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Oct. 25, 2022 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

54:52

The Right Tells You Exactly What They're About

Jared Yates Sexton is flying solo in this episode, so he goes deep on The Federalist article that exploded the internet. Includes a discussion of Right Wing "Marxism" and what they're planning for the future. To support the show and access bonus episodes each week become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake podcast.
	I'm Jared Yates-Sexton.
	Unfortunately, once again, I am flying solo.
	Nick Halseman has some family business to attend to, so keep him and his loved ones in your thoughts.
	In the meantime, I'm going to be taking care of things, I believe, for the rest of this week.
	On the weekender edition on Friday, which again is for patrons only, all you got to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast to get those full episodes.
	I got to tell you something.
	We got some really interesting things on tap.
	I'll just say that.
	I'll just leave it there.
	Meanwhile, before we get into the major news of the day, just a couple of breaking tidbits.
	It looks like Rishi Sunak is going to be the next Prime Minister of Great Britain.
	Soonok, for those who aren't aware, as an investment person, has more money than nearly anybody else in the entirety of Great Britain.
	And part of it is the fact that he has married into a wealthy family.
	He has nearly a billion dollars.
	And it is already becoming clear, as I've spoken about in talking about what's going on in Great Britain, that Sunox's entire purpose is going to be austerity.
	I feel bad for the British who have enjoyed health care and other social services.
	This stuff is now on the chopping block in the exact same way, and we'll talk more about this in a little bit, that Social Security and Medicare in the United States are on the chopping block.
	Soonok, not the most charismatic dynamo in the world, feels pretty bad.
	Doesn't feel like this is going to get the job done, but best of luck to our British listeners.
	I've been hearing from a lot of you lately about how frustrated you are with British politics, so cheers on that end.
	Another piece of breaking news that should surprise probably no one, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who spends most of his time in a catatonic state while his wife tries to overthrow the government of the United States of America, has stepped in and carried out a stay for his good buddy, Lindsey Graham, so he doesn't have to testify or get brought down for questioning in Georgia for election interference.
	You know, I'm not going to talk about this very long because there's not much else to say about it.
	It's a miscarriage of justice.
	And quite frankly, this is what happens when you steal the Supreme Court.
	Period.
	That's what they got it for.
	That's why they carried out this operation to not only keep Merrick Garland from getting on the court, but effectively capturing the judiciary.
	This is what they wanted all along.
	The Republican Party is not worried about being a majority party.
	They're not worried about popularity.
	And you don't have to be when you have a governmental system that was created as a minoritarian institution.
	That's why the Supreme Court's there.
	That's why we have an electoral college.
	That's why the Senate is structured the way that it is.
	That's why this country was put together in the fashion that it was so things like this could happen.
	So the white and the wealthy and the powerful could be protected.
	There's literally nothing else to say about this in terms of breaking news.
	The only thing to say is, I'm sorry, but it's time to get serious about the Supreme Court.
	There's no secret plan.
	There's no impeachment coming.
	You need to expand this court, or you need to impose term limits, or you simply need to ignore them.
	That's the long and the short of it.
	But yeah, we need to talk about some other things.
	The first deal that we need to get into, it is an article that, I have to tell you, was probably sent to me roughly 30 to 40 times in the past couple of days.
	This is an article that appeared on The Federalist.
	Which should go ahead and give you a fair idea of what it's going to feel like and what sort of territory it's going to run aground in.
	This is an article called, We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives by John Daniel Davidson.
	Davidson is the senior editor of The Federalist, which, outstanding job there, John.
	But also, just to give you a little bit of context in all of this, John Davidson keeps pretty close ties with a group called the Claremont Institute, which we've talked about on this podcast as being a right-wing think tank that has consistently flirted and at times just
	Consummated a relationship with fascism and authoritarianism.
	This is a group that, of course, supported Donald Trump, but saw him as a battering ram against liberal democracy, which they believe has created a decadent, degenerate, decayed society that they call the regime.
	And since Trump exploded onto the national scene and gained power, they have used their resources, which are considerable, to fashion an ideology around Trumpism to turn it into the authoritarian movement that we know today.
	Of course, their background is through Leo Strauss and Harry Jaffa.
	They believe that there are, quote-unquote, natural rights That supersede any of man's laws, right?
	Because it's about God and obviously we know where all of this goes.
	They are extremely homophobic, transphobic, anti-democratic.
	They have talked very much about overthrowing the quote-unquote regime and creating a new Christian society.
	And a lot of what they have pushed and others on the new right have pushed is something very different from what most people recognize as the Republican Party or conservatism.
	Now we're going to get into the actual article and we're going to go through some of these pieces of it and break down what's being said and what's actually occurring.
	But I want to, as I usually do, let you know we're about to break conventional wisdom.
	As I keep saying on this podcast and elsewhere, the Republican Party has completely changed.
	In the past, it was neoliberal.
	Right?
	It was about getting rid of regulations.
	It was about promoting policies that, you know, helped the wealthy and the powerful to become more wealthy and more powerful, cut social safety programs, shrink the government at all given times, basically leave the government there to carry out wars and to serve as a bailout mechanism in case the economy cratered, as it always does.
	In that time, this neoliberalism, of course, hollowed out a lot of America, not just in terms of industry, but also culturally.
	And this group, the Claremont people, some of these Federalists, obviously John Daniel Davidson, as we're about to talk about, believe that that neoliberal order is reaching its end.
	I happen to agree with them.
	I actually happen to think that some of their diagnoses are correct.
	And that's actually what happens in a lot of these authoritarian movements.
	They actually say, hey, you know, this system isn't working and something needs to be done.
	And that's where they branch off from neoliberal Republicans, neoliberal Democrats, moderate Democrats, liberal Democrats.
	Progressive Democrats and leftists, of course, say that something needs to change.
	But there's that large center and center right that's like, oh, things don't need to change.
	What are we talking about here?
	And meanwhile, the American people, as we've seen, not just with the electing of Donald Trump, but with this embrace of authoritarianism, they understand that something needs to change.
	Now, just because they have a diagnosis right, and we'll talk about why they have the diagnosis right, because it is Really interesting what's happening here.
	It's mind-bending.
	This isn't the kind of stuff they could talk about on CNN or MSNBC or even really the New York Times or the Washington Post.
	This, a reminder, is why you listen to the Muckrake podcast, because we can get weird and deep in the weeds.
	But yeah, this is not the Republican Party as most people understand it.
	It has changed and it has gone in very, very weird directions, as we will see.
	But this article, We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives, again by John Daniel Davidson, this is not unfamiliar territory.
	This is what national conservatives have been saying for a while.
	This is what the authoritarian right, the new right, This is what they have been advocating.
	They've been having conferences.
	They've been giving speeches.
	They've been writing papers.
	The think tanks have been absolutely losing their minds over this and pushing this stuff and trying to give it a legal and a philosophical sheen.
	This article just happened to go a little bit viral as people are starting to notice these things.
	But this has been out in the world for years now, which is one of the reasons why I'm getting on podcasts and live streams and writing in books saying, hey, just so y'all know, some weird bad stuff is taking place.
	But this is a really good introduction to it.
	So I'm going to take this opportunity to get into it a little bit.
	So, we need to stop calling ourselves conservatives.
	This is how it opens.
	Quote, given the state of America in 2022, conservatives should stop calling themselves conservatives.
	Why?
	Because the conservative project has largely failed and it is time for a new approach.
	Conservatives have long defined their politics in terms of what they wish to conserve or preserve.
	Individual rights, family values, religious freedom, and so on.
	Conservatives, we are told, want to preserve the rich traditions and civilizational achievements of the past, pass them on to the next generation, and defend them from the left.
	First of all, before we move forward, what a load of horse shit.
	It's never been about conserving or preserving.
	In fact, like, conservativism has always been pointed in the direction of quote-unquote progress.
	But it's managed progress, right?
	It's progress that happens on the broken backs and the splintered bones of vulnerable minorities and their enemies.
	Whether or not that's black people, that's women, that's gay people, that's trans people or the poor.
	It's never been about conserving.
	It's about moving forward in a general direction.
	In America, conservatives and classical liberals alike rightly believe in ascendant left.
	An ascendant left.
	By the way, if you haven't read my article, The Myth of the Left, there is no ascendant left.
	The only thing that's happening right now is that there is a popular movement among the people against capitalism and against the system as it stands.
	The way that it has been whether that's through wokeness or cancel culture or Me Too or in our popular culture, is largely defined based on how it reacts to the problems of the current moment and whether it moves in a direction that actually fixes things,
	whether that's Me Too or actual critical race theory whether that's Me Too or actual critical race theory or actual history and actual science, or through popular culture and through corporate products, it's a matter of salving those things by profiting off of a personal and people's desire to change things.
	There's no ascendant left.
	There's a burgeoning labor movement that could somehow or another graft onto a lot of this dissatisfaction and create an ascendant left, but this is a fantasy in their mind.
	It wants to dismantle our constitutional system, this ascendant left, which is very rich, actually, and transform America into a woke dystopia.
	That's right, everybody.
	It will be legal for you to have a he or a him or a she or a her pronoun.
	That's right.
	That's going to happen when Emperor Dark Brandon makes it happen, right?
	The task of conservatives, going back many decades now, has been to stop them.
	In an earlier era, this made sense.
	There was much to conserve.
	But my honest appraisal of our situation today renders such a definition absurd.
	After all, what have conservatives succeeded in conserving?
	In just my lifetime, they have lost much.
	Marriage, as it has been understood for thousands of years.
	It's always marriage.
	It's always marriage.
	And by the way, whenever they talk about traditional marriage, they're talking about patriarchal power.
	They're talking about men being in control.
	And at the heart of this, by the way, is a total and utter fear that white men aren't going to be able to live the lives that they've been living without consequence.
	That's always at the heart of these things.
	The First Amendment.
	That's right.
	The ascendant left is taking away the First Amendment.
	And again, we all know this.
	This is about cancel culture or the idea that if you say something absolutely repugnant like Jews control the world or something like that, you might lose your ability to make money in this economy.
	First Amendment, obviously.
	We've lost any semblance of control over our borders.
	Absolute brain worms here.
	A fundamental distinction between men and women.
	And again, this goes back to patriarchal power.
	And especially of late, the basic rule of law.
	That's right, people.
	Cats, dogs, living together, mass hysteria.
	Crime!
	You can't even go outside of your hotel without being terrified of crime.
	Now, What John Daniel Davidson does in this is he takes this in a very, very specific direction, which is part and parcel of the argument that is made by the New Right.
	And the argument that is made by the new right is this, that this stuff that is taking place, whether or not it's the problem of wokeness or the ascendant left or the destruction of America and the family and family values, that the problem is technology.
	It's not that it's an absolute figment of their imagination.
	It's not that people are waking up to power structures that hold them down and oppress them and exploit them.
	It just so happens that you can get on YouTube and, I don't know, watch videos all day.
	He says, quote, instead of questioning these technologies, including social media and the internet, asking whether they would contribute to human flourishing, conservatives acquiesced to their inevitability and focused instead on narrower issues.
	The result has been the transformation of society within the span of a single human lifetime, and with it the wholesale destruction of our traditions and the looming implosion of Western civilization.
	By the way, real fast, quick note, my book, The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, available for pre-order right now.
	You can buy the book and you can see how this exact same argument has been made for centuries.
	That's right.
	It was literacy.
	It was the peasants learning to read.
	It was books.
	It was screeds.
	It was newspapers.
	It was television.
	It was the radio.
	It's always this technology that has made it possible for our traditions to explode.
	It's the exact same argument every time.
	And these people constantly say the technology is the problem.
	Otherwise, we could just live in a perpetual peaceful state in which nothing changes.
	And they blame that for a loss of power or a loss of hierarchy.
	Right.
	That's what they always, always do.
	He says, and by the way, this is what the fascists did.
	I mean, it's just, it's, it's, I laugh because it's so obvious and because the playbook has just never changed.
	It just, it's just, it's the same stories, man.
	It's that the Jews have infiltrated baseball and they've infiltrated the radio and that's why things are changing.
	Well, it might be necessary, he says, to enact a serious program of technological development to build a future that supports human flourishing.
	It is also the case that to do so on a scale sufficient to save our country will require political power and the willingness to use it.
	Now, this is an important thing.
	The argument that Davidson is making here Is again an argument that fascists and reactionaries have made for centuries.
	The story is this.
	That conservatives have been weak.
	That they have played by liberal rules.
	And I'm talking about capital L liberal rules.
	And here are liberal rules.
	There is a law that is supposed to treat everybody equally.
	Right.
	The idea that justice is blind, which is, again, absolute horseshit because liberalism is absolutely riddled through with hierarchical notions that serve the wealthy and the powerful.
	The justice is supposed to be blind, that the law is supposed to be fair, but especially that democracy or liberal democracy is just The fastest way to hell that you can possibly have.
	And if you listen to any of these people, their podcasts, their speeches, you read their books, you read their articles, what always comes through is this, that there is a natural hierarchy.
	Notice the word natural, by the way.
	We're not talking about going out in the woods.
	We're talking about the way the world's supposed to work.
	Right?
	And the idea is that the natural hierarchy sorts us out, right?
	You have the elite, like the actual elite, the actually talented and the strong, and in a non-democratic system, a conservative system, a monarchial system, a hereditary system, by the way, which is the idea that, you know, and tell me if this sounds familiar, wisdom and power and talent runs in the blood Which is of course why you have to put on a swastika and dab it with a blood flag because the power is in the blood, the myth of the blood.
	It's always the exact same thing.
	But the argument being made is that liberal democracy is weakness.
	It just inherently opens up all of the world for mediocrity to be rewarded.
	Because most people are mediocre or worse.
	Most people should be underneath the heel of that small, talented elite.
	And as a result, because conservatives Have elections.
	Because they participate in elections.
	Because they campaign for office.
	Because they talk about the sacredness of institutions.
	Because they do all of that.
	What they're actually doing is they're allowing liberalism and the left to run rampant.
	So in this, the call here is, we're not playing tough enough.
	And if we don't take this seriously, and if we don't play total and absolute hardball, which if you're reading between the lines is the dismantling of representative government, the dismantling of the rule of law as we know it, and liberalism in totality, And that is capital L liberalism, which involves both Democrats and Republicans alike.
	If you're not willing to dismantle all of that and get tough and authoritarian and become your own little Caesar, your own little dictator, well, the world is reaching an apocalypse.
	Because that's what's at heart here.
	It's always an apocalypse.
	It's always something that's happening in the future if you don't take care of it right now.
	Quote, put it bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country, they're going to have to rebuild and in a sense, re-found it.
	I'm just going to take a little sip of my coffee.
	Re-found it.
	Because here's the thing, everybody.
	That is not just like a flippant phrase.
	They literally think that they need to move beyond the Constitution.
	Because the Constitution, for those keeping track at home, was capital L liberal.
	Because the secret that a lot of these people harbor... They'll talk about the founding fathers, they'll talk about their wisdom, they'll talk about tradition.
	But what they actually truly understand, because these people actually study history and these people actually study the ideas behind history, what they actually understand is that the founding of America, even though it was flawed, even though it was based on a bourgeois hierarchy, moving from kings and queens down to white wealthy landowners,
	What they understand was it was done specifically to move beyond hereditary religious backed power.
	So why refound?
	Because they need to get rid of that constitution and they need some sort of a mechanism to put in place This idea that there is a God or there is a natural law that allows them to do whatever they want because they can't win elections.
	They're not interested in winning elections.
	There has to be a story that legitimizes this.
	He goes on.
	And that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it.
	Because that's the problem with the Republican Party, right?
	They despise having power.
	My God.
	Why?
	Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible.
	One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips.
	The left will only stop when conservatives stop them.
	Which, by the way, is very, very eerily reminiscent of what was said in Spain before the Spanish Civil War, in which fascists took over the country.
	They had to!
	The leftists, they weren't going to stop.
	They had to be stopped.
	They were going to turn Spain into a socialist, communist nightmare.
	There were so many conspiracies being carried out.
	They weren't going to stop unless they were stopped.
	Which means, quote, conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about small government.
	Because that's what conservatives care about, right?
	It's small government.
	We've seen that.
	It's not like they're in our bedrooms.
	It's not like they try and legislate literally everything.
	It's not like they use power to absolutely wield it like a sword against everybody.
	They love small government, right?
	That's why they talk about deficits, but then they get in office and they run up, like, record deficits.
	Because they don't believe in small government.
	Quote, the government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life, and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.
	A blunt instrument indeed.
	Now, next couple of paragraphs.
	I'm going to read these.
	And as I do, I just want you to kind of, again, dispose of your understanding of what Republicans are, who they are, what they believe, because you've been told this a lot of your life, right?
	They're small government.
	They're pro-life.
	They're fiscally conservative.
	They're socially conservative.
	They define themselves in opposition to the left.
	So I'm going to read these two paragraphs and then we're going to have a little bit of a talk.
	Quote.
	To stop big tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms.
	To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds.
	To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce combined with generous subsidies for families with small children.
	Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government.
	It is time to clear our minds of Kant.
	In other contexts, wielding government power will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code.
	It will not be enough, for example, to reach an accommodation with the abortion regime, to agree on reasonable limits on when unborn life can be snuffed out with impunity.
	As Abraham Lincoln once said of slavery, we must become all one thing or all the other.
	The Dobbs decision was, in a sense, the end of the beginning of the pro-life cause.
	Now comes the real fight in state houses across the country to outlaw completely the barbaric practice of killing the unborn.
	So let's break this down.
	First things first.
	To stop Big Tech, for example, we'll require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms.
	That's... interesting.
	That's progressive.
	In fact, when you actually listen to what these people have to say, it's leftist.
	It's Marxist.
	And a funny thing that has happened in all of this, which is, more and more the thinkers of the new right are starting to talk about a guy named Karl Marx quite a bit.
	They're talking about seizing the modes of production, particularly when it comes to technology, because they understand that technology has come to define a lot of how we experience the world.
	Now, they're wrong that this has caused an ascendant left.
	In fact, cancel culture and other cultural worries like that, they're just paranoias.
	It's almost like a red scare or a satanic panic.
	Like, it doesn't actually hold a whole lot of power.
	You know, everybody talking about gender, like, that isn't actually deconstructing the power base that exists.
	But what they need is they need to control big tech.
	They need to control the algorithms.
	They need to control the public sphere that is represented through social media and the Internet in order to maintain orthodoxy or to create discipline.
	They need to create their own alternate reality in which they're able to control any sort of dissent or differing voices.
	As they talk about all of this, and by the way, they're talking about, like, giving funds to families, right?
	With small children.
	It'd be really interesting, by the way, and again, I hope that this never comes to pass, you know, to go to an alternate reality and see, like, when this legislation gets passed, exactly how it's worded in order to help white people specifically, because it absolutely will be.
	This is right-wing Marxism.
	Period.
	That's what they've done.
	And the reason why their diagnosis is correct is because they understand that the neoliberal regime that is powered by global capitalism and hyper capitalism unleashed by neoliberalism, they understand it doesn't work.
	They're mad because neoliberalism erased a lot of traditional things and because there's always place in the market for differing ideas.
	The market will go ahead and allow you to have leftist products and to let you have leftist entertainment.
	And those things are specifically to neutralize ideology and to keep us from engaging in mass politics and organizing.
	But, you know, you at least have to allow it.
	And people are making a lot of money off the fact that there are these leftist expressions in the market.
	It undermines them, neutralizes them, takes the power out of them, and processes them, and packages them, and resells them to us.
	But that's neither here nor there.
	What they're literally doing, what the new right is literally doing, is that they're advocating for a right-wing version of Marxism.
	A right-wing version of communism to a certain extent.
	It's amazing and I would love, love, love, love to take this article and like go back in time and show this to some of the neoconservatives and show it to some of the Republicans and show them what they were fighting for.
	Which is, in the 21st century eventually, the right wing would start moving towards its own type of communism and its own type of socialism.
	This isn't surprising.
	Every time the capitalism starts to go into crisis, you start to have these polarized attempts to explain what's going on.
	The left will say, hey, guess what?
	Marx was right about capitalism's inherent contradictions.
	He was.
	Now whether or not he was right in saying that there needed to be a dictatorship of the proletariat or eventually would lead to world revolution, that's up for you as listeners to decide and argue amongst yourselves.
	God knows that argument is happening somewhere right now underneath a poster of Che Guevara.
	But what happens on the right is that that liberal, capital L, liberal center, in this case neoliberal, Mitch McConnell, people like him, those types of Republicans, Or, you know, like a Bill Crystal.
	A lot of these people who are now Never Trumpers.
	Those people are engaging in the capitalist society.
	They're engaging in the reality that capitalism was created.
	Meanwhile, whether it's the evangelicals or it's, you know, the authoritarian right, they recognize that this deal isn't a good deal for them.
	Why?
	Because what comes along with capitalism?
	One of the side effects of it is multiculturalism.
	Or cosmopolitanism, as it's usually said.
	Why?
	Because nationalism isn't all that important to capitalism.
	You can make money off of it.
	You can grift off of it.
	But what capitalism always wants is a world market.
	You want to be able to bring things from other cultures.
	You want these cultures to mix because it allows more markets to exist and easier access to resources.
	It allows cheaper labor.
	So the side effect of that is multiculturalism or cosmopolitanism.
	Nationalism hates that.
	It literally wants to go ahead and create protected markets, right?
	Which is something that we're seeing right now.
	We're watching global capitalism start to roll back, and as a result, we're going to have American industry, we're going to have investment in American production, we're going to stop, you know, relying so much on China and other countries.
	Not just because of supply chains, but also because we want to stop the rivalry with American hedge money.
	We want to go ahead and protect our own markets.
	So you're seeing Like this sort of reversal of global capitalism.
	And as that's happening, and as there's a crisis, same way we saw in the 20s, same way we saw in the 30s, same way that we saw before all of that, the right starts to understand that the only way it's going to gain power over time is to start adopting tenets of the left.
	But here's the thing.
	It's not widespread socialism.
	It's not widespread communism.
	It's for particular groups.
	And I know what you're saying at home, and you're completely correct.
	It's about white supremacy.
	It's about making sure that protected classes of white people are the ones who benefit from these programs.
	What is being argued in this article, and what the New Right is arguing, is that they want to take control of the system as it exists, with its tech, with its economy, with its politics, all of it.
	They want to take it over, and they want to reprogram it, and they want to make it specifically for a chosen group.
	In this case, it's white evangelical people, but particularly white wealthy evangelical people.
	Or, People who understand that evangelicalism is a useful ideology in order to legitimize what they do.
	In all of this, what's being created is a new type of politics that moves away from traditional Republican Party politics.
	Mitch McConnell, neoliberal Republicans, all of them, they're losing power.
	They're losing the momentum in this fight.
	So what are we arguing?
	We're arguing to change the economy.
	We're arguing to seize the modes of production, particularly technological production, which, again, man, they love Marx right now.
	Absolutely love it.
	But we're also talking about changing the criminal code so we can start going after people, so we can start using it as a weapon, so we can make sure that instead of justice is blind or that, you know, we have a system of law that treats everyone equally, It becomes a political weapon.
	And I know what you're saying right now.
	You're like, man, this sounds a lot like fundamentalists.
	This sounds a lot like Al Qaeda or ISIS.
	It absolutely does.
	Listen to this quote.
	On the transgender question, conservatives will have to repudiate utterly the cowardly position of people like David French, in whose malformed worldview drag queen story hour at a taxpayer-funded library is a blessing of liberty.
	My god, are they getting so much traction and joy out of Drag Queen Story Hour, which I love.
	I love that they treat this as if it's some sort of mortal threat to children, like something sordid is taking place at these things.
	It's so stupid.
	Quote, Conservatives need to get comfortable saying in reply to people like French that drag queen story hours should be outlawed.
	That's right.
	Outlawed.
	The parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse.
	The doctors who perform gender affirming interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical license revoked.
	And the teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired, but be criminally prosecuted.
	This is literally the world that they're trying to create.
	And you're right when you say that this is fascist.
	You're right when you say that this is akin to Nazism.
	Because those phenomenon were not just based around people giving getting up and giving amazing speeches that hypnotize people.
	It was about taking capital L liberal progressive societies.
	In the case of Germany it's the Weimar Republic.
	This happened in France too, by the way, in Vichy, France.
	It's just this idea that if women are allowed rights, which, read between the lines, this is absolutely about putting women in their place.
	It's about putting gay people in their place.
	It's about putting trans people in their place.
	The idea is that women having rights, gay and trans people feeling safe to live their lives the way that they choose, That sort of an open society is seen as degenerate.
	And it's seen as decayed.
	And based on apocalyptic paranoia, it has to be put right.
	That means arresting people.
	But that's not all.
	And I want you to really sit with this for a second.
	You start arresting people who don't Go along with your belief that there's only two genders.
	And it's, it's become kind of a joke, the idea that they're going to legally make it to where you can only have, you know, these two pronouns.
	Think about all of the people who will simply say no.
	Think about how many people would be arrested, how many people would be rounded up.
	Think about how many people would be subjected to not just penalties under the law, but mass violence.
	Because let me tell you something.
	Things like the Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht, widespread mistreatment of Jews and gays and Roma, leftists, communists, socialists.
	That just doesn't happen.
	It just doesn't pop up.
	What happens is a reactionary movement like the fascists, like the Nazis, like these people, They push an agenda that says, this is the problem.
	This is why your groceries cost too much.
	This is why your dollar doesn't go as far as it used to.
	This is why things feel bad.
	It's because of these people.
	It's because society has become degenerate and decayed.
	That scapegoating has already created violence.
	We've already seen people killed.
	We've already seen bloodshed.
	You start outlawing these things, actually passing laws.
	And by the way, the scapegoating and the spotlighting starts before you pass the laws, which will lead to widespread violence and harassment and intimidation.
	Those laws start getting passed.
	We're talking people getting killed in the streets.
	And it will be absolutely laundered and legitimized by sickos like this.
	It's part of it.
	Society's under attack.
	The nation is under attack.
	This is evil.
	This is degenerate.
	And if you don't think this is possible, and if you're sitting at home and you're like, yeah, listen, this is all pretty disturbing, but there's no way this could ever take place.
	I want you to think about on a smaller scale what happened from the 1960s to the 1980s.
	You had massive upheavals in the 1960s.
	Of course, you had civil rights, you had the anti-war movement, the free speech movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement.
	It seemed like change was possible.
	In fact, that movement was even more sort of imbued with activism and organization, which is one of the reasons why neoliberalism cut it out at the knees.
	The reaction was 1980s.
	And in the 1980s, you see everything from, I mean, my God, a generational, you know, affliction of AIDS in the gay population.
	They just allow untold amounts of people to suffer and die.
	You see feminism just absolutely ridiculed and put in its place.
	And on top of that, you see a cultural, societal-wide satanic panic.
	We're talking about, like, major news organizations, like, supposedly serious people.
	Journalists, politicians talking about Satan lurking in the shadows.
	What is happening right now is going to be an equal reaction to what has been happening over the past couple of years.
	And the advent of social media and the internet has created an outlet to people to feel safer, to identify with other people, to realize that they're not alone, that maybe there's nothing wrong with them.
	The equal and opposite reaction, and even overreaction, will be stunning if this comes through.
	I have to tell you what Davidson has written here is a really, really important insight into what they want.
	If what Davidson is advocating here and what the new right is pushing for and organizing for and fighting for.
	And by the way, they're fighting harder than what the opposition is fighting.
	Like, there are people right now who are organizing, who are working on votes, who are doing all this.
	The people who should be fighting this, the politicians, the journalists, the media, they're not paying attention to this.
	They don't want to.
	And why?
	Because they're like, you know, maybe if this stuff happens, I don't know, maybe they'll still protect my money and my power.
	But if this comes to pass, I can't even tell you how many lives will be lost.
	I can't even tell you how much suffering there will be.
	Because to roll back progress on a scale like what Davidson is advocating here, to create this neo-fascistic authoritarian state, And also to have like a failing economy, a bipolar world, sort of the rolling back of not just progress, but neoliberalism.
	It boggles the mind.
	Like I talk about this stuff all the time.
	I cover it.
	I analyze it.
	I have had to develop a pretty Good callous when it comes to this stuff, because how could you not in order to cover it necessarily?
	It makes my skin crawl.
	It's almost too much for me to imagine the tragedy, the people I care about, the people I love, the people out there who are vulnerable already and already suffering.
	The idea that this could take place.
	I mean, the results would be catastrophic.
	Davidson says, quote, to bring this article to a close, If all that sounds radical, fine.
	It need not at this late hour dissuade conservatives in the least.
	Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.
	To those who worry that power corrupts, and once the right seizes power, it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point.
	If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus?
	It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after, emphasis Davidson's, after we have won the war.
	If that doesn't put a chill in you, I don't know what to tell you. - Yeah.
	If you think this is just going to work itself out, I don't know what to tell you.
	This is the defining ideology of not just the new right, but what is taking over the Republican Party.
	And the Republican Party, much like what happened with the Tea Party in 2010, is going to accept this and go with it and run with it.
	The conspiracy theories that they're using to consolidate power right now, it's all part of this.
	You have to believe there's an evil conspiracy against the United States and against evangelicals and against God in order to vote for Republicans right now.
	Or you have to say, eh, my pocketbook is what matters and I'm sure they'll take care of things.
	Those are the two sort of avenues toward it right now.
	And that all leads to this.
	I did a bourbon talk last night.
	I'm taping this on Monday, October 24th.
	I did a bourbon talk last night, Sunday night.
	And I said one of the things that you might have noticed already, but is definitely going to become part of your lives.
	You're going to start seeing people in your life who were very vocally against Donald Trump, who had signs in their yard, hate has no home here, here we believe.
	You're going to see people who, you know, put the hashtag resistance or cheered on Robert Mueller or you name it.
	And they're going to start accepting some of this stuff.
	And they're going to do it if they haven't started already.
	I have a bunch of people that I've started to notice this with and it's discouraging and heartbreaking and hard, really, really hard.
	But it's inevitable that some of these people are going to accept it and even champion it.
	And it has to do with their own wealth, their own position in life, and a view that, you know, I don't know about this transgender stuff or this gay stuff or, you know, I'm tired.
	I'll just go along with it.
	And, you know, I just need to vote for my checkbook.
	There's going to be people who go along with it.
	And it's going to be made to seem Almost hopeful, if not jubilant, by our media.
	They're already doing it.
	The problem all along, for them, was Donald Trump.
	He didn't have the decorum.
	He was abrasive.
	He was rude.
	He was openly racist.
	He was openly sexist.
	He was openly xenophobic.
	He didn't play the role of president the right way.
	He said the quiet part loud.
	They hated him for those reasons.
	They didn't hate him because they necessarily disagreed with him.
	In fact, for a lot of people, I think it reflected back to them the parts of themselves that they hated knowing was there.
	Their own misogyny, their own racism, their own self-dealing and self-interest.
	When we move past Trump, and it feels like we are, Whether it's Ron DeSantis or somebody else, or Carrie Lake, I don't know.
	Whoever it is.
	The economic situation, the situation with the neoliberal machine, because the neoliberal machine, by the way, needs something else.
	It is failing.
	It needs to install discipline.
	It needs someone to take the wheel and react as a strongman.
	It's either that or we change things, which the leftist idea, which I happen to subscribe to, is we need massive change.
	This system sucks.
	It's always sucked.
	It's intentionally cruel and it doesn't work.
	I agree with them when it comes to that.
	It just so happens that I don't think that the answer Discipline.
	I don't think the answer is hurting certain people, which is what they believe.
	Our media and our political class are already starting to accept this.
	Parts of the country are already starting to accept this.
	Think about these quotes that I read, because this is just a sampling.
	I have to tell you, I've been I've been reading up on Christian nationalism, national conservatism, this new right.
	I've been reading up on this the past six years.
	This is, the reason why this went viral is because this is the most accessible version of it, the most cleaned up version of it.
	And I saw where some people who listen to the podcast and are on our discord and all of that, I saw that they were like, Oh my God, can you believe that?
	People were emailing, they were like, can you believe this?
	And it's like, absolutely.
	I can believe it.
	This is tamped down.
	This is toned down.
	Seizing all the power and using it to outlaw your enemies and using the power of the state to inflict ideological orthodoxy?
	That's only the beginning of this stuff.
	You get deeper, oh my god, we're talking eugenics, we're talking possible genocides, we're talking suffering on a scale.
	Again, it makes my skin crawl.
	This article is a good entry point into this mindset.
	This stuff, and I appreciate that people were freaked out about it, this is why I've been freaked out about this stuff for years.
	This is why I do what I do.
	It's because paying attention to it and seeing it makes you realize how dangerous and terrifying this stuff is.
	We can't lose to this.
	And when I say we can't lose to this, I don't mean in the November midterms.
	Those are electoral contests.
	I said it on the livestream last night.
	I said, you know, all signs are pointing towards Republicans making gains.
	I'm not talking about elections.
	Elections are important, but those are the baseline, absolute minimum participation in a democratic society.
	We got a lot of work to do.
	These people, these John Daniel Davidsons, the Federalists, who by the way played a giant role in overtaking the judiciary that I was talking about, you better believe they're doing the work.
	They're dedicated, they're focused, they have the money, they have the energy.
	They're out there doing the work.
	When I say that we can't lose to this thing, I'm not talking about the midterms.
	I'm not even talking about the presidential election of 2024, which, by the way, is going to be part of the rollout of the larger ideological implications of this stuff.
	And we'll cover that more on this podcast.
	I'm talking about we can't lose to this overall.
	We have to outwork these people.
	And we have to expose what this is and what it means.
	We have to make people uncomfortable.
	People who are talking about like, ah, maybe this is okay.
	Maybe those people aren't so bad.
	Maybe DeSantis isn't so bad.
	Maybe national conservatism will work out.
	You have to make those people uncomfortable.
	Because the bourgeois, the middle class, the white population of America, I gotta tell you right now, this is the makeup of the groups that made fascism, Nazism, and other authoritarian reactionary movements like this possible.
	We just can't lose to it.
	We can't.
	And we're not going to.
	And that's why we do the work, that's why we do this podcast, that's why we keep struggling against this stuff.
	Because there is a better future that is possible.
	And I gotta tell you that this, this is bad, bad news.
	And I'm glad some people are starting to wake up to it.
	All right, everybody.
	That's going to do it for this show.
	I appreciate you going through this with me.
	I will be back for the Weekender episode on Friday.
	Again, that is for patrons only.
	Go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
	The support we get from you, not only does it keep us ad-free, but I want to point something out.
	A discussion like the one that we just had.
	This deep dive into this article and that ideology.
	This is stuff that only the McCraig Podcast is doing.
	There are a couple of other places out there, a couple of other people who get into this stuff.
	But this is the story that conventional narratives and conventional politics do not go into.
	Because it makes people uncomfortable.
	Because it's complicated.
	Your support is the reason this show exists.
	The reason why we're still around and we're still fighting this and why this show is growing.
	We need your help.
	We need your support.
	Patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
	You make this whole thing possible.
	We appreciate you so much.
	But this threat, this problem is really, really bad.
	We need more conversations like this.
	We need more shows like this.
	We need more of an effort to expose this stuff for what it is.
	Because it's not going to go away on its own.
	It's not going to fix itself.
	So I'll be back on Friday.
	We've got some cool stuff lined up.
	I've already got one interview in the can with Angela Dinker about Christian nationalism.
	Really, really good interview.
	I can't wait for you to hear it.
	And maybe a little surprise that I'm trying to cook up.
	So cross your fingers on that one.
	All right, everybody.
	If you need me before then, you can find me at J.Y.
	Saxton.
	My God, with stuff like this out in the world.

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