked, shocked that he was supporting all this anti-white stuff.
Now, to his credit, he is also one of the very few who said anti-white.
He didn't just say, oh, it's anti-Jewish.
Yeah, he didn't just say that.
He did say DEI is anti-white.
Now granted, he only said it now, but he did say it.
Then he gets one of the main guys and getting Harvard's president replaced on the Israel issue.
He says he's going to do all these other things.
But then when it comes to presidential politics, he still just calls himself an independent.
He still can't bring himself to support Trump.
And he gave like a million dollars to some Democratic congressman no one's ever heard of as a challenge to Biden, which basically is just, you know, I would rather have I would rather take a million dollars and light it on fire.
Then support this gross Donald Trump guy.
And I think that's basically the typical position.
I don't, I don't think you're not going to get these people.
You're not going to get like Chuck Schumer to like change his mind or something like it.
It's just not going to happen.
And it doesn't matter what Biden does on Israel.
I don't, I think, and this policy is, I mean, that's even an even more dramatic example.
I mean, we're going to talk about the history of paleoconservatism and The right, but like support for Israel on the left is – I mean, it's not even half the party at this point, I think.
It's like plunged to like – No, they've completely lost.
They've completely lost the younger generations, and that's because the younger generations are not white.
They're just not white.
Yeah, it's been plunged into like the 30s and 40s, and you know, there's still – it's really – the dynamics are the same on the other side, even though the meta-politics has changed, the politics hasn't changed, because you know, you're still getting the same salavishly pro-Israel policy.
Did you see that the other day?
When I was on the Wednesday conference, it was a big – article in the Washington Post, and it was about how some big Jewish pro-Israel donors in the New York City had pretty much told Eric Adams he had to send in the police to crush the protesters at Columbia.
And then, of course, the ADL was outraged about it.
How dare you spread tropes?
But I mean, that's how politics is ruled.
On the Democrat side.
It doesn't really matter what public opinion thinks.
The thing that matters is who's writing the check.
Yeah, who's got the check.
Who's taking care of people in retirement, you know?
Right.
This is one of the big problems for us on the dissident – god, I hate that term, dissident right.
Let's just say the real right.
There is – I mean certainly if you're on X, certainly if you look at a lot of the people who have been – I'm getting a lot of traffic.
I mean, obviously Nick Fuentes and the Gropers, but like there's a lot of other people too.
And you certainly see even guys from the Daily Wire kind of tacking against Israel a little bit, but not much, but some, but the divide is not actually there.
If you break into the polling data and the Democrats, it's a real divide and you see Biden doing, I mean, what do they say about politics?
If you're in the middle of the road, you're going to get run over.
I mean, Biden is dead in the water on this issue because no matter what he does, he's going to get everyone upset at him.
And the Democratic Party, like this is what an actual wedge issue looks like.
It splits the Democrats right down the middle.
He is going against the wishes of half the party on this.
Yeah, no matter what he does.
And he's kind of doing this.
And when he does do something designed to make everybody happy, It just makes everyone mad.
So like the one day he, he gives a speech talking about, I think he declared like a new month or something for Jewish Americans and talking about how bad the Holocaust was.
And then like the very next day he holds up the weapon ship in Israel.
So of course, you know, all the same people who normally would have his back are just screaming at him, calling him a Nazi.
And of course it also means that, All this civil rights stuff he had said the day before, it looks insincere.
And then when he kind of backs up from that a little bit and says nice things about Israel, now he's genocide Joe again, and he's doing all these things.
The Republican Party, in contrast, in terms of the politicians, is utterly monolithic on Israel.
And as much as you see younger people divided, maybe, maybe not as much as Democrats, but divided on the Israel issue.
The party itself is totally united, and the same sorts of people, again, a younger version of Pappy Cannon, if you want to call it that, you're sort of giving a choice that wasn't really there for us 20 years ago, which is, okay, what's more important to you?
Israel or demographic change?
Because if you I'm not saying that Biden is really all that different than Trump when it comes to foreign policy on this specific thing.
And I'm not saying that Trump is slavishly devoted to the neoconservative agenda because Trump has said some things that show some independence on the issue.
It could always happen.
Trump could do anything.
You know, Trump sees everything and, you know, it's all personal, so like he's totally offended that Netanyahu, you know, congratulated Biden on the night that, you know, the election was stolen, and he's never forgotten that.
Yeah, right, right, right.
So it totally could be some kind of personal, some kind of personal, you know, I can totally see that happening.
But this is the question, is if you have to, and I'm not saying it's totally this simplistic in this coming election, but If you have to have the choice between prioritizing foreign policy or immigration as an issue, what do you pick?
And just to put my cards on the table, I mean, I'm always going to prioritize the latter.
I mean, the reason I'm mad at a lot of things that happened is because of its effect on what's happening in this country.
And I want to win here before we can do anything anywhere else or not do it.
Right, right.
I mean, I totally, I totally agree.
I'm on the same side of the issue.
First of all, like, you know, we got to remember here that, you know, Trump is not the president.
Biden is the president.
And if people, a lot of people think, oh, well, you know, Trump would be worse than Biden on Israel.
But, you know, by the time, like, let's assume Trump wins.
Let's assume he's, like, sworn into office.
This is how long from now?
Six, seven, eight months?
Like, yeah, well over half a year.
How many people in Gaza are going to be, if starved to death and die from famine by then?
I think a lot of people there will just be completely dead.
And how many of the rest will be shipped to Europe and America as refugees?
Yeah, on the way to... I mean, that's got to be the grand compromise.
That might, yeah.
I mean, the plan is already to, like, ship them, to get them out of Gaza.
And at least, like, the politics on the Republican side would cut against, you know, bringing all the Palestinians here as refugees.
Because that might be, like, something actually really... if that was really made an effort, you know.
To import all the Palestinians to, say, Tennessee or Michigan.
That would really be a wedge issue for Republicans.
Now, the politics of the issue on the Republican side is different.
I've looked at this, and it was not as bad as I thought.
It is something like, you know, three-quarters of Republicans are, like, really pro-Israel.
A quarter to, like, a third are not.
Like, a third of Republicans will say that they're less likely to vote for someone if they are strongly And that's heavily related to age. Older people in general
on both the left and the right, Democrats and Republicans, older people in general are just very, very, very pro-Israel.
And on the Republican side, it's like people are mildly pro-Israel if they're younger or they don't care. On the Democrat side,
they're generally anti-Israel.
So, I mean, there's a lot going on, but we shouldn't kid ourselves that the way people talk about this issue online,
particularly on the right, Yeah, well, everywhere else too.
I mean, Rumble and 4chan and whatever forums and free speech OACs are left.
I mean, the reason you have this sea change against it, it is at the end of the day, just anti-white.
I mean, they regard Israel as a European settler state and therefore it's illegitimate.
I would say that's not true, and we could argue about all day why that's not true, but it also doesn't matter because I'm not the chair of Ethnic Studies at Yale or whatever else.
I mean, this is what's being pushed, and this is what people are aping.
And this is, while it hasn't quite translated over to the full media yet, it will.
I mean, that's what the media will be in 10 years.
So, we are confronting something that It's very ominous, not so much about this particular issue in a way.
I mean, we should be kind of grateful that it's happening on this issue because it allows people to wake up.
We're talking about this issue because most – if I had to write down issues… Immigration, pretty much everyone agrees now.
Political correctness, everyone agrees.
Everyone agrees.
Pretty much everyone agrees about the anti-white stuff, even though they would style themselves as... You know how the National Review crowd will be anti-anti-Trump?
Well, conservatives will be like, I'm a civic nationalist, but I'm anti-anti-white.
I'm not pro-white.
That's the nuance on...
That issue.
Trade policy, another paleo-conservative issue.
Biden does industrial policy.
Biden imposes tariffs on China.
So that's actually the one issue where there's actually a surprising consensus.
The infrastructure bill got passed.
Yeah, although that bill was loaded with DEI.
Loaded with all kinds of... Yeah, that's another thing.
Like, Biden will build infrastructure, but it'll be stuff about, like, you know, solar plants, and it'll be attached to all this DEI nonsense.
That's his idea of industrial policy.
Well, none of these things are even being built.
I mean, if you look at the... Right, yeah.
One of the most important things, the superconductors that are... Or, superconductors.
Semiconductors.
Semiconductors that are being built.
In Arizona.
They're not being built because Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, TSM, which is such an important company that's almost like a geostrategic focal point because, you know, Taiwan obviously is right there and we would have to do something about it just simply for that reason.
The way you get around that is get someone to move the factories here in America, but they can't because the factories are come loaded with all these DEI requirements and it turns out that, you know, ethnic study graduates can't put semiconductors together.
That's the issue.
You just don't get to have the factories.
And also, I mean, this is where I agree with Orrin McIntyre, as opposed to Academic Agent.
These two commentators have kind of a debate about whether the woke, so to speak, will be put away because wokeness could undermine the American empire and eventually you have to do serious things.
I agree with Orrin.
I think that they can't put the brakes on this.
They can't pull out of this thing.
Too many people are reliant on the jobs and patronage and the ideology for their sense of identity and self-importance.
Too many people are reliant on these things for them to stop pushing this stuff.
It's similar to when you read about the late Byzantine Empire, the late Western Roman Empire, where you have these corrupt elites that are so self-interested that things are collapsing all around them and they just can't even look up.
to see what's going on.
Like, there was that one story of the Roman Emperor, I can't even remember which one because he was so ineffectual, where he was told that Rome had fallen, and he freaked out because Rome was the name of one of his favorite chickens.
Yeah.
The Emperor Honorius.
Yeah, right.
Honorius.
Yeah, you're right.
Honorius.
Yeah, Honorius.
Yeah.
And then when he told it was said, he was like, oh, that's fine.
It doesn't matter.
That's what it is.
Yeah.
And We're sort of seeing how that plays out, because you have people who are so tied in and dependent on this artificial system of power and privilege and set-asides that, on paper, it should not be capable of continuing forever.
And this was sort of what Buchanan was talking about, not just in Death of the West, but Suicide of a Superpower, where he basically said, you know, is this whole thing going to come apart?
And I think he gave 2025.
Yeah, that was the subtitle of one of his books, Will America Last Until 2025.
I think that the counterpoint is there is a lot of ruin in the nation, as Adam Smith said, or there's much ruin in the nation.
There's so much wealth, and America's ability to generate wealth, especially regard vis-a-vis Europe, which is just in a death spiral, is so extraordinary that There's enough that they can just skim off the top for a really, really long time.
And particularly because people point to BRICS or, you know, there's this emerging geopolitical rivalry.
I mean, China is in a tailspin itself.
I mean, it's certainly the it doesn't look nearly as fearsome or competent as it did even a couple of years ago.
Russia's completely full of problems.
Iran is not exactly anyone's idea of a dynamic power.
And bricks isn't even a real thing.
It's a meme.
I mean, there's no there's no alliance where India and China are going to be on the same side.
That's meaningful.
And South Africa is not a leading power.
Sorry.
It's just cruising on like the remnants of the white population that create anything worse than that disastrous country.
So it's not that America is doing well, but It's just the rest of the world is so bad.
I mean, this is just kind of what it looks like when you have global dysgenics.
Yes.
I mean, it's about race.
I think, in my opinion, the way it'll play out is we are very deep into like, I would say, like a crisis period, something like the 20s, 30s, something like the civil war era.
And something could happen, like, that could bring the crisis to us.
Let's suppose, like, the Trump trial.
Like a John Brown style raid type thing?
Yeah, I mean, the system really did fall apart.
And it was, you know, things were polarized to two sides.
And then one side won and imposed its vision on the country.
And then there's a long period of stability afterwards.
Or like, for example, or back in the 30s, you know, when the things were, you know, pretty, I mean, the Republicans had, you know, ruled the country since the war between the states.
And then there was, you know, a crisis like the Depression that was so discrediting that the GOP essentially collapsed.
And it took, like, decades to, like, come back.
I mean, Republicans didn't, you know, control Congress until, what, the 90s?
Yeah, I think I think something like that could happen.
The polarization could just get so bad.
I mean, this could happen if Trump wins.
If Trump wins and the Libs go gloves off and then Trump goes full authoritarian or attempts to on, say, the FBI or I mean, things could.
And who do you think is vice president?
You know, that's that's the big thing, because I mean, there's a there's a big difference between I don't even know.
I can't even think of a person who's been mentioned.
But then again, every time they say, like, oh, he's considering so-and-so, it turns out to be a false alarm.
So I don't even want to speculate.
We've had plenty of periods with, like, the system, the existing order is broken down.
And that created the space for, like, a new order to be imposed.
And then, like, that settled things.
And the country moved on.
Whereas, you know, at the time, it might have been like, this is the end.
It's all over.
Yeah, people can get along with that.
Somehow like we managed to get through it, that's what I think my lifetime is going to be.
Yeah, there'll be a crisis, there'll be a conflict.
We better make sure we win that conflict because whatever the conflict imposes, that will be the new order.
With that, as we wrap this up, I want to just kind of talk a little bit about some of the ideas that you've been talking about and your vision for things.
Now I've said, you know, I'm a white nationalist, obviously.
Obviously, I'm not a Christian nationalist, although I'd say I'm far more sympathetic to that project, I think, than most, in terms of you look at the moral breakdown of society, and it's like, well, you know, I don't think the problem with America is that we have too much Christianity.
We have too much moral repression.
Like, that's not the issue that we're dealing with, guys.
It's not my bag.
But what would you say – but you've talked a lot more about this.
I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you would consider yourself more a Southern nationalist than a white nationalist, correct?
I mean, what would you say is the biggest difference?
That's one of the things I've touched upon on my little review of the conference.
I'm not even really sure what label.
I'm kind of like over labels at this point, because in my opinion, labels can, in one sense, be very constricting and limiting, and also bad people can come along and hijack a label and ruin it.
I think we're calling ourselves the dissident right now, even though a lot of the stuff we believe is completely mainstream.
And the idea of a dissident right, you know, kind of puts us in this permanent, inside, it kind of feels like, you know, people, long after the Beatles became, yeah, long after the Beatles became, like, you know, the biggest band in the world, people, you know, listen, they still believe they're outsiders.
Right.
Anyway, I think a big challenge for us is, you know, overcoming A lot of this, you know, mental posture of the last 20 years and growing and realizing that, you know, we are whatever the American right is today.
We're not really, you know, on the fringes of it anymore.
We're right in the middle of it.
Yeah.
And so yeah, I mean, Southern National, you know, I think about these labels in like, I always find them unsatisfying.
First of all, like Southern Nationalism, right?
It would be great if the South left the Union.
Is that realistically likely to happen?
Number one, no.
Is that the divide in our country?
Is it the same divide as in the war between the states?
Obviously not, right?
White nationalism, the big problem with that is, you know, will whites ever get together and move to a location like the Northwest?
No.
We remember all the old vanguard strategies for that.
The problem with white nationalism is white people.
If a civil war actually breaks out, It'll be mainly between white people who hate each other.
Yeah.
Not so much wherever they came from.
Yeah.
I mean, the prospects of like a general race war, I think, are rapidly diminishing.
It's more of a class, cultural, you know, that the hate, you know, there was a really interesting study in Christian nationalism.
Yeah.
Oh, go ahead.
In Christian nationalism, the problem is it's really the same thing.
You know, people want to have like a Christian nation.
The only problem with it is, you know, Who's the leader of this thing?
I mean, if you look at the polls for, say, I mean, obviously the one I'm most familiar with would be Roman Catholics, but you look at the polls for this.
Very few Catholics go along with church teaching on anything.
And you look at the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops and they're just entirely worthless.
I mean, they're nothing on any of this stuff.
And people were like, oh, well, if we had like a Catholic leader, it's like Joe Biden's Catholic.
We never hear the end of what a faithful Catholic he is, and he supports abortion to the hilt, and nobody's denying him communion, so what does any of this mean?
Even with the Evangelicals who support Christian activism, they also support Zionism, a huge faction of them.
They might actually have absolutely great views on immigration, but then they might be totally out for lunch.
Wacky, you know, the rapture's about to begin, that kind of stuff.
Right, right.
Well, certainly, I mean, having worked for years at WND, I can tell you stories about that.
And, you know, whatever people may say about the Roman, the state of the Roman Catholic Church, or the Orthodox, or the, a lot of the evangelicals, I mean, I think the biggest story of the last century, in many ways, is just the utter disintegration of mainline Protestantism Which, that was what defined the country.
I mean, that's what American religion was.
And you think about these denominations like, say, Methodism or something like that, and you kind of, well, it's kind of wimpy or whatever.
You go back to, like, McKinley or something, where after he was shot, I mean, the last thing he did was talk about his faith and sing a hymn as he died, and he was a mainline Protestant.
All these guys, even in the North and South, but even in the North, These guys who were marching with guns, they weren't all just like Puritans.
They were like descendants of Puritans, I mean.
I mean, a lot of these guys were just kind of like mainline Protestants who fervently believed in God and fervently believed in what they were doing, and they were the ones who really built the country, and it's just gone.
Just as an entire subculture, just wiped out.
Yeah, I can read books, and one of the books I reviewed, I think it's called End of American Innocence or something, It talks about how culturally, even around 1910, around the time the Titanic sank, Americans had a universally agreed what morality meant.
It was true, objective, it was obvious, people were idealistic, right?
And that is just completely gone now.
It's not here.
But yeah, as for labels and stuff, any label you can pick is really unsatisfying.
There's a lot of stuff that was discarded for a good reason.
When you're an alternative, as Matt Parrott said once upon a time, there's a lot of stuff that was discarded for a
good reason.
And just because you've been untreated unfairly doesn't mean that everyone that has been discarded doesn't deserve
what they got.
That's one lesson we learned.
And also the idea of dissidence.
I mean, at this point, there's a real question about whether we should just be considered the right.
And I think there's going to be a major reckoning.
I'll close with this as the last topic.
There's going to be a major reckoning if Trump loses.
I think if Trump wins, obviously, I mean, let's just get ahead of this now, there's obviously going to be a huge amount of disappointments.
I'm sure he's going to rip our hearts out with whoever he picks for Vice President Tim Scott.
Oh yeah, we take that for granted.
It's better not to have any illusions about this.
Yeah, right.
Because when you have illusions, you can just get very bitter, and then that bitterness can lead a lot of people to surprising places, which you don't even understand.
Yeah, well, I mean, if you want to feel optimistic, you can read the New Republic cover and fantasize about how awesome it's going to be.
But to to encourage my liberal journalist friends, I don't think you have to worry about any of that.
None of that's going to happen.
But that said, I do think that if he does win, it will be a repudiation of the system in a lot of ways.
I mean, you'll you'll essentially have an electoral ratification of January 6th, which they were trying to promote as like a new Nuremberg fire or something or a new Reichstag fire or something like that.
And they certainly it would be a slap in the face to all these efforts to drag him through the courts and everything else.
Uh, it would be a repudiation of Biden on immigration.
It would be repudiation.
It would show that the, it would split the Democratic coalition wide open on foreign policy, because I think the Israel fight would get a lot more intense really fast.
That would be the obvious reason they lost.
Yeah.
No, I don't think non-whites are going to stay home.
I don't think Zoomers are going to stay home.
I don't think these pro-Palestinian protesters are going to vote for Cornel West or anything else.
I think they're going to stay home.
You think Trump wins 20% of the black vote?
I mean, you know, at this point, the funny thing is, and then I'm going to turn it over to you about what do you think about 2024?
The funny thing is, is, and again, to date ourselves, but I think it's important for guys coming in now to understand what this was all like.
Going to CPAC, I'll tell this quick story.
When I had Youth for Western Civilization, we were in the CPAC meetings, the planning meetings.
You could suggest what you wanted as like a panel.
And I said, We should need to have a panel on the electoral consequences of demographic change and how that could cost us the Southwest and basically create a permanent Democratic majority.
And I was backed up by, like, people like at Eagle Forum, like Phil Schlafly and people like that.
Like, these types of people were like, yeah, that's what we need to do.
And you know what they did?
Instead, they had a panel on appealing to Hispanics.
Like, that was the only way.
It didn't even register what I said.
It didn't even register what the other people said.
They didn't get it.
They couldn't conceive of anything other than, well, how do we apologize and balance scraped minorities?
And then, and of course, none of it works.
And then the only guy who's actually managed to increase the minority vote, is the so-called white nationalist Donald Trump who's
actually winning more black and Hispanic votes.
I can speak directly to that. One thing that surprised me when I was – after 2020 and I was looking at all the
various Pew surveys and employing data priorities is that one thing I noticed is that in terms of like issue
priorities, if you ask white working-class voters or Hispanic voters
who are working-class, what are their priorities? They'll say stuff like the economy, healthcare. None of them say
like transgender rights or climate change.
The issues that resonate with white voters also resonate with a lot of Hispanic voters.
And because Hispanics are so racialized, they didn't really get that.
What's happened under Trump really actually completely fits with I mean, they wanted to win Hispanic voters.
Trump is doing it by, like, being harsh on immigration and, you know, being a big man and acting masculine and talking about making money.
Being a caudillo, yeah, what they wanted.
Being a caudillo, more of a populist.
That actually resonated, not the wonky, dorky, Paul Ryan stuff.
Yeah, nobody cares about some, like, winsome virgin in CPAC, like, babbling about, like, oh, we need to apologize for the Southern strategy, what they want.
You know, basically an American version of Franco or Salazar or something.
Not even that, no.
That's too European.
You actually want something like that of Latin America or something.
And the funny thing too is that, you know, you think Trump wins Nevada?
Apparently he's killing it in Nevada.
I want to just ask you directly, like whether he's going to win in 2024 and we'll end it there, but I want to preface this by saying, No, I said the exact same thing in 2016, though, so I could be wrong.
But I think that people are really underestimating the collapse of the GOP in really important states like Michigan, where there's just no money, and there's no ground game, and there's just a total collapse of infrastructure.
And because of the changes we saw in voting rules in 2020, which have not gone away, Mail-in voting, early voting, all these types of things, it puts a premium on political organization, and it puts a premium on turnout.
And the Democrats have mechanisms and institutions and money to slosh around to get their people out, whereas Republicans don't.
And ideologically, Republicans also have this very self-defeating idea that it's actually a mistake, or it's somehow immoral, to do ballot harvesting To do early voting, to do mail-in voting and all these kinds of things.
Yeah.
Not to mention the fact, and you know, we can't really define this because by its very nature, it would be hard to catch, but if you believe there was fraud in 2020, it's pretty reasonable to assume that there's going to be more in 2044, which means that if Trump is going to win, he can't, he doesn't just have to win.
He has to win by more than any amount of fraud and shenanigans could overcome.
And all these other infrastructure problems and lack of ground game problems.
I just don't think he can do that.
So I'm still not sold.
I'm still shocked, frankly, by the complacency about a Trump victory in twenty twenty four.
Am I wrong?
And I'll let you close it with that.
No, actually, I was I was joking around about this at the conference process for conference.
I was like, you know, Trump's just killing it in the polls.
But, you know, in Pennsylvania, they vote for three months or something.
Yeah.
That's a huge issue.
My sense of it is, based on past experience, it's usually obvious who the winner is, and it's usually obvious well in advance.
In 2020, I believe, if you looked at any poll out there, Trump was going to lose.
He lost.
A lot of people say it was stolen, but it was really never close.
The surprise was that it was so close.
It should have been like a blowout.
Biden was supposed to win Florida and North Carolina.
And now he's just up, like, tremendously.
And then go back to 2022, when a lot of people said it was going to be a huge red wave.
And actually, the polling was close.
The polling had the GOP winning, I think.
Yeah, which is what happened.
I think Trump does win in 2024.
Not a huge wave, but still more people will vote Republican than Democrat. That was accurate.
Which is what happened.
Yeah, which is what happened. I think Trump does win in 2024.
In order for him not to win, there would have to be an absolute massive reversal in opinions of Biden because
people have known – I mean it's not like – it's really two incumbents running against each other.
Everyone knows how they feel about Trump and Biden.
And for Biden to come back, it would require a massive shift in perceptions in less than five months.
And not just that, but also see like the environment could take a plunge for the worse for Biden, especially on the Israel issue.
Yeah, which is already divisive.
He could have like a, I know a lot of Republicans are just dying to see the Democrat convention.
And it could be, it could be that.
But I mean, he would, Trump would need to win.
Just, I mean, you talked about electoral advantages.
Biden barely, barely, barely won Arizona and Georgia.
And that was at the height of the pandemic with hundreds of thousands of people like dying on paper, even though that's people argue about that to this day.
And it would just take a small shift for him to get those states.
Now, Nevada, the polls have been so strange in Nevada.
Yeah, there have been some pretty crazy ones.
Yeah, like Trump up 13 points.
That's ridiculous, but still, for every poll coming out, I'd say to be that.
So that means if Trump wins those three states, He holds everything he won last time, and he would need just one state.
He would need Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania to win the election.
And I think one of them he can get to.
Pennsylvania, I doubt because I just believe the election will go on for two or three months, but maybe Wisconsin.
And Michigan, I just think will be Michigan.
It'll disappoint.
The thing with Michigan is just the GOP is just such a basket case up there right now.
But the...
And Wisconsin was really pretty close. It's a very evenly...it's like a very Balkanized state.
No, it's an incredibly balkanized state.
Shift it around the edges and that changes the whole dynamic of the state.
Yeah, and the big thing too is that – and this would be a good place to close it – is that what we've really been talking about is the reorientation of the American right.
Not the alternative right, not the distant right, but sort of this pitched battle to take control of the right as such.
And it's a battle continuing now where people are talking about who's in charge of the right.
Who are the people who are running these organizations?
What issues do they prioritize?
That battle is continuing, but on the metapolitical level and certainly at the grassroots, the big shift is already taking place.
And maybe we need to start positioning ourselves as self-consciously fringe or marginal and be like, no, we're in charge now.
Like I'm, I'm the captain and this is what we're going to do.
But a lot of it is going to depend on how 2024 plays out.
But I think that, If Trump, this is the optimistic view of things, and obviously he can blow it, and he could also come in and do what Bush did.
Because there were a lot of people talking about, if you recall, George W. Bush, when he won in 2004, how we were going to have a permanent Republican majority, how we had a new coalition, how Karl Rove had created this new big thing, and this was going to dominate American politics for a generation, blah, blah, blah.
And then he just blew it.
In 2006, they lost an entire generation.
So Trump could do that too.
But to be optimistic for a second, If he wins in 2024 and shows that he runs way ahead of all these losing Republican Senate candidates and all these Republican politicians who are not doing very well, and that Trumpism is more popular than the GOP, that it's not Republicans holding their nose and voting for Trump, it's Republicans and a lot of other people enthusiastically backing Trump while holding their nose and voting for local Republicans.
If that becomes The story, that changes things, and that creates new opportunities, and I think that's what's really at stake in 2024.
One last thing before we go.
The most likely scenario, I think, I think Trump wins the presidency.
I think Republicans win the Senate, and I think Democrats win the House.
Because, you know, my congressional district here has been erased by the Supreme Court.
There's another one in Louisiana where Republicans are losing a seat to Democrats because the Supreme Court has ordered Louisiana to create another Democratic seat.
That's two seats right there that should be like safe red seats.
And also the current Speaker of the House is doing everything he can to blow his majority and has divided his caucus.
And I mean, that's I mean, I can see, you know, lose the House, win the Senate.
Trump wins the presidency.
Then it's Griblock for two years, and then Trump's a lame duck in 2026.
That's the most likely scenario, in my view.
Yep, and then we wait to see.
I mean, I suppose that's why it's all important.
Maybe we'll do another one when he picks his VP, because that's going to be way more important than the typical VP pick.
I mean, nobody will ever care about Mike Pence ever again, but I think people are going to care an awful lot about who Trump picks this time.
Yes, we'll schedule another one for that.
I'm not going to calculate.
Absolutely.
All right.
All right.
Well, thanks.
Do you want to tell everyone where they can find you, where your essay's up, and anything else that you've got that works?
Sure.
Just check me out at OccidentalDescent.com.
That's my website, and I'm there daily.
Or you can follow me at Luther and Joyer on Twitter.
It's great talking to you.
All right.
Great talking to you, and thanks for joining me.
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