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Aug. 7, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show
27:36
They Just Want to Diddle Kids | Auron Macintyre

Michael Knowles is joined by "recovering journalist" Auron Macintyre to discuss the strange obsessions of the creepy left. Want more? Check out DailyWire+ here: https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe-plus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Of all of the perplexing questions in politics, and there are a lot of them, sometimes the libs do things that we don't expect them to do.
The conservatives do things.
We say, why are you doing that?
Why aren't you doing this?
Politics seems to get more and more confusing each day.
But the one issue that I know a lot of us are scratching our heads on is why are the libs Spending so much time and money trying to push weird sex stuff on little kids.
They are.
They're pushing the transgender agenda.
They're pushing pornography in elementary school libraries.
They're pushing all sorts of creepy, weird sex stuff with kids.
And people come up with all of these deep, profound, esoteric answers.
There's one man who's given an answer that went completely viral.
It seems to be the most persuasive one.
That is, Oren McIntyre is a columnist, recovering journalist, YouTuber, and he said, hey guys, it's not that complicated.
They're just perverts and they want to diddle kids.
Oren, thank you for coming on the show.
Oh no, yeah, thank you so much for having me.
I appreciate it.
Before we get into your answer on that question, why do you think that tweet went viral?
Yeah, it was pretty wild.
You make a meme and you just put it out there.
You don't really expect it to kind of do what it did, but I think it's because it kind of spoke to a truth that a lot of us felt, but we didn't say out loud.
It wasn't really couched in a lot of academic language.
It didn't sound very highbrow and educated, but it broke through a lot of those kind of different layers of abstraction and just kind of said the obvious.
And people are so kind of hesitant to do that today that I think it just kind of spoke to something everybody wanted to say but hadn't.
I think that tweet might have been the first time I was introduced to you and your work.
And so I said, I've got to follow this guy.
He's really cutting through all the, as you say, the jargon and all of that nonsense.
And one thing that I have really enjoyed from your writing that I've tried to do myself is you don't only take pot shots at the libs.
You reserve a lot of your ire for conservatives and squishes and all that sort of thing who in many ways seem to be nothing more than the court jesters in the kingdom of liberalism.
That our political problems maybe run a little bit deeper than just Republican versus Democrat.
Yeah, when we look at what's going on, it's really easy to get trapped into the frame that's handed to us by the media and even our conservative media, right?
And so when we look at that, it's very easy to focus on the day-to-day issues and policy decisions and not ask questions about the wider, you know, political scenario.
Why do the teams line up the way they do?
Why are we so invested in these particular political battle lines?
Were there any other points in history where right and left looked different?
What are kind of the core things that something like, say, conservatism is actually conserving?
Because if we look at it, it doesn't seem like very much.
And so kind of as we look a little below the surface, I think that that's kind of where some of my stuff breaks through is we can get outside of that mainstream frame and maybe explore some of those areas and ask, are these opinions something that are organic, that makes sense with our worldview, our religion, our morality?
Or is it something that's been handed to us and we're defending because we've been told that's the team we're on?
And I think that's something that makes a big difference.
And then when someone hands you the framework that you're supposed to play in, very often you end up in a situation where it's heads I win, tails you lose.
And there's really no way that you can have a victory.
Even these terms left and right, they refer to the French Revolution.
They refer to the National Assembly.
And so maybe there's more in our political order.
And I guess Donald Trump really brought a lot of this to the surface in 2016, where all of a sudden you had a lot of people who had said they were Republicans.
I mean, the Bush family, for goodness sakes, lining up against the Republican nominee.
At that convention, it was only Bob Dole, was the only living Republican nominee for president, who actually showed up to the convention for Trump.
You had a lot of conservatives saying, no, I hate Trump on tariffs.
I hate him on trade.
I hate him on immigration.
I don't agree with this guy on anything.
If this is what it means to be a Republican, if this is what it means to be a conservative, I guess I'm not that.
And there's been a whole lot of soul-searching that's gone on.
What does it mean to be a conservative?
What does it mean to be a Republican?
So I guess, Ben, I'd just ask you, as we're all trying to figure this out, what should conservatives be conserving?
Well, that's a really difficult question because I think that requires conservatives to look at kind of the core of their ideology that they've been invested in defending for so long.
The core of American conservatism is largely classical liberalism, and classical liberalism on boards a lot of assumptions that kind of lead it to lose against the more radical versions of liberalism that are now kind of in vogue in kind of our ruling class.
And so because conservatives are always in a mindset of, say, for instance, small government at any cost, they tie their own hands when it comes to implementing agendas that will benefit the family, benefit religious conservatives, benefit other people who are part of their coalition.
And so that's something that conservatives really need to do some soul searching on.
You know, Patrick Dedean has a book called Why Liberalism Failed.
And for those who haven't read it and are kind of interested in it, I think it's a really good Patrick Dedian explains that liberalism has been cracked and spread over the two parties.
The Democrats got the social version of liberalism, and the Republicans got the economic version of liberalism.
And you'll notice that whenever the Republicans are in power, the only thing that gets passed is tax cuts.
And when the left is in power, for some reason, none of that redistributive justice or those free college trips actually get passed.
It's all the crazy social stuff that gets pushed.
It's always these versions, these halves of liberalism that are always being pushed forward, and so that's why you end up in that game like you were talking about, heads I win, tails you lose.
So I guess one of the assumptions that both the left and the right tend to focus on and begin with in America, at least these days, is that the basic unit of society is the individual.
And you see it play out just as you're describing.
The individual gets to shtup pretty much whoever he wants to and gets to engage in whatever personal behaviors he wants to.
And for the conservatives, they say, well, the individual should be able to keep all of his own money and make all of his own choices about his personal life.
You can do whatever you want.
Just don't make me pay for it sort of thing.
And when I look at that assumption, I say, wait a second.
This isn't, that's not conservative at all.
Edmund Burke, you know, one of the, considered one of the founders of modern conservative philosophy, and many of the founding fathers for that matter, would be rolling in their graves at that assumption.
Because it seems to me that the basic unit of society is the family.
You remember when conservatives used to talk about the family?
Now we haven't conserved the definition of the family, and we're using all the same kind of individualist language that the libs use.
So how do we get back to a kind of family-oriented, I don't know, traditional sort of political framework in America?
Well, and that's the trick, right?
Power always wants to centralize.
It always wants to take away power from the periphery and centralize it under its control.
And so what's been very powerful for government has been the narrative of the individual because what that has done is allowed it to liberate people from what used to be these competing social spheres of obligation.
We used to all be part of families and churches and civic organizations and guilds and unions And different things that demanded our loyalty and our money and our time.
But over the years, those different intermediate organizations have dissolved themselves.
Those bonds that used to bring communities together and hold them together without the interference of the government have been removed.
And in their place, the government has stepped in as kind of a weak counterpart, right?
That's part of the welfare state, but it's also Part of so many other things that the government has involved itself in.
It always comes with a promise of liberation for the individual, right?
Why do we have to involve the government here to guarantee your right to something else, right?
Your freedom in some other area.
And so by dissolving those bonds, the government has been able to take on more and more centralized power, sometimes under the idea of collectivism, sometimes under the idea of individualism, but it's always in the service Of breaking down those institutions that were competing with the government and centralizing the power back with the state.
That's such a great point.
I sometimes think if Karl Marx were alive today, mercifully he is not.
He's looking up on us right now and watching us conduct this interview.
But if Marx were alive today, I sort of think He wouldn't be a Democrat.
I think he would be in the Tea Party or something.
I think he would probably describe himself as a radical individualist.
I mean, when you talk to radicals on the left, they very frequently use the language of individualism in much the same way as you might hear someone on the American right use that kind of language.
But you think of the image of fascism.
The image of fascism is what?
A A big bundle of sticks all brought together.
Well, you can only bring the big bundle of sticks together when the sticks have been broken out of all those associations, the family, the community, the churches.
Once they've been broken out of all of those structures and then they're just alone as individuals, then you bind them up together in the collective of the state or you see it on the left in communism.
So it seems to be one of those two sides of the same coin kind of issue, that the opposite of collectivism It's not individualism.
Those two actually kind of seem to help each other.
It's the family and the churches and all those intermediate institutions.
So the word you used there at the very top is an important one.
You said power.
Power is kind of flowing between these institutions.
That's a naughty word for a lot of American conservatives.
We don't like the idea of power.
We want to back away from power.
We want to say, look, you just...
Take the power back.
I don't want to run your life.
You don't want to run my life.
Let's just let it go.
You're saying that doesn't really work.
Yeah, that's right.
A lot of, you know, one of the ideas of conservatism, because it's taken this libertarian bent, is the idea that they can take this power, right?
They can take the ring of power and they can throw it into Mount Doom.
You can destroy the power and then no one has to deal with its consequences.
But that's not actually how power works.
Sovereignty can never be destroyed.
It's always conserved.
It can simply just...
It has to be invested in something, right?
And so, American conservatives, we like to believe that the Constitution allows us to basically avoid being ruled, because the Constitution is this delicate balance of checks and balances and separation of powers, Montesquieu and And all this stuff allows us to basically keep the government under control.
We're under the rule of law.
And so because we're under the rule of law, we don't have to worry about kind of the people who are in control of our system because we don't actually serve them.
We're not actually under them.
We rule ourselves, and this kind of objective system operates in the background and makes sure that everything is fair, right?
But as we're seeing very often today, it's becoming increasingly clear, no one is ever actually governed just by a system.
We're governed by people.
Laws are really powerless to constrain the actions of an organized minority of people who want to subvert them as long as those people are operating in the correct institutions and positions of power inside I think that we're seeing maybe even the left see that a little bit with the Supreme Court here recently, right?
You see them suddenly losing their minds because they have to deal with the same kind of phenomenon that American conservatives have dealt with for many, many decades, that a small minority can basically change on a dime what has been kind of the reality inside the United States.
And so conservatives have to be more comfortable with the idea of power and the use of it.
Because if they're not, I have another tweet that kind of goes around.
The team that wants to win always beats the people who just want to be left alone, right?
And that's who conservatives are.
They just want to grill, man.
They just want to go out and enjoy Fourth of July.
They got the kids.
They got the business.
They got the beautiful home.
They've got things to do.
They don't have time to become professional activists.
And, you know, scream at the heavens every time something happens.
But that is not a good tactic.
The people who want it are going to win.
And you can never live in this kind of fantasy where the government is just going to leave you alone in perpetuity.
You have to invest.
Every generation has to care about the values that are being inculcated and the things that are then being passed into law and carried forward.
You don't just get to kind of put the government on autopilot and let it protect your rights once you set up the system correctly.
Unfortunately, we never escape the rule of men, and we have to then generate good leaders and put them in positions that will defend our values and our families.
We can't just hand it over to the Constitution and hope that it does the job all by itself.
But we are at this dispositional disadvantage here that you've totally hit on correctly, which is, as conservatives, you'll sometimes see these social scientific surveys go around.
They say conservatives are hotter than leftists or something like that.
Conservatives are happier than leftists, and whenever I see those, I always think, yeah, duh.
We're pretty content with the way things are.
We like our lives.
We like our families.
We don't dye our hair crazy colors and put in all sorts of mutilations and go screaming and shrieking in front of government buildings all the time.
That's what the libs do.
That's what the leftists do.
We conservatives...
We took the grill pill, man.
We just want to stay and grill and spend time with our nice families, often in the suburbs.
And I work in politics professionally.
This is my job.
And even I think, man, can't I just go home and grill up my delicious good rancher's steak and have a nice drink and have a good life?
Conservatives naturally don't want to...
Don't feel the same burning fire to go out and wield political power.
And so that is a dispositional issue, but you're so right.
We are not simply governed by letters on a page of a statute.
It's against the U.S. code.
It's against federal law to protest in front of a judge's house to influence a case.
It went on for weeks after the leak from the Dobbs decision.
The cops didn't do nothing.
The authorities didn't do nothing.
Even though you had a Republican governor in Virginia, presumably you had federal law enforcement that is supposed to enforce these laws, and they just don't do it.
You saw the double standards during the vying insurrections of 2020 and 2021.
You had BLM burn the country down for eight months.
Usually the charges were dismissed.
In some cases people were arrested and the current vice president, the now vice president, raised money to bail those people out of jail.
Meanwhile, Hornhat guy busts into the Capitol and cracks a Coors Light and they throw those people into solitary confinement and they practically throw away the key.
So the law is not going to enforce itself, certainly not going to enforce itself in a neutral way.
I agree with all of that.
So how are we supposed to get and wield power?
Yeah, and that's really the million dollar question, right?
Is what do you do now?
Because what we're seeing so often is the impotence of elected leaders, even somebody who might be more dedicated like Trump.
Look at like a executive order Trump issues versus an executive order that Obama or Biden issues and the effectiveness of those orders, right?
Trump issues an executive order and his own generals, his own executive branch, they just ignore him.
They just completely move forward with whatever they're doing and they just hide it from the commander in chief and they pay him no mind.
Barack Obama issues the executive order about genders and bathrooms.
And all of a sudden, every organization in the country jumps to attention and follows it as if he just issued some kind of dictate.
Including private organizations, not just government organizations, the whole kit and caboodle.
Right.
And so you have to ask yourself, as an American conservative who believes in the Constitution and the letter of the law, both of these men have the same elective office.
Both of these men operated under the same rules.
Both of these men used the same instrument, but they have decidedly different impacts and different effects.
Why is that?
That's the key question that you need to understand.
And once you understand it, you better grasp where the power sits.
What you start to realize is not all of our power is simply in the branches as explained to us.
It exists in things like media.
It exists in things like our educational institutions.
It exists in things like non-government organizations.
It exists in things like the permanent bureaucracy that people call the deep state.
Far more power resides in those institutions than resides in any one particular man who's sitting in an office.
And so while conservatives love to win elections and love to think that one elected official will step in and change those things, they need to understand that the rot is far deeper.
It sits well into things like the FBI. Things like our university system.
And those are things that, if you're going to change things, have to fundamentally be rearranged, possibly dismantled and rebuilt if you're going to see real change.
You can't simply just stick someone into an elected office, say, oh, throw out all the bums and we'll get them in the next election.
That doesn't work, and we've seen that time and time again.
Because when a Republican is president, even a conservative Republican, even a conservative Republican with his head pretty much screwed on straight, It is just a different thing than when a Democrat is president.
I sometimes think of this when it comes to the media, because when I see anonymous reports in NBC or the New York Times, Washington Post about a Republican president, I usually dismiss them.
When I see anonymous sourcing in a report in NBC and New York Times and Washington Post about a Democrat president, I'm not so quick to dismiss them.
I take them much more seriously.
Is this because I'm a hypocrite and I just want to believe whatever is good for my side and harmful to the other side?
I don't think so.
The reason, at least the way that I think about it, is that...
They're different things.
When the left-wing media is going after the right-wing president, that is to be expected.
When the left-wing media are going after the left-wing president, that's a totally different relationship.
Their access to those sources is way better.
It's way more reliable.
The incentives are completely different.
Even though it looks like it's the same thing, because the people are different, because the movements inside of those power structures are different, the way to understand them is different as well.
Yeah, there's this guy Antonio Gramsci, and he was a Marxist, and he wanted a revolution like the one that he had seen in Russia, but he couldn't get it going.
He ended up writing a lot in a prison in Italy.
I always say this was Mussolini's worst thing that Mussolini ever did.
Maybe not the worst thing, but it was up there.
He put that man in prison, and not because he didn't deserve it, but then it focused Gramsci's mind, and all of the guy's contributions to philosophy come out of him sitting in prison.
Exactly.
So you're familiar with the fact that basically Gramsci said, we're not going to get a communist revolution in kind of these Western countries the way we got in Russia, because they're too affluent.
You can't create this deep class divide the way you can in these other countries and kind of get the revolution going.
So what we need is this cultural hegemony, right?
We're going to march through the institutions.
Most people have probably heard The long march through the institutions, right?
And that's what's going to gain you power in the West.
The fault line is not going to be this class divide of rich versus poor directly, though it ends up spilling out in that way in other But it's going to be along things like race and gender and these other aspects of society that allow them to create these fulcrums.
There are a lot of people who are willing to sign up for a revolution that's going to put their ideas first, their priorities first, and subvert the way that your society was constructed before that.
And so it is by grasping hold of these different institutions that these kind of ideologies have been allowed to infiltrate.
And a lot of what we're seeing has been sitting around for a very long time.
A lot of people, especially kind of these IDW, you know, classical liberal type folks, I love to think that wokeness is just some kind of descendant.
Progressism just went a little too far.
It went off the rails.
And if we can just dial things back ten years, if we can roll liberalism back to the last patch, then things will be fine.
What they don't realize is that wokeness is in many ways like a direct descendant of things like the Civil Rights Act.
And so this ideology has been built into our system for a very long time.
And its implications are simply being felt full force many, many decades after it's been deeply seeded through pretty much every aspect of our society.
You're seeing some conversation about that now.
I'm reminded of Chris Caldwell's book, Age of Entitlement, came out a few years ago.
So you're starting to see a little bit of this discussion of, huh, maybe wokeness isn't just the last five years.
Maybe actually this has deeper roots.
So, okay, we've talked about Gramsci.
We've talked about cultural hegemony.
We've talked about all of these things that are very important from a 30,000-foot view.
Now, for people who are listening, before I let you go, people who are listening right now, they're saying, what do I do in the year of our Lord, 2022?
What do I do as I look ahead?
There's going to be a presidential election in 2024.
What do I do as I look ahead?
What, tangibly, would you encourage conservatives to do?
Yeah, again, this is a really difficult question, first and foremost, because your audience may not like me for this, but I'm not a big fan of democracy.
But I don't think that it works very well.
And what we have is a fundamentally democratic problem.
One of the issues that conservatives have is they buy into this myth of kind of like popular action, right?
That if you get enough people together, because we see the left do this, right?
They get a bunch of protesters together, they stand outside stuff, they chant, they yell, they scream, things change.
And we think to ourselves, That's how things get done, right?
That's how that happens.
But as we talked about, we see a very different reaction from when a leftist mob shows up to one thing and then when some right-wing protesters showed up, right?
Left-wing mobs, they have the sanction of the state.
They have the sanction of the media.
They get away with everything.
They have, you know, the vice president bailing them out of jail.
Right-wing people show up and they sit in basically black sites, you know, getting, you know, Getting denied food and sleep in medical care, right?
So we do not sit in kind of this even playfield where the left and the right both can use this popular will to drive things.
Whether we like it or not, society is always ruled by an organized minority, right?
It is actually our elites that dictate in large ways what happens in our country.
They always need a connection to kind of the popular consciousness and the zeitgeist and the support of the people But we need to start understanding and focusing on the fact that we need a better class of leaders.
We need a class of leaders that is willing to step out there, defend the things that we want them to defend, fight for the things we need them to fight for, and have our well-being in mind, not the well-being of other nations or of their own personal patronage, you know, network.
Personal enrichment or something, right.
Right, right.
And to be fair, all elites are going to do that.
That's another thing that conservatives need to understand.
Elites will always serve their own interests.
That will always be true.
What we want are elites that are aligned with our interests, whose well-being is tied to the well-being of the average American worker and the average American family, not to some multinational corporation or some giant NGO somewhere or some super PAC, right?
And so in a lot of ways, I think looking at people like Ron DeSantis, A lot of people want Ron DeSantis to run as president, and I understand why, but I think that's a mistake because what he is doing is setting up a kind of test run for how regional power can be created.
So you're saying you would rather DeSantis stay in Florida and keep building up that power base?
I would take 10 more DeSantis's as governors before I would take one DeSantis as president.
Because I think that 10 more DeSantis's would have a far larger impact On their individual states and regions and their ability to change the values and the structures and the power bases and the things that exist there.
And also give us a model for how these regional, how federalism was actually supposed to work, right?
The idea that the government shouldn't be able to push down vaccine mandates and mask mandates and And educational mandates on every single inch of the United States.
That's not how our system is supposed to operate.
And if we had more people who were conscious of that and willing to step out beyond kind of this federal prison that most of these regional powers have been placed in, I think that would be a far more effective thing.
I think conservatives have a much better chance Of changing things on that level.
That doesn't mean that things don't need to happen at the national level.
But if you're hoping to just like shove DeSantis or Trump into the White House in 2024, and that will just fundamentally change the direction America is going in, I don't think you've been paying attention to what's been happening in America in the last few decades.
That's a really great point.
And you say somewhat provocatively that you're distrustful of democracy.
Worth remembering that the Founding Fathers themselves had a pretty healthy skepticism of mob rule and democracy, and they constructed a system that has since decayed and been perverted, and there have been all sorts of problems over the ensuing centuries.
But they created a system that was in large part designed to rein in the popular passions.
But to your point, power has moved around in ways that have really not been to the benefit of the country.
And it's going to take a lot more than one presidential election to fix that.
I really love your point, though, on we've got this governor.
He's the most powerful governor, most effective governor I've seen, certainly that I see around the country today.
What if we stopped playing the game that the libs are handing us?
What if we start saying, well, what if we build up more of those kinds of power centers?
If the rules of the game aren't working for us, what if we change the rules?
Really great point.
Oren, where can people find you?
Oh, absolutely.
I've got a YouTube channel.
I've got a substack where I put out different articles and podcasts and things.
So if people want to find me there, you can just look for Oren McIntyre.
I've got a Twitter, which is where most people know me from, and there's a link tree there that can just bring people to where all my work is on all the different sites and that kind of thing.
Excellent.
Oren, thank you for coming on the show.
I appreciate it.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much for having me.
I really enjoyed it.
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