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Nick Hauselman is still on vacation, but Jared Yates Sexton is here to detail recent rumblings in the Right's intellectual class discussing dictators and overthrowing the political system of the United States, as well as detailing the ideological history of the Right Wing and their natural hatred of liberal democracy.
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I'm Nick Hauselmann, and this is an announcement to let you know that we are going to be doing a new series called The Weekender over on Patreon that will appear every Friday.
And this is a little sneak preview so you can get a handle on what it's like and why you'd want to go over there.
And join the Patreon and be part of that community which has been incredible and amazing with a lot of people there and a lot of great conversations.
So here it is.
Check it out and feel free to check out the actual Patreon as well at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton, flying solo still as Tricky Nicky Houselman is out enjoying his well-earned vacation with his family.
I am enjoying the weekend a little bit early.
I hope you are as well.
I just want to let you know before we get started in earnest, and this is a message to a lot of our listeners who listen to the The Weekender Preview.
You want to go ahead and subscribe for this episode.
All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and I just want to tell you that this episode that I'm getting ready to tape here right now is going to have some fundamental information and for our subscribers I just want to say thank you and I hope that this
I hope that this episode serves as both a warning but also something that maybe demystifies something that is happening in our current political climate.
It serves as a warning but it also serves as a way that you can begin to make sense of a lot of what we're seeing right now and also because this podcast Is so focused on providing this information and providing early warnings about what is happening that maybe this is something that you can share with the people in your life.
Because when we look at modern politics, it is so strange.
If you don't have the fundamental underpinnings of what's going on in this current system, because so much of it is hidden behind rhetoric and lies and, well, bullshit.
And so what I'm going to talk about today is something that I've been seeing more and more of recently.
Nick and I spend a lot of time while we're, you know, researching this stuff, discussing it and talking about it.
We spend a lot of time talking about how The mask is starting to slip from the right and the Republican Party and as they grow more and more desperate and electorally less viable.
That they're starting to not even hide who they are anymore.
And that gives us an opportunity to move beyond the stated principles of the Republican Party, which of course is small government, states' rights, fiscal responsibility, social conservatism, pro-troops, pro-police, all that shit, which is not true.
And we've talked about this A lot about how all of those things are actually malleable, right?
They're only for small government when they're not in charge of the government.
The social conservatism was never actually about family and faith or whatever they want to spew.
It was always about oppressing vulnerable populations via the idea of traditions or family values.
They're more than happy to break up families, whether it's people at the borders or making sure that people don't have enough money to have families or take care of their families.
The fiscal conservatism is just really, really such a lie.
The deficits they have driven up at every possible turn.
And they're certainly not pro-life.
We've seen them damn people to death, whether it's in a pandemic or from deaths of misery.
What I'm about to talk about today.
Is going to give you some insight into not just what Republicans and the right and quote unquote conservatives actually believe.
And we're going to get into the history of it.
And we're going to get into some of the, um, how do I say the minutia of it?
We're going to get in the weeds today because I mean, I don't have anything better to do.
I'm taping the weekend or I have a cold beer and this is important stuff.
So not only are we going to get into the underpinnings of what the right and the conservatives actually believe, we're going to talk about what the plans actually are.
And I'm going to give you insight into where this thing is inevitably heading.
And what I've been watching over the past couple of years, but especially over the past couple of weeks, is a marked change.
For years now, particularly during the Obama presidency, the Republican Party started to obviously dive deeper and deeper into the conspiratorial and white supremacist abyss, and that has dragged the party out into some really, really dark water.
But that doesn't mean that this wasn't always there, that it wasn't always at the heart of the conservative project, because it absolutely is.
In my work and a lot of what I'm going to be talking about today is going to be a preview, I guess, of my next book, The Midnight Kingdom, and the research that I've been doing and what I've been finding.
And I want to get it out to you because I think you deserve to know what's going on and I think that seeding information is incredibly important, particularly during a crisis.
But I also want to have this conversation today.
Because I've been seeing something incredibly alarming over the past few weeks.
Now, obviously we watched in with January 6th as Donald Trump, everyone who supports him, and more or less the entire Republican Party, both inspired and directed an attempted coup.
We watched that happen.
We've seen them turn it into a religious crusade as of late.
Both the right and the far right and the extremist neo-Nazi right have all taken Ashley Babbitt and other people who have been arrested from that attempted coup.
They've turned them into martyrs.
That's pretty bad.
It's not unexpected, though, because we've seen this already.
Trump obviously is going to be on the wrong side of anything and always on the side of his own aggrandizement and his own face-saving rhetoric and these conspiracy theories that make sure that he never is humiliated or downgraded from the God that he believes himself to be.
But what has started to happen over the past couple of weeks in particular?
Is that the intelligentsia, the think tanks, some of the more intellectual vanguard of the right.
And notice I didn't say Republican Party there because every now and then we get those to be a little interchangeable.
But these are people who are, they're sort of on the outside of even the Republican Party, but they're more than happy to use it, which is, of course, a lot of what we saw with Donald Trump.
The intellectual vanguard of the right has began, begun, began.
I mean, I'm only a liberal arts professor.
I should know that offhand.
They've begun to talk openly about the overthrow of democracy.
And I don't mean just January 6th.
What's been taking place lately is an intellectual discussion that started in the fever dream paranoid swamps of neo-nazi nihilistic online forums.
This is the kind of stuff that I used to have to log into with like a VPN in order to keep my IP and location and identity hidden from Neo-Nazis.
I'm talking about groups that had every intention of overthrowing the government of the United States of America.
You might remember if you've been listening to this podcast for a while that one of the reasons why this podcast was one of the first media platforms to tell you that there were far-right instigators within the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests, that were starting fires and trying to escalate these protests to the point where there could be more violence and possibly even the overthrow of the government, is because I heard them talking about it.
And what was happening in the far right, the neo-Nazi extremist territory, has been happening for a while.
I started paying attention to it back in 2016.
This was when I got some notoriety for going into these Trump rallies and talking about the potential of a possible fascistic movement in America.
And all of a sudden I woke up one day and neo-nazis were showing up at my house and neo-nazis were harassing me and I didn't understand what that movement was yet.
And so, you know, one of those things as a person who has suffered anxiety, it makes me feel better to understand what I'm facing.
So I dove into it pretty deep and I started haunting their channels and their communication channels and I started listening to them and talking to them and I started doing the research in the far right.
And what I found to my surprise, dismay, terror, I don't know, something along those lines, was that they were avowed fascists.
And I don't just mean that they're like, oh, we're fascist.
I'm talking about that they were steeped within fascist ideology.
They believed that liberalism, and this is not what we talk about when we say liberal, liberalism is, of course, the idea that there should be representative government.
That plurality isn't the worst thing in the world.
That maybe diversity is a strength and maybe that when we come together and in a culture, maybe it changes us for the better.
These people had decided that the liberal project had run its course and that it was meeting with inevitable decline.
There was no way whatsoever that this could continue going on the way that it was and that there was going to have to be a destruction of liberalism.
Now, you're probably more familiar with this in a couple of different ways.
You're probably familiar with this, the light version of it that shows up on Fox News.
They'll wink and nudge a lot about how America is changing and you might not even be able to recognize America anymore.
That is the Diet Coke version of what I'm talking about.
Steve Bannon is one of the most concentrated versions of this.
Make no mistake about it, Steve Bannon is a neo-fascistic, mystic ideologue.
What he has been doing over the past few years, both with Donald Trump and outside of Donald Trump, and by the way, for the record, I'm going to bring up Donald Trump a couple more times in this podcast, but you need to understand because we're getting all of this on the record, we're making sure that everybody's on the same page.
Hardly anybody that I'm about to talk about.
Whether it's Steve Bannon, this new quote-unquote intelligentsia of the right, the extremist, the theocrats that we're going to discuss, the millionaires, billionaires, wealthiest type of people who have controlled our economy and our politics for years now, none of them believe that Donald Trump is a capable person.
They saw him as a useful tool, a cudgel.
Somebody who could be thrown into the political system, like a cinder block into a bathtub.
They thought he was stupid, incompetent, and crass.
But they thought they could manipulate him.
And they thought that the movement that he had created, that he had tapped into, was something that they could use.
And they were right.
Steve Bannon has been going around the world working with other neo-fascists who believe that liberal democracy or liberalism has met its inevitable end.
What will replace it?
A lot of them are interested in different solutions and we'll talk about that here in just a little while.
But that is at the heart of the right.
But what I want to talk about now is what's been developing over the past couple of weeks.
It's gone from closed-door conversations.
It's gone from right-wing extremists talking about these things when they're in protected chat rooms, when they're in these forums.
It has suddenly become a matter of intellectual pursuit.
This is an escalation, because as you've paid attention to during this podcast, you know what we've talked about in terms of how the Republican Party doesn't actually have ideology.
It gains its marching orders from think tanks and the intelligentsia that we are about to talk about.
Now what we're going to discuss to begin this conversation is a really disturbing thing that I've started to see in a lot of different avenues and venues.
But it's always been at the heart of this stuff and now it's just becoming more and more out there.
And the example that we're going to use today Is a conversation that was on a podcast called The American Mind.
It was a subset of that.
This is out of the Claremont Institute, which is a think tank that's been around for roughly 50 years now, and it's what we would call a Straussian group from Leo Strauss, who will talk about here in a little while.
You've probably heard that name on the podcast in the past.
The podcast that we're going to be jumping off of, and we're going to hear a couple of clips from it as I do this podcast, is called The American Mind, and the subsection of it is called The Stakes.
And this is from a recent episode called The American Monarchy.
And this is a conversation between a guy named Michael Anton.
And Michael Anton, by the way, served in the Trump administration and was originally a really influential thinker who penned an essay called The Flight 93 Election, which made the rounds.
It was one of the defining texts of the Republican Party coming to accept Trump.
And what Anton argued What Michael Anton argued in the Flight 93 election was that people might be offended by Donald Trump, they might not agree with him, but they had to vote for him.
Because, like Flight 93 on September 11th, they had a decision to make.
And the decision, there were a lot of lives on the line.
So like it or not, they had to vote for Donald Trump, had to support Donald Trump, because it would be the apocalypse if they didn't.
Now this was a conversation.
Oh, and by the way, Michael Anton has shown his ass a lot recently.
He penned another really influential right-wing column that speculated that Joe Biden and the Democrats were going to carry out a coup if they didn't win the election.
And then, I know this is shocking, it almost completely mirrored what happened with Donald Trump and eventually January 6th.
Now I'm going to play you a clip from a conversation that he had on this podcast with a guy named Curtis Yarvin, and I have to tell you, he is a real piece of shit.
Just absolutely intellectually bankrupt and also just incredibly offensive.
Kurt Yarvin is a self-described monarchist, and the conversation that took place during this podcast had everything to do with how America could get beyond liberal democracy, republicanism, or representative democracy, and find itself in a new monarchy.
Now I'm going to give you the background of this in a minute, and I'm going to explain to you in a moment what exactly is at play here and how this is what the conservative movement actually believes.
But before we get there, and before we talk about the intellectual bent of this.
I'm just going to play you a brief little excerpt from this conversation so you can get an idea of how this works and we're actually going to listen to two parts from this.
This first part is where they are discussing what they call Caesarism.
And for those of you who have a background in history, or maybe you've heard about this stuff before, Julius Caesar, of course, was the man who ended the Roman Republic.
Rome had a representative democracy.
that reached its end as Julius Caesar decided to declare himself dictator.
The argument that's being made here, just to give you a little bit of background, is that Caesarism sometimes is necessary when a country reaches the point of no return.
When liberalism or representative democracy runs its course, somebody of incredible talent and power Has to declare themselves dictator so that they can take care of the problems that liberalism and representative democracy cannot take care of for themselves.
So here's a brief little glimpse of what that conversation is like.
So, you know, really the pattern, the pattern of Caesar is such a strong one because there were so many strengths about the regime that he created.
It was so stable.
It ended all kinds of, I mean, my God, to end the red versus blue dispute in America.
You know, after Caesar came in, people forgot about the whole class conflict in Rome.
really to a substantial extent it just went away and this had been the fixture of the republic for like four centuries under different terms and in different contexts right from the aventine secession to like that you know the rise of caesar that's like four centuries five centuries like it's it's insane um and and so you know you really have in Now, first of all, it is so absurd that this Claremont Institute has to beep this guy when he says bullshit, but whatever.
you know, he won, is that they saw the end of this bullshit on the horizon.
And then when it appeared, they're just like, my God, this is all over.
How wonderful is that?
Now, first of all, it is so absurd that this Claremont Institute has to beat this guy when he says bullshit, but whatever.
It's so obnoxious.
Now, what you just heard, of course, was Curtis Yarvin on this podcast saying that the red versus blue dispute is...
is so unsolvable and that our politics have gotten to the point where there is no way whatsoever for liberal democracy to solve it.
And so during this podcast, what he is arguing is that we need in order to survive as a country, as a power, we need somebody
To rise up, and even though it might be frightening, and even though it might be a moment of terror, that we might need some strong man to rise up, carry out a coup d'etat, and declare themselves Caesar.
And you have been listening to a free preview of our Patreon-exclusive Weekender Show.
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All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
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