Auron MacIntyre and the hosts dissect America's decline, arguing that government overreach, mass incarceration, and surveillance stem from an oversized state enabling a distributed oligarchy. They analyze the "ratchet effect" where democracy drives society leftward, co-opting former progressives like Piers Morgan while elites prioritize endless wars over national security. The discussion concludes that traditional conservative and libertarian labels are obsolete, suggesting the ruling class's disconnect from reality makes systemic collapse inevitable under bureaucratic entropy. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Overlapping Neo-Reactionary Liberalism00:14:51
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Thank you so much for tuning in today.
We got a very special episode of Part of the Problem.
I am in the new studio.
We have the equipment and the construction done.
It's not fully decorated, but I figured better than recording in the other room.
I'll come in here and test this out tonight.
So hopefully this goes well tech-wise.
I am very excited for today's show.
Before we get into it, I just have a couple quick announcements.
April 1st, this Saturday, I will be speaking at the Mises Caucus event here in New York City.
Tom Woods, Maj Ture, Gene Epstein, Michael Heist will all be speaking there as well.
Very much looking forward to that.
Tickets are still available.
A few tickets left.
I will put the link in today's description.
Also, I will be in Albany at the Funnybone and then in Chicago at Zaney's coming up in the next couple of weeks.
Those ticket links will be in the description as well.
Comicdavesmith.com for all of my dates and tickets and all that stuff.
All right.
Today's episode.
I'm very excited to have our guest for today's show on Aaron McIntyre.
I first was, I had a conversation with Curtis Yarvin a couple months back that was hosted by Michael Malis.
And when that was done, I got a ton of people on Twitter telling me that me and you need to have a conversation.
And then I guess it was maybe last week or the week before, there was another thread that we were both in.
And a lot of people were like, it'd be so great if you guys would talk.
And you agreed.
And I was also happy to have this conversation.
So thank you for taking some time.
It's nice to virtually meet you.
Thanks for coming on Part of the Problem.
Yeah, absolutely, man.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, absolutely.
So after we agreed to do this, I started watching some of your YouTube stuff.
And I got to say, I really enjoyed it.
I think you're a very interesting content creator.
And I understand why people wanted us to have a conversation.
Thanks.
Yeah.
I mean, I do a lot of stuff in kind of the same wheelhouse as Curtis Yarvin, but talking with Curtis is kind of like, you know, just there's just a river constantly rushing over you.
And if you're really lucky, you might be able to get something in there.
So I understand how that might not be a wholly productive thing.
So I get why some people are like, maybe, maybe you should have a different type of conversation.
Yeah, I mean, by the way, it's not a knock on Curtis Yarvin at all.
I think he's a really interesting dude.
And like, I encourage people to check his stuff out.
I think he's got like he stretches your mind and it's very interesting to go down the paths that he goes down.
He's very bright and very well read, but it's a little bit tough to like have a back and forth with him because he hits you with like 17 things and 12 of them are like thought experiments or analogies or something.
And then you're like, I don't even know where to respond to any of that.
But yeah, he was, if people want, they can go check out that conversation we had.
It was on Michael Malice's show, You're Welcome, which you've also been on.
So do you, do you, how would you describe your political views or your philosophical views?
Are you a neo-reactionary?
Is that a good term for you?
It's definitely where a lot of the political thought that I kind of talk about comes from.
I was one of those people who was just really a really standard issue talk radio GOP guy, you know, for most of my life.
A little bit of that libertarian leaning and listening to Neil Bortz on the radio as libertarian, I guess, as people will qualify that.
And then kind of, you know, with the 2016 election and then obviously with the pandemic, I was just like, okay, politics doesn't work anything like I thought it did.
None of this makes any sense.
None of the political theory I was taught.
explains any of this.
So I started looking around, I ran into people like Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, other thinkers in the neoreactionary sphere and kind of started reading a lot of the same people that Yarvina had read.
Okay, sure.
You know, I think there's certainly some overlap between that kind of camp, neoreactionary, whatever you want to call it, and my camp, which would be not just libertarian, but kind of the more, I don't know, I suppose some would describe us as the right-leaning libertarians.
Some people call us paleo-libertarians, whether that's, I don't find it completely accurate, but that's whatever you would call that kind of like the Mises Institute, Ron Paul, Jeff Dice, Hans Hermann Hoppe, Murray Rothbard camp of libertarianism.
And I think that probably one of the areas where we have a lot of overlap or a lot of agreement are kind of assessing the nature of the state, the nature of democracy,
the nature of what is deemed progress and kind of questioning a lot of these things and saying, yeah, if you really have a sober analysis of these institutions and these dynamics, they're not really like objectively speaking, they're not what people claim they are.
It's not true that the government is the will of the people.
It's not true that we're always kind of infinitely progressing.
And it's just like a lot of this stuff.
And even examining some of the assumptions of classical liberalism, a lot of them just aren't true.
And so I do find, I will say, I find neo-reactionary thinkers to be very interesting.
While I don't always agree with them, I have to at least concede, okay, this is an interesting conversation to have.
Whereas with a lot of other people in the mainstream and even kind of in the dissident left, they're still holding on to a lot of these views that are just like, I mean, objectively speaking, it's just not true.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, in a lot of ways, neo-reactionary thinking is just kind of the step after paleo-libertarianism.
That's where a lot of people come to it from.
And so, you know, whenever I would rib on libertarians online, I always be very clear like, except the Mises guys.
They're the good ones.
They're the like, yeah, the paleos are the non-Lulberts.
They're not regime libertarians.
So I think it's very fair to draw a distinction between like your reason, you know, magazine libertarianism and then guys who are really more coming from that paleo background.
And so I think there's a good reason that there's a lot of overlap there.
I think the neoreactionary crowd or just or really what is it, it's updated Italian elite theory, but neo-reactionary sounds a lot more snazzy.
That's good, you know, so that kind of stuck.
But it just kind of takes a lot of the power analysis that was missing from some of the paleolibertarians.
Some of them are good on this, but some of them aren't.
And it just kind of applies that and kind of takes it to its next logical step.
So I think that there's more overlap here than a lot of people understand.
Yeah, okay, I think that's right.
And so let's get into where there is overlap and where maybe we disagree.
But so I think one of the a few areas where we probably agree, where there is overlap is criticism of, as I mentioned, criticism of democracy, criticism of the current regime, the idea that we're an improvement over the past in all ways.
Certainly, I think there are lots of ways.
And I think maybe what it comes down to is the inherent critique of liberalism.
And I think that, and when I say liberalism, I don't just mean, you know, what you would think of today as a liberal, but the entire kind of liberal, classical liberal movement into the neoliberal movement.
I think it kind of makes sense that there would be a rise in people who are criticizing the entire thing, especially as it seems like we might be in the death rows of this entire order.
I don't know that we are, but it certainly seems more and more likely that that's where we are today.
And so let me ask you, do you think, because maybe this is an area where we have some agreement and some disagreement, do you think, because I've heard this, a lot of people in this camp, in the neo-reactionary camp kind of talk about this stuff, do you think that what we're seeing today is like a perversion of liberalism, or is it the logical conclusion of liberalism?
I think it's the logical conclusion of liberalism.
I think, of course, that if you look at something like the liberalism, the classical liberalism of America's founders, it sure looks radically different, obviously, than what we have today.
And I think that the founders, if you read the Federalist Papers, had a much better grasp on maybe some of the limitations of liberalism.
They were very skeptical themselves of democracy, even though it's now carried out in their name.
They understood the importance of things like the community and kind of the culture of the people being a central part of constitutional government.
Today, many conservatives and unfortunately, many libertarians like to pretend that constitutions and contracts enforce themselves and are some kind of magical apparatus that kind of holds back government, but they don't.
And the founding fathers were very familiar with the fact that you needed a very specific type of people, a group of people with very specific morals and cultures and backgrounds who would enforce those things.
And so I think there is an argument to say that maybe the classical liberalism of the American founders is significantly different from what we have now.
But I think what it did do in many ways was enable a slow degradation of that system.
Unfortunately, like you talked about, democracy is, I think, antithetical to freedom.
It's the enemy of liberty.
It's not the handmaiden of it.
And so over time, as the franchise expands and the influence of democracy expands, liberty necessarily is reduced.
I don't know if liberty is in and of itself a good end, but if that is your end, democracy is not your friend.
And so I think there we have a pretty good agreement.
Yeah.
So there's a lot that's very interesting about that.
So I'd say I believe it was Jeff Deist who said, he said, whatever you think about classical liberalism, it didn't hold.
You know, so like whatever, whether it's almost a, you know, like if you were to take Lysander Spooner take on this, you know, on like his thing on the Constitution, be it one thing or the other, it either authorized what we have today or it was useless to stop it.
Either way, that's, you know, that's a comment on classical liberalism, which really did win out in its day and certainly hasn't held to this point.
But I would take more of a Hoppian perspective on this, where I'd say that there were fatal conceits within classical liberalism that led to where we are today.
But that's not necessarily to say that the best parts of it weren't correct.
So if, you know, again, if there's one term to describe Ludwig von Mises and Hillary Clinton, probably that term is not very accurate, you know, like probably something, something's gone wrong in there if you can call both of them liberals, which in popular language, people would call both of them liberals, at least in their day.
I think that one of the fatal conceits of liberalism was that democracy would somehow give, you know, I think the argument at the time was that, you know, the monarchs are above the law, but if they were held to a vote, then the people would have a say.
I can totally understand why that would make sense in theory.
But in practice, I think we'd probably both agree that in fact, it's granted governments more power than monarchs ever could have dreamed of having.
Absolutely.
And the reason that Hop is the best libertarian is he takes his theory of power from Bertrand de Juvenal.
The things that you like from Democracy the God That Failed are almost like one-to-one transcriptions of a large chunk of On Power by Bertrand de Juvenal.
Now, a lot of credit to Hoppe.
I'm not selling him short here.
He does a really excellent job of grafting things like time preference onto his explanation of de Juvenal's theory of power, but his theory of power is lifted pretty much wholesale from de Juvenal.
And de Juvenal, like Hop, points out that, oh, you know, while we think of kings as tyrannical and having all of this power, at some level, they were still one man asking much from many.
And that meant that there were many natural social limitations to a king's power, especially in the Anglosphere.
As opposed to democracy, we think of democracy and popular sovereignty as checks on power.
That's kind of the story we hear about the Constitution.
But it's really hard to ignore the fact that as democracy has expanded, the state has expanded along with it.
And everything from standing armies to large percentage income tax to top-down social engineering all come from democratic mandates, not from some kind of divine right of kings.
And so democracy really does seem to be a legitimating mechanism that allows government to grow almost unchecked, despite the fact that we've heard that it's actually supposed to control our rulers.
Right.
And as you pointed out, as you mentioned, a legitimating mechanism where it kind of gives people this feeling that, well, whatever they're doing to you is what we chose and therefore it's complete.
Whereas it would be so naked and obvious if it were a monarch or if it were some one royal family or something like that that was looting the entire population.
It'd be very hard for them to get away with it.
Democracy As A Legitimating Mechanism00:05:41
And when it's done democratically, it's much easier for people to feel like, well, you know, there we went.
We had a fair shot at the game and we lost the game.
However, if you actually look at it just objectively, there are so many policies.
Like I think one of the best examples is just, you know, in the last couple of weeks, we've seen like these banker bailouts that have been happening with, you know, a couple of banks that have, you know, on the verge of failing because all of the banks are completely insolvent.
And the banker bailouts in 2008 were like amongst the most unpopular federal policies in the last hundred years, if you measure it by polling.
But we'll still see another round of them.
And it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter whether the voters like, you know, rejected those policies.
They simply, the game is kind of rigged and controlled.
And no matter who you vote for, you know, and most people weirdly on a gut level, I think would understand this, but still won't question the kind of, you know, the religion of democracy is that they'll go, well, who do you really think the government works for?
You or Goldman Sachs?
Who do you really think they're here to serve?
And it doesn't matter whether you have more, the people in general have more votes than Goldman Sachs.
We all know who they're here to serve.
And so everyone kind of knows this on a gut level, but it's, you know, still somehow people, like if you challenge democracy, that's considered like, I don't know, you're evil, you're a Nazi or something like that.
Well, the story of self-liberation is a powerful one, right?
Like everybody wants to feel like they're in control.
Everyone wants to feel like they're in charge.
And so when you have a monarch, you're right.
Like that's really clear.
It's hard to argue who sent the troops to rough up your town and take your tax money.
Like you know.
Now you might not have a good political recourse to do anything about it.
But if you are going to hold someone accountable, you know whose house to sack, right?
Like you understand the direct relationship.
The thing about kind of our democracy is that it creates this distributed oligarchical system where you don't really know who to hold accountable because there's always in theory a political recourse, even though it never happens.
And I was red-pilled on this kind of stuff the same way you were.
I looked at, in my instance, immigration numbers.
If you look at how unpopular mass immigration is over the last couple of decades, even across parties, to be clear, even the Democrats until just about, I think about a decade ago, really were in majority against mass immigration.
So even though both, even though people from both sides, the entire American public really did not want mass immigration, both parties, no matter what they said in public, continued to enable it on every level.
And so whether it's bank ballouts or immigration or anything else, it's very clear that over time, the things driving the decisions of our government are not public opinion.
It's our apparatus that manufactures public opinion, not our public opinion that informs our government or apparatus.
And so I think that it's still hard for people to look at that, though, because they're so used to the idea that everyone has agency in a political system.
And if you admit that democracy doesn't actually respond to popular sovereignty, then you're also admitting that you don't actually have any control over the government.
And I think that's a very odd place for people to put themselves in at this point.
Yeah, I think you're right.
But at the same time, it does seem like there is kind of a big change going on that we're living through, where a lot more people are willing to wake up to these ideas.
And I think a lot of that is because, you know, the last few years have been pretty crazy and pretty wild.
And it's been obvious to a lot of people that whatever, that the system isn't working anymore.
You know, I think there's, I think people are very, people have an unbelievable ability to look the other way, even at corruption or even at like to avoid the cognitive dissidence of things that fly in the face of their narrative while things are working.
And once they stop working, then things change.
And I kind of think that's the point that we're at now, where it's like, oh, yeah, but you know, the problem now is that actually there are like this whole system has become so corrupt that it can no longer function in the most basic ways.
That we're all, we're worried about like supply chains and we're worried about like whether our kids will have a drastically worse life than we've had.
And that's that to me seems to be in a lot of ways that kind of wakes people up more than any of these arguments that me or you might be able to make.
It certainly makes them receptive to them once they realize that kind of that miracle of progress is not going to continue forever.
And so I think you're right that as people start running into the fact that they can't get like important products, that things become less available, that they can't get housing or start families.
then people start saying, okay, how much better is this than what we had X number of years ago?
Are we really in a situation where we're always progressing?
I don't think we are.
And so you hope that that does bring change.
But of course, there are plenty of countries that live in just third world conditions, you know?
So while material conditions changing can awaken people to kind of the corruption of their system, that doesn't always necessarily trigger change, though I do hope we're not in that situation.
Affordable Online Professional Counseling00:02:15
Yeah, but it's a little bit different for a country to exist in a third world condition than it is for a country to exist in a first world condition and then be degraded down to third world conditions.
So there's, you know, like it's, it'll be interesting to see how people kind of handle that.
Not saying we're going down to a third world condition, but certainly in many aspects, we're being degraded from where we were, you know, like a couple decades ago or a decade ago, even.
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Civil Rights And Skepticism00:13:16
All right, let's get back into the show.
I'm curious what your thoughts are about the, obviously there was this school shooting the other day.
Not that this one shooting is particularly that big of a, like in the grand scheme of things, a big change, but it is, it kind of brings up to the surface this conversation about what the latest iteration of civil rights, you know, the civil rights kind of movement is, which is this like transgenderism.
And I'm curious how you feel.
To me, I've talked about this a lot on the show.
It really seems like this is something different.
Like obviously, this is a continuation of kind of the civil rights ideology, or at least it's attempting to derive its power from the legacy of civil rights, you know, victories.
It does seem to me like this is something different in kind and scale.
And that this the backlash we're seeing against this is something different than any of the other kind of like civil rights.
You know, I don't know, any of the other projects within my lifetime, whether it was gay marriage or something like that.
This seems to be different.
And it almost seems like the elite class are overplaying their hand.
And this is like almost too weird and too different that there's no way it's not going to get a substantially like it's not going to get substantially more backlash than those other movements would have gotten.
Do you agree with that?
Or like, what do you think?
There's definitely a feeling that they might have tried to boil the frog a little too fast on this one.
Yeah.
Normally, like you said, a lot of this of the civil rights revolution has moved along because obviously, you know, the original victory of the civil rights movement and the insubstantiation of the civil rights law framework has really created an easy way for groups that may or may not have any legitimate claim to that movement of a way to kind of completely circumvent the constitution and any kind of rule of law.
There's basically two constitutions in the United States and everyone wants access to the one that basically supersedes the actual written constitution, which is civil rights law, which is why every issue that is going to be an issue in America today has to be a civil rights issue.
You'll notice that with just basically anything.
It immediately becomes a civil rights campaign because everyone understands that there's just kind of this I win button if you manage to go ahead and link it to this kind of body of court decisions and kind of all the other organizations and media hype and everything else that attaches itself once you've kind of won this designation as part of the next wave of the civil rights movement.
And this has been extremely effective because they've just yelled bigot and racist or whatever.
And oh, you don't want to be on the wrong side of history.
You don't want to be that guy holding the mean sign in the 1960s for your kids to look at in history films for the next 20 or 30 years.
And so by doing that, they've kind of been able to just destroy any separation of powers or any due process or any kind of legislative restriction.
And they've just been able to establish a whole host of rights kind of through this process for all kinds of different groups.
And every time they do this, it creates power for the leftist coalition.
It creates a whole nother set of make work jobs.
It enables a whole other set of NGOs.
It creates a whole other set of those who are dependent on the patronage network.
But they have to look for increasingly smaller and smaller wedges of the society with which to kind of pick and bludgeon what's left of our social fabric and extract kind of the money and power that's left out of the social movement.
And when they hit the trans movement, I think that one's particularly dangerous because it does seem to have finally triggered the fight instinct with many conservatives and kind of regular Americans that otherwise were just kind of put on the back heels by the relentless PR campaigns of the media and such.
And you hope at this point that they've bit off more than they can chew.
this does shatter the illusion that all this is done in good faith and in the name of civil rights or human rights.
But the media is a powerful tool.
And we're seeing what's happening now after the shooting, we see the media goes out and lectures the very people who were the victims of this.
If only you, you know, if only you hadn't been wearing a skirt that was that short, then this person wouldn't have had to come in there, you know, like basically just saying, you know, if you guys had, you know, if you just let us mutilate your kids, then you wouldn't have to worry about them getting shut up in a school.
I mean, it's absolutely insane.
I don't mean literally what the media is doing.
Yeah, I don't mean to laugh at that because it's like, it's, it's really fucked up, but it is hilarious just as you say it back to me.
And it is actually what's happening.
It's like, holy shit.
Like that is actually the, they found a way to go like, oh, yeah.
So a trans person shot up a Christian school.
Yeah, you asshole Christians.
You really should have let us been be trans with that.
Like it's, it's really bananas that that could be the response.
And look, I've seen bad takes all around on this.
And I do, I, I don't like, look, I, I think as people who know, who listen to the show, I've been critical of a lot of parts of the kind of like trans ideology.
I'm not, I think there are sloppy takes where people are like, yes, this proves that trans people are going to go out and shoot everybody up or something like that.
And it's like, okay, well, not exactly, but for your response to this to be that like, yeah, it's the Christians' fault for getting shot up by the, it's, it's, that is really hard to stomach.
Um, it's what's interesting about kind of this, this latest push.
And like you said, they might be boiling the frog a little bit too fast here is that, look, I'm, I'm a hardcore libertarian.
I have my issues with, obviously, with like civil rights legislation in general.
I believe in property rights.
I don't think people should be forced to associate with anyone they don't want to.
I would even, I'd have issues with like gay marriage being legalized.
I don't really think the government should be involved in marriage or something like that.
But at least all of those things actually existed, if that makes sense.
Like it was actually real.
There were like laws that compelled segregation.
There were laws that said gay people can't be married.
The trans thing is the first one that you're like, number one, it's not real.
And number two, it's targeting children and targeting other people's children.
That is such a, like, it's such a leap from what any of this stuff was before.
And so it's kind of interesting to see it getting the pushback that it is.
I don't know what all of this means, but I do sense there's something different about this gasp, that it's not the same as the previous ones.
I mean, it might be a continuation in the trend, but I think it's an overreach.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I don't know what you think about that.
I think it's certainly a continuation of the trend.
I mean, if you look at the religious right or social conservatives in the 1980s, they made a bunch of predictions that were characterized as crazy, insane, ridiculous.
Oh, I mean, well, how hyperbolic can you be?
Yeah, sure, that's going to happen.
And if you look now, all of those predictions were way too mild, right?
If you had described to people in the 1980s that we would have like drag queens in schools reading to children and we would have kindergarten teachers trying to teach kids like how to masturbate and that they're not boys or girls.
If you had told that to some like a Christian conservative in the 1980s who was really, really conservative, they would have been like, okay, man, I mean, I know it's going to be bad, but let's not be ridiculous.
Like, obviously, like no one would allow that, but it's happening right now.
And so I think it's fair to create some linkage here.
Like, I think if people correctly predict the future, then it might be willing, it might be reasonable to say perhaps there was some reasoning behind what they said.
But I do think you're right that this is too intense for people.
I think this, this, like we said, this, this has triggered something in people who otherwise have just kind of laid down for all of the previous iterations or this, because it really does feel, I think, for a lot of people that this is kind of the last part of it.
And they're right, because the key for any totalitarian state, the total state always wants to destroy families because the family is the last bastion.
It's the last place.
It's the most natural small community in which the government does not have power.
And whether you're the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany or the United States of America in 2023, if you want total control of your population, you need to gain the ability to turn children against their parents.
And that's what trans ideology does at its core.
It robs parents of their authority over their children, which means it robs parents of their ability to tell them anything the state doesn't want them to think.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And I think it's the family unit and religion.
Those are the two things that the totalitarian states always try to like, you know, eliminate because both of them kind of for the same reasons, that they're both a check against state power, ultimately.
Yeah, I mean, I'll say this, and I've mentioned this many times before, that I remember like very vividly, I remember listening to people like Jerry Falwell when I was like in the 90s, when I was a kid, like a teenager.
And back then, there was like a debate about gay marriage, although it didn't end up being legalized for another decade.
But I remember them saying things like, well, if you let gays get married, then we have no standards anymore.
Then you're going to see, you know, bestiality.
You're going to see all this crazy stuff.
So some of the ones on, you know, on the more like far Christian right were, they, I wouldn't say they were, uh, they couldn't have foreseen how bad things were.
They were predicting other things that were very bad, but, you know, kind of in the ballpark, they're going to go after the kids was a big one.
So I'll give them that.
And at the time, I thought it was the dumbest argument I had ever heard.
I was like, this is so stupid that anyone would believe that because you let two men get married, that then you're going to see them go after the kids, that in no way logically follows.
So I do have to at least admit, okay, there was a lot more truth to that than I would have believed at the time.
I would also just say that I, so I agree with you that, okay, if someone does accurately predict the future, but maybe we should have a tendency towards saying, okay, there's probably something to what they said.
But it also doesn't, because two things happen, you know, doesn't necessarily mean that they were destined to happen.
However, yes, that is where we are.
That's where we started.
And this is where we are now.
I don't know.
I think that it's, I would like to think there it would be possible for there to be a world where, say, marriage was privatized or even gay marriage was legalized and we didn't have to, like it wasn't necessary to go in this direction after that.
But maybe this is to some degree where I'm a little skeptical of some of the NRX claims that it's almost like this was inevitable that we would go in this direction once we started here.
Do you think like this is just, it's kind of like, I think Curtis Yarvin had an analogy about like almost like a decaying piece of fruit out in the sun or something like that.
Like once it starts decaying, it's inevitable that it's going to go in this direction.
Sure.
So some of these are NRX arguments and some of them aren't.
They're just social conservative arguments.
So I don't want to mix the two because there are plenty.
One of the reasons I don't call myself a neoreactionary is that actual like neoreactionary philosophy has some solutions that I'm not a big fan of.
So I don't want to mix the two.
I think they're right on a lot.
I subscribe to many of their understandings and analysis of power, but I don't want to say, I don't want to speak on the behalf of like, here's all the things that they believe all the solutions they would have.
Atrophy Of The Ruling Elite00:07:02
That said, what he's talking about is entropy and extropy, right?
So the natural state of the world is entropy.
Everything breaks down.
And every time you see civilization and order, what you're watching is extropy.
You're watching the reduction, the reversal of entropy to create and grow and build something.
All things that are assembled will eventually disassemble without proper maintenance, right?
That's just the nature of things.
And this is as true for civilizations and moral structures as it is for a cabin you build in the woods or anything else that nature would eventually reclaim.
And so I don't know if you're familiar with Robert Conquest's laws of power, but this is why Robert Conquest's laws of power are actually just political entropy, right?
The first law is that everyone is conservative about what they know best.
That's your extropy, right?
That once people know something and care about it, they build it up, they create something, it matters to them, they defend it.
The second law is that any organization that's not explicitly right-wing will eventually become left-wing.
Why?
Well, because right-wing is order and extropy and left-wing is disorder and entropy.
And over time, if you're not renewing and gatekeeping and defending your order, eventually it will fall apart and dissolve because there's always an incentive to do so.
There's always power, like we already talked about, in disassembling the social fabric and breaking down the traditional bonds that have held something together.
That's especially apparent in democracy, where wedging people apart and using them against each other is the best way to secure power for your team.
But the final law is probably the most important one.
It's that a bureaucracy is basically indistinct in like a bureaucratic organization.
Basically, the bureaucracy becomes indistinguishable from an enemy, right?
Because the bureaucracy, the bureaucratic actors inside the organization are incentivized to do things that are against the interests of the actual organization.
And again, we see in democracy that our ruling class is far more interested in making sure that they have an eternal war to fund defense contractors than they are in, say, defending our southern border, because defending our southern border means the cutting off their cheap labor.
And so even if everyone in the United States at some point would have preferred, say, a stronger border and an end to mass immigration as opposed to continually going to war forever overseas for no particular reason, we keep going to war overseas for no particular reason.
And so the ruling class eventually becomes an enemy of the people who they're supposed to be caring for because their interests completely separate from the organization they're supposed to be running.
And so I think that's what most interx people are talking about when they talk about the inevitable decay of organizations like this.
Right.
Right.
There's something interesting about the fact, and I think it's kind of what we're living through in this moment, where the ruling elite have gotten, there is kind of this atrophy and they have gotten like so unimpressive to a level that's kind of shocking, I think, to a lot of normal people.
Whereas like, you know, even if you were, if you were to look at like people who were not, I'm not even saying political leaders, although some political leaders as well.
Look, it's say Bill Clinton in his prime, you know, in 1992, despite being like a rapist who was friends with Jeffrey Epstein or whatever.
But, you know, if you listen to him give a speech, you'd be like, okay, he was kind of an impressive guy.
Barack Obama was kind of an impressive guy.
JFK was kind of an impressive guy.
And then just other people within like the kind of like the media world.
William F. Buckley was an impressive guy.
Sure, he worked for the CIA or whatever, but whatever.
He was like, you know, if you listen to him, you were like, this is like, okay, this guy's got something to say.
And you see that totally like degraded today.
Like it's like, whoa, Maxine Waters is supposed to be like Nancy Pelosi.
These people are supposed to be the like elites.
And as that's happened, it seems like there's something where they don't even understand, or maybe they understand more than I do.
But it seems like they're disconnected from the fact that, well, aren't you invested in this whole thing not collapsing?
You know what I mean?
Like, aren't wouldn't you at least think if you're like winning this game, wouldn't you want to keep the game going and not risk that the whole game could be destroyed?
And there seems to be that, that's like a very interesting dynamic about today's politics.
There seems to be no real like understanding from, I mean, look, even as they're provoking this conflict with Russia, like you're like, look, don't you guys care about nuclear war?
I mean, okay, I understand you don't care about a war in Iraq, but like nukes will take out Washington, D.C. You know, like, don't you guys kind of want to try to avoid this?
And I'm constantly blown away by the fact that they would even like be this careless with everything.
Like with you, you're like, this, this could actually result in the chessboard being flipped over and you guys losing your whole, you know, like, okay, you're a parasite.
You don't want to kill the hosts, right?
Yeah, no, it's, it's unfortunately a cycle that every civilization sees.
It's not really unique to ours.
Decadent elites are kind of the end point of almost every civilization.
You know, Vilfredo Pareto had something called the circulation of elites.
And basically the idea is that in a healthy society, you would have an elite structure that's not completely open, but is open enough for capable people to kind of rise in there.
So when you have smart people, when you have capable people, they're going to be able to elevate themselves in some way.
And every civilization had this sometimes, you know, you had the Roman elites adopting capable people or you had the church or just different infrastructures.
Eventually it became capitalism and mercantilism that allowed people to kind of be elevated into these positions.
But you have to have some way for like capable people to come in and kind of renew your elite structure.
But today our elites are closing themselves off as much as possible, right?
They're literally building like racial quotas and ideological tests into every credentialing institution that allows people to have any kind of position of significance in the United States.
And so unsurprisingly, the people that are now running our society are not, there's no renewal.
We're not elevating the best and brightest.
We're locking them out of these situations.
And the people left there are dumber and worse at their job, but they're also more sure that they deserve it than any people have ever been because no one else is allowed to be elevated.
Holistic Hair Growth Solution00:02:05
There's no competition for it for these spots.
They get it just because of their birthright, essentially, or their ability to kind of display loyalty to the regime.
And anytime you have this kind of Leninism where you're taking people who are less capable and using them to replace people who are more capable simply because they are more ideologically aligned or more loyal and more importantly, more dependent on the regime, then you're always going to have a degradation.
And so this is rather unfortunate, but it's also entirely predictable.
It's just kind of late stage regime stuff.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how late stage we are.
Exactly.
So I guess we're all going to figure that out.
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You had a video that I just checked out the other day that I thought was really interesting about, I think it was something, I can't remember the title, but it was something about neoconservatives.
And you were using the term neoconservative, not in the traditional sense of like the actual neocons who are like followers of Urban Crystal or something like that.
But you were talking about this kind of dynamic where ex lefties come over into the conservative world and then become kind of like the most elevated conservative spokesman.
And there was something about it I thought was very interesting.
And one of the themes, Michael Malice, a good friend of mine, of course, you did a show and I've done a show a bunch of times and I love the guy.
He came up with this tagline that was conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.
Like the idea being that like whatever conservatives are fighting for is like basically just trying to solidify the progressive victories from a decade ago, maybe two decades ago, if you're lucky.
And you kind of talked about this dynamic.
And I think this is part of this whole process of how things keep moving left and keep degrading more and more that so often you have these people who are like completely with the program up until last minute ago.
And then they come over and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, this last inch is completely unacceptable.
And then that becomes like the new leaders.
And it was a very interesting way because, of course, if people don't know, the neoconservatives, the real original neoconservatives were all like Trotskyite leftists who then came over and decided, hey, wait, you know, that's not quite enough.
And they kept a whole bunch of their Trotskyite tendencies, but with the American flag wrapped around it or whatever.
And I was thinking about this.
So I watched that video the other day.
And then I happened to see there was a tweet by Jank Uger.
I'm sure you know who he is from the Young Turks.
And he was talking about how like, I don't know, whatever the latest thing is that it's it's not right to blame all white people for so and so.
And it was just so interesting to see that you're like, I just watched your video on that.
And I was like, yep, there you go.
That's exactly the thing.
It's like, okay, you're supposed to be now the great, like, you know, I don't know.
And then you see people on the right going, yeah, okay, thank you, Jank, for your good take for once.
And I just did my last episode.
I was talking about Piers Morgan, who was just, I mean, the guy is awful on every issue when it matters.
I mean, he was he at one point, I think he once advocated that people should be jailed for using the N-word.
He wanted guns rounded up after every mass shooting.
He was saying that people who didn't get the vaccine should like not have full rights.
He is currently advocating full total war on behalf of, you know, the Donbass region being ruled by Kiev rather than Moscow.
But he will have a dude in a dress on his show and say, I think that's a dude.
And so that's enough for like a lot of like, you know, people, conservative types to go like, all right, he's really, he's fighting for us.
And there's almost like there's this dynamic where as the left gets crazier and crazier and crazier, if anyone will even stand up to the latest sliver of crazy, they become almost like lionized on the right wing.
And then you're like, oh, but you can just see in the bigger picture, you can see what's happening here.
It's just the ratchet effect.
Like, oh, okay.
So we're just going to keep moving it over and over and over and then celebrating these people.
And I don't, I don't know exactly what the solution to that is, but I was saying like, hey, stop celebrating these guys.
Stop celebrating the people who are just standing up to the latest iteration of insanity.
Yeah, it's, you know, the conservative hero Ronald Reagan has a famous quote.
I didn't leave the left, the left left me.
And no one ever seems to kind of evaluate what that really means.
It means that Ronald Reagan had the same views that, or at least thought he had pretty much the same views as a lion of the right in the 1980s as he had as a liberal younger in his life.
So that meant that the left had moved so far that he was no longer located there.
That also meant the right had moved so far that he was now located inside the right.
And this happens so often for, again, people like you're talking about.
Ching's kind of robin to his Batman Anna Kasparian, you know, came out and said, like women are actually women.
Like she, she did the J.K. Rowling thing.
And, you know, of course, she immediately, you know, now we have the young TERFs, you know, they're, they're, they're going to be hunted down for this.
But, you know, you see people look at someone like J.K. Rowling and they're like, oh, look, she stood up to wokeness.
And oh, aren't you glad you're on our side now?
And she's like, no, I hate you.
Like, like, like, she's, she doesn't like the right.
She doesn't like conservatives.
She doesn't like any of those people.
They don't see a problem with their support of every bit of the revolution up to the point until the revolution got to something they held sacred.
And then all of a sudden, the revolution's a problem.
And they find themselves, you know, with a strange new respect from the right and all of a sudden they see an opportunity to go ahead and step into leadership.
And, to be fair, a lot of times conservatives are so desperate to have a, a convert or a celebrity on their side that they'll rush over and just kind of agree to almost anything that that person is pushing for inside the conservative sphere, as long as they can now count this person as some kind of convert.
Because conservatives are just kind of always under the impression that they're just like one election away from victory.
They don't understand kind of the totality of their problem, and so because of that they're willing to make all kinds of concessions in the short term, thinking that it's going to grasp them a larger part of the electoral uh uh map, and then they're going to kind of ride that to victory and everything will kind of revert back to 1990s or 1950s or whatever.
But it never does.
It just gets further and further and further left.
Because democracy is a dialectic that will always drive things left-wing.
The power will always be in disassembling traditional values, traditional structures, society.
In this way, democratic power is always created by unlocking and breaking these bonds and then kind of distributing the spoils that's created by the disassembling.
And so one of the things that the right just doesn't understand but I guess we kind of both agree with, since we don't we don't really like democracy is that as long as you're playing the democratic game, you're always going to drift leftward.
That's, that's an unescapable function of the political system you're in.
Trump Too Radical For Republicans00:06:54
Yeah well, I think certainly you're.
You're always going to drift in a direction of what, of what is the best way for the powerful to pull the wool over the eyes of the masses, and whatever that is going to be is going to be where you're going to continue to go.
And it's interesting to see, like you know, I I remember I did this episode years ago I think it was like in 2017 or maybe 2018 or something like that um, where uh Ben Shapiro had given a speech on the the like what he called the alt right.
Um, he was talking about like Nick Fuentes and uh Owen Benjamin and uh, two people i've i've had on the show uh several times, and what was interesting is so he's going from this perspective.
He was arguing that basically, like uh, they weren't true conservatives because they were, like uh, race racialists or whatever, and you're like, oh, the racism is just something that true conservatives can't stand with.
Now, however you feel about Owen Benjamin or Nick Fuentes or Ben Shapiro, it's just such a bizarre argument to make.
Like he's like, I am a religious constitutionalist conservative and I am just outraged by this like racialism.
And you're like, well okay, but you know like what?
So what are you saying?
So you're like, you're this hardcore conservative and you want to take it all the way back to what the 80s like, even at your most like radical.
You're saying, and, by the way, i'm not a racialist and I don't, like you know, subscribe to any of that, but it's just, I can still recognize that you go with.
The game here is that you just accept everything that conservatives would have been against.
And so in your example of Ronald Reagan, I mean, he was like, well, i'm an Fdr Democrat and the you know, the Democrats left me.
I didn't leave them.
And you're like, oh well, I don't know, don't we want someone who is fighting against Fdr, like the old right, the um, you know uh, Robert Taft types were.
We're fighting against the new deal.
So now you're throwing all them under the bus.
That's now outside of the Overton Window.
That's not acceptable anymore.
And now you're going.
Well obviously, we all agree that.
You know, Fdrs was the new Deal was correct.
No one's fighting against Social Security.
And then, of course, Reagn't talking about, like abolishing Medicare or Medicaid or anything like that.
It's like no, but we're trying to cut back and and even today, you see it, where you know um, I mean, there's cultural issues of course, as well, but even like Obamacare, the idea of fighting against that, that's over, that's completely over.
No Republicans trying to go back to that.
That was not that long ago I know it seems crazy long ago, is not that long ago that this was a crazy fight between like, the conservatives and the progressives, and it's just been completely conceded.
That's where you get your health care.
If you can't afford to like, get private insurance through a business, you are going to get your health care through the state exchange in the United States Of America.
That's the and so you just kind of watch this happen over and over again.
And this happens both in kind of like the political realm and in the cultural realm where, in the cultural realm, it's more just kind of like, you know, anyone suggesting that they don't believe in gay marriage.
That is totally outside the Overton window now.
Now it's like, I mean, I guess maybe there's a little bit of a move back toward it as things are getting so crazy, but the trend in general is just that whatever the left's victories were a decade ago, are now the conservatives like the given and sometimes will even spin it as their victory.
Yeah, the well yeah, because they're still fighting over the legacy of uh, of uh, of uh Mlk.
Right, he's a he.
The Republicans are the real heirs to the, to the legacy of Mlk uh.
But yeah, I mean, you look at uh.
You know Barack Obama in 2008.
He is now too radical to be a Republican.
He's too radically right wing on marriage because he said marriage is between a man and woman.
By the way, so did Joe Biden in 2006.
So both of those gentlemen are now way too radical for Senate Republicans who voted to change the definition of marriage and codify it into law.
So if you need you know, if you need a recent example of drift, then that there's one right there.
But Yarvin has a really helpful thought experiment.
Uh, you know he's got the the phrase Cthulhu swims slowly but he always swims to the left.
And he said, you know, if you, if you pick up Ben Shapiro, he specifically uses Ben Shapiro, so that works here.
He says, you pick up Ben Shapiro, who's supposed to be like the most radical crazy right-wing commentator of you know available today he's, he's breathing fire dragon of the left, you know.
And you drop him into the average neighborhood from 50, 60 years ago.
Ben Shapiro is to the left of all of those people, right.
And if you pick up the craziest right-wing commentator from 50, 60 years ago and you drop him into a neighbor like just an average neighborhood from 100 years ago, he's the craziest left-wing person in that neighborhood right, And we can do this experiment reliably pretty far back.
We can continue to do this.
And so the point is there's something else here, right?
If politics is always moving this direction, then there's something at play.
You know, the left likes to talk about the long arc of history, right?
The inevitable progress.
And the reason they can say that is there's at least some truth in the fact that what's happening is inevitable, but it's not necessarily progress so much as it is social entropy, like we talked about.
Like these things decay over time.
And as they do, the window moves and moves and moves and moves and moves until the point where Donald Trump, who is basically a blue dog Democrat, who like was on board with gay marriage and all kinds of other stuff, is now the most radical right-wing human being that the media can imagine.
Someone who would have been a Democrat and was a Democrat just a few decades earlier is the most radical right-wing person.
And of course, that means that he's the edge of the Overton window, right?
He's as far as anyone can go because he's basically Hitler at this point, right?
And so there couldn't be anything beyond Donald Trump.
There couldn't be anything to the right of Donald Trump.
And so this inevitable shift of the window in this direction assures that there's any, never any real opposition to progressivism or leftism or wokeism or whatever you want to call it.
It's only ever going to get more radical as long as this is the dynamic in play because they always get to re-anchor the window way to the left of where it was just a few decades earlier.
Moinkbox Meat Subscription Offer00:02:40
Yeah.
I mean, feel however you feel about Trump, like personally or his like style, his actual policies were completely in line with being like an 80s Democrat, 90s Democrat, maybe.
I mean, really wouldn't have been everything from immigration controls to hesitation on fighting, you know, like too many wars to, you know, better like trade protectionism.
Like protectionism, being opposed to some of these trade deals, all of that stuff, all his major issues could have been completely in line with the Democratic Party.
And like you said, he was.
He was like a major donor to them before that.
So maybe this, because we were supposed to argue more than we have been.
We're supposed to disagree.
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This was one thing I did kind of disagree with you about that I want to dive into a little bit more.
Because I saw one of your one of one of the videos of yours that I watched recently, which I did like the video, but I disagreed with some of what you were saying.
But it was something like they won't stop targeting your kids.
If you remember the one that I'm talking about.
I'll put your YouTube link in the description of the episode so people can go check all of your stuff out.
But so it seemed to me like one of your views of why the conservatives keep losing to the left was almost like that they had accepted libertarianism too much.
It's kind of like those the ones who just want to be left alone are always going to lose to the ones who want to win.
And that the conservative movement had just kind of accepted this idea that we can't use government against our enemies.
Am I getting that wrong or what exactly?
No, that's essentially right.
Like you, I mean, that's one of many reasons.
And of course, as we've already discussed, we'll have to be careful about how we define libertarianism.
Because whenever someone, for instance, jumps into the comments and says, you and Dave Smith have to debate because you just disagree so much.
What they're saying is like, because I'm making fun of Belway libertarians, I'm just saying the same thing.
I would really, I'm just going to, I'm going to make a short plea to you and all the Mises guys.
Just change the name to something else.
Like if, like you said, if Hillary Clinton is a libertarian and Bill Maher is a libertarian and Greg Gutfeld is a libertarian and Mises is a libertarian, the word just doesn't mean anything.
I don't call myself a conservative.
Well, hold on, but Greg Gutfeld's all right.
But those other ones, but I'm not saying he's not.
What I'm saying is if all of these people wear the same moniker, then something is wrong with the moniker, right?
And so I just, I understand the attachment to it.
I get it.
It's our word, right?
We own it, right?
I understand why you would want to hold on to it.
But I'd like, like I said, even though I was a conservative for most of my life, I don't call myself a conservative because I don't think that I hold to the values of the 1990s GOP or the political orthodoxy of the 1990s GOP.
And the word is so useless at this point.
I think we need a new one.
That was what my latest piece was about over at the Blaze was conservatives dead and we need a new thing.
We got to build a new thing.
That doesn't mean I'm refuting all of the things about conservatism.
There's still principles of it that I hold dear.
But the term has become useless in the popular culture.
And I think we need something else.
I think the same is true of libertarians.
It's not that there isn't truth in parts of libertarianism.
It's not that specifically the Mises caucus doesn't have something valuable to say.
But the term itself is just, it's owned by 400-pound fat guys dancing in their underwear and talking about the age of consent.
It just is.
Like, that's what people think of when they think about libertarianism.
Well, see, I don't know if that's exactly true.
See, okay.
So in general, like, look, there is, there's, there is some truth to the fact that like, okay, sometimes a term becomes so useless that you just have to abandon it.
But also sometimes the linguistic battle is important.
And you can't, and this is, by the way, I think part of how the left wins at everything is they take over these terms over and over.
And if you keep seeding ground, you're always like giving them kind of the win.
So I will say liberal, I think is dead.
I will abandon liberal.
There's like, okay, Mises called himself a liberal, but I'm going to give up on the term because at this point in the popular, you know, like mind, it's just, it means nothing like what Mises was talking about.
Libertarian, I got to say, I think a lot more people think Ron Paul than think that fat dancing naked guy who was an embarrassment.
And I think that it's kind of like almost what's going on in the Republican Party, where the neocons have been completely beat down and the kind of like populist, more Trump supporters are winning.
And even right now, if you look at the polls, it's like it's DeSantis and Trump and no, Nikki Haley's at like 1%.
Like no one's supporting this kind of like that vision, even though if you look at the think tank power or something like that, the neocons are wrecking, you know, the populists.
Like, but the, but amongst the base, there's just way more support for this kind of new Trumpian direction.
I think that's also true within the libertarian movement.
Like, yes, there is Cato and reason.
And even within Cato and Reason, there's some splits about this.
But if you look at what just happened with the Libertarian Party, if you also just look at like all of the kind of like now in the social media age, all the rise of like the popular libertarian people, it's kind of all, it's like the Ron Paul people and the next generation from that.
That's where all the energy and enthusiasm is.
So I think like, I don't, I'm not that attached to a word.
You know what I mean?
Like I would just if we were beaten and they had 90% of it and we had 10, I'd go, all right, we got to come up with a new word.
But I feel like we got 90 and they got 10.
So I'm like, you know what?
I think we should keep this word.
But regardless of that, semantics aside, if you're just like, if your criticism is of the regime libertarians or something like that, fine.
But if we're actually talking about what I mean by it and what the people in my camp mean by it, the idea of, you know, private property rights and the non-aggression principle and self-ownership and drastically limited government or, you know, maybe even completely limited government, all that.
You know, does the idea that the problem is that the conservatives ever embraced this live and let live philosophy too much to me just seems out of step with like the objective history of what actually happened.
And so I think that, you know, there is what's much more accurate is that the conservative movement abandoned any view of liberty long ago and that this has kind of led them down the primrose path to where we are today.
And so it's, I just felt like, at least from what you were saying in your video, like me and you, while we agree on a lot of this other stuff, we're kind of diametrically opposed on this.
Like I, you know, I think that the conservative movement, at least through their elected officials, have accepted, as you mentioned, since, you know, even Ronald Reagan and well before him, to ever expanding government, more and more centralized state control, and that this has ultimately led to their, you know, to the disaster that we're in today.
Sure.
So there's a lot there to unpack.
So I guess where to begin would be maybe I don't think that simply reducing, having your ideology be that the reduction of government is the overall goal is good.
And the reason is not that I wouldn't agree that a reduction in our current government would be great because our current government is evil and it has terrible, terrible designs for its people and it does not have the interests of its people at heart.
And so I would cheer the disassembly of, say, the state education apparatus the same way you would for the simple reason that it is completely hostile to the well-being of the people of the United States.
And therefore, its existence should just be removed, right?
But I don't think that that's a workable framework for all interactions with the state, because the state is arguably the second most enduring phenomenon in social organization.
The state will always exist once society generates itself beyond a certain level of complexity.
And so the only question then becomes not does the state exist, but to what good does the state exist?
To what ends does it exist?
Who does it serve?
And the answer will always initially be the good of the rulers.
This is something that de Juvenal points out when he's talking about the king.
The king always starts as a bandit.
He always starts as a parasite.
He always starts as a thief upon the people he rules.
But just as Hoppe later kind of takes from de juvenile, the king eventually realizes that if he's got this stock of people and they're his private property and he's going to pass them down to his descendants, it would be far better if these people were living in good conditions and had a better life and were more productive so that when he passed them on to his heirs, they would receive a better product.
And so even in kind of governance, personal property, be it human or otherwise, proves to be a better organizing thing than say a distributed network of understanding of small ownership, i.e. democracy, in which it just makes sense to eat everything you can while you can because some other guy is eventually going to be in charge.
And so if the state is an unavoidable part of human existence, then the real question is, what's the best thing for it to do?
And while I would prefer the influence of government to be relatively small, because I think that does protect the other spheres of social influence like religion and others that are essential for flourishing, I think that having a blanket policy of the government always being small is a problem because for instance, conservatives were taught that we might have neutral institutions, that something like a school could just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic and didn't have to get into any of that messy cultural stuff.
And then kids could make their own decisions based on the influence of their family.
What we're quickly to discover is that when conservatives abandon the culture war and abandon what's being taught in schools, the government doesn't get smaller.
The schools don't get smaller.
The influence of the government ideology doesn't get smaller.
There's just nothing to contest it anymore because the state continues to exist.
And so the only thing that happens is more of state ideology is directly pumped into the students who are captured by this system.
You might say, well, I'd rather get rid of the system.
Me too.
But until then, it matters what's taught there.
Yeah, well, okay, but I agree with that.
Like, so I don't disagree with you that as long as the system's there, I'd rather it teach something good.
Like, yes, I'd rather the, I mean, I'd rather the like public schools teach how great a nuclear family is as long if they're going to exist rather than teach how evil a nuclear family is, right?
But I guess what I disagree with is I don't think that conservatives actually abandon the culture war any more than I think that they abandoned the democratic war.
You know, like they were always kind of trying to win elections.
It's just that as you said earlier, this game is almost rigged toward one side.
And so no matter how much you fight it, it's going to keep going.
And so again, my, my thing that, and again, I, like, I agree with you on a lot of the stuff you're saying, but I guess if there's one thing I'd want to like, like kind of leave you with, and I want you to leave me with stuff too, but I would say that it was almost like I took in that video, like it was almost like you were saying that, well, the Republicans accepted so long ago.
And I heard Michael Knowles say this on Timcast a while back that really, this just makes me want to like argue so much with this, that the idea is that at some point, the libertarians convinced conservatives.
Like it's almost like they bought into this libertarian ideology.
And whether you're talking about Cato or some other libertarians or whoever, the ideology that we just can't even fight this battle.
It's almost like we have to let, you know, we can't use government against our enemies.
And so we're going to stop doing that.
And then that led for this fertile ground to the left to come in and say, well, no one else is going to use the government.
We'll use the government.
Whereas like objectively, that's not what happened.
And so, you know, it's like I'll see sometimes, I saw someone the other day on Twitter, literally just yesterday, I believe, where someone was arguing, they were arguing about like not letting trans people have guns after this last shooting.
And someone, some like libertarian said, they go, well, if you want to let the government take guns away, they're going to end up using that against you.
And it even kind of made me cringe because I understand where that's not.
That's not going to be a compelling argument to a right winger today.
Today, in 2023, it's not going to be compelling to tell a right winger, well, you know, if you support some government policy, it could be used against you because it's like, I don't know, it's already being used against you.
What do you, you know what I mean?
Like, oh, okay.
Oh, I might set a precedent that the government could be a bunch of left wingers who hate right wingers.
So like, I get that.
But if you're just rewinding the tape a little bit, that is exactly what happened.
Like the libertarians were actually right when they were arguing, say, in the year 2003, that like, oh, you want to create a Department of Homeland Security that could end up targeting you someday.
And now it is.
Now the whole war on terrorism is targeting right wingers.
And so like, like, okay, well, I get why that's kind of cringe now to hear from a libertarian.
I also think they were kind of right about this from the beginning.
And as you know, because I know you're well read on all this stuff, look, it was William F. Buckley in the 50s, the most influential member of the conservative movement, at least in the second half of the 20th century, who wrote explicitly that we must reject libertarianism because there's a cold war.
You know, because there's a cold war, his, his quote was, you know, close to it, was that, yes, the great evil is the state.
It's the great enemy of liberty.
But you know what?
We've got a big enemy of liberty abroad.
And so because there's a totalitarian bureaucracy abroad, we need to embrace a totalitarian bureaucracy at home.
And so I guess my, where I disagree with some of the NRX thinkers is that I think that really the problem, although there were fatal conceits in classical liberalism, and although I'll fully acknowledge that, and there were just like flaws, things that were not correct that they believed in.
I really think the fate, like where things really got off the rails was the civil rights kind of like movement from the progressives and the conceit of conservatives to say, we're going to support big government from here on forward for XYZ justification that was always kind of, you know, also backed up by money interests.
Also, Bill Buckley was a CIA guy, you know, all of that.
But that it wasn't like this adherence to libertarian principles.
And in fact, at every step of the way, you can see where they're abandoning it.
And the conservative movement would have been so much better off if they had been listening to like Ron Paul and people like that the whole time.
So I don't know.
That's a little bit, I've been rambling a bit, but anything you want to say to that?
Mechanical Government Growth Formula00:14:24
No, I think there are plenty of fair points there.
You're absolutely right that the libertarians were right about, you know, the Patriot Act and the security state apparatus.
I guess here's the issue.
One, there are still people in the conservative movement arguing exactly the same thing that you just said they're not arguing.
Like literally to this day, even with all the evidence in front of us, there are still people in the conservative movement, guys like David French, who are like, you can't do this or it'll violate viewpoint neutrality.
You can't ban Drag Queen Story Hour.
And this guy is not a libertarian, right?
You wouldn't, you wouldn't describe David French as a libertarian, but that principle is still very alive in large parts of the conservative movement.
So I don't think it's fair to say that this didn't get preached to conservatives and that conservatives didn't follow it to their detriment.
But where you're right is that the conservatives didn't understand, and I think this is true of both conservatives and libertarians, is why government is growing.
It's not because of libertarians and it's not because of conservatives and it's not even really because of Democrats.
Government is growing because that is what government does, because the state will always centralize power, because power is an arms race.
If one entity, if one state secures the levee en masse and the ability to mobilize an entire nation to defeat all the other nations around it, well, guess what your nation has to do?
You better get that draft going because if you don't, you're not going to have a nation to govern, right?
And so what you end up with is a truth that's very difficult for all of us who would prefer that the current state not function the way that it does, is that the Leviathan is globalizing for a reason.
It's growing.
It's becoming international for a reason because the managerial structure that has been created and solidified in our current system thrives off of larger bases, higher production, efficiency, the kinds of things that only come with mass production, mass consumption, and mass management, which means that the state always needs to grow, not only because it wants to acquire more power,
but simply to stay alive in competition with other states.
And that's a really big problem, right?
Because as much as you and I might say our current state is horrible, if we disassemble it tomorrow in the most peaceful manner possible, all the other managerial regimes that are centralizing power don't disappear.
They continue to exist and they continue to amass more and more control.
And I don't have a solution for that problem.
I don't think anyone does.
But I think it's really important for everybody, just like it's important to realize that democracy just pits people against each other instead of pointing to the actual enemy.
I think it's really important for everyone to realize that libertarian, conservative, neoreactionary, whatever, the government is growing for a reason that is mechanical.
And if we ignore that, any attempts to simply disassemble or make government smaller or restrict the power of government will fail because they ignore a core problem that is not just some ideological construction that can be fixed on, you know, in kind of a platonic realm.
It's something that is a real physical problem that continues in our system and will continue unless something completely shifts the paradigm.
And I don't think anyone knows what that will be yet.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I essentially agree with all of that.
And I think that I think that, and this is what Hoppe would argue as well, is that this was one of the major flaws of classical liberalism is that it's kind of like his argument and mine too would be that if you're going to go in the libertarian direction, you have to go all the way, kind of.
And that if you're going to say like, oh, okay, well, we're going to have a libertarian society, except there will be a monopoly on like military and police and then also on law and then also on the courts that determine whether the government's gone too far.
And then that'll all be democratically voted on.
You're like, well, obviously you're setting up a system here where this is just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
And that is what we're living under today.
So I agree with mostly all of that.
I think that it's interesting, like the conservative movement over the last, say, even like 20 years is it's interesting to reflect back on it and see where it's kind of developed and where it's like going now.
And I will say that one of the things that keeps me kind of like at least a little bit optimistic is that I do think there is a large awakening to a lot of the problems that you just laid out.
Now, I don't know exactly what that means, if that's enough to, you know, really make the difference, but it does seem like more and more people, particularly on the right, are recognizing that the kind of this game is not getting them where they want to be and that they're losing, they're going to keep losing unless they try something different.
So that's something, I suppose.
No, I agree.
I think the good news is that there's a reason that guys like you and me are having these conversations because people got really tired of the solutions that were being offered to them.
They realized that I keep sitting down at this table and I lose every single time, but I'm told it's the only table at which I can play.
But if I don't do something, then they're going to take my kids.
And I think it really has gotten to that point.
And people are seeing that and they're saying, okay, so we got to figure something else out.
And so I do think that's why a lot of people are exploring paleoconservatives and paleo libertarians and people that have been well outside the overtune window for a long time, because kind of the current conservative movements and the current libertarian movements that are popularized have just gotten no answers.
Yeah.
And look, I mean, it's been, you know, I talk about this a lot.
It's like a major theme on my show.
But if you look at like, you know, major things that, you know, things like the war in Iraq or the, you know, the financial crisis in 2008 or Obama saying if you like your healthcare, you can keep your health care.
And, you know, there's these major policy disasters that are sold off lies.
And there People do, it, you know, like immediately you may not see exactly what the response is, but if you look at it, say, like 10 years after all those things, you go, oh, there was a big, this actually had a big impact.
If you look at kind of like just the 21st century, say those things I mentioned, the rise of wokeism, then you see Donald Trump get elected and you're like, okay, there was kind of a reaction to this.
And it took a little while to realize exactly what that reaction would be.
But man, over the last three years, this COVID stuff, where it really touched regular Americans' lives.
And now to see kind of like Joe Biden being the president and just how transparently just ridiculous it is that we're, we have to pretend that this old senile guy is even like up to the task.
And there's just a lot of things going on that you're like, wow, I wonder where all of this is going to go in the next few years.
And I don't exactly know, but it'll be interesting to say.
Yeah, you do feel like kind of the narrative machine is winding down.
Things are kind of getting brittle.
The regime kind of has to flex hard power more often than it used to because it's kind of lost its ability to manipulate people's opinions and understanding of the political process.
And that certainly brings us to a far more interesting scenario than existed before.
Yeah.
And there's something that I know I've talked about this with Jeff Deist a lot.
I just got his book today and I haven't even started reading it yet.
It literally just arrived, but I'm very excited to read this and look into it.
But one of the things, and I think this is a theme of his book that he talks about is politics dropping the pretense, you know, and I think that's something that's really big about the moment we're living through, where it would seem that in the past, there was at least like, okay, so from like the, from the, I don't know, the standard Orthodox point of view, you know, it would be something like, well, government is, you know,
of the people and by the people and people liberals or left liberals, you know, tend to, their argument would be like, well, government's supposed to be kind of the referee in the game, the neutral arbiter.
That would, you know, traditionally that would kind of be the argument.
And what libertarians and kind of reactionary right-wingers have in common is that we recognize that like, no, that's objectively false.
Like what the government is, is an instrument of force that rules over its subjugated people.
Now, what the difference between libertarians and the like right wingers might be that, you know, libertarians are like, well, that's why we have to abolish it, which according to the right-wingers might make us kind of left-wingers.
But we might say like, okay, well, we have to abolish it.
And then the right-wingers might say, well, no, that's why we have to use it or it's inevitable or something like that.
You can't abolish it.
That's, that's the, yeah, but sure.
Well, maybe that's, that's where the decision would be.
Yeah.
Sure.
But at least we're both acknowledging it is what it is.
You know, like whether we agree with that or not, it seems like we're almost the only ones in town who are both agreeing that, okay, but we can both see that this is what it is.
Like the government is not in the role of like just making sure all the big banks are being honest.
They're in the game of like helping out other big banks.
Right.
So like at least we kind of recognize that.
But it seems like the way this game is played is that the government always tried to keep this pretense going that no, no, we're just the new neutral arbiters.
And they would always be trying to convince people on both sides or all sides that like, oh, what are you talking about?
Come back to us.
Don't be a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Come back here.
You know, if there was an election that one large swath of the American people believed was stolen, they'd be trying to convince them that, no, it wasn't stolen.
But now it seems like that they've almost given up on their ability to do that.
And they're going like, well, if you believe it's stolen, you're a terrorist.
And we want to lock you in jail.
And it's almost like they've given up on this even like attempt to bring the Trump voters back into the fold.
And I do, I oscillate back and forth between whether I'm like, oh, that's kind of good because they know they can't win these people back over.
Or I'm like, oh, that's completely terrifying because what are they going to do to these people if they think they can't bring them back over?
I don't know whether that's a white pill or a black pill, but that's kind of what I've been thinking about a lot lately.
Yeah, it really doesn't matter if you're an accelerationist or not.
Acceleration happens, right?
So that's kind of the thing.
Right.
Yeah.
No, I mean, you know, Gaitana Mosca had this idea called a political formula.
And it's just the idea that every ruling elite needs to have a story, a narrative to justify their power because we're always going to have a ruling elite.
They're always going to exist.
And so the question is, you know, how do they justify their, you know, place in the system?
And ideally, you have a political formula that everyone kind of benefits from.
You know, the ruling elite have their interests aligned with the interest of the people and the flourishing of the people also grows the, you know, the well-being of the elite.
And every kind of everyone kind of benefits from this.
And so when that's happening, no one really takes a hard look at the political formula because like you said previously, you know, you're doing well, they're doing well, everyone's doing well.
So we don't need to really look terribly hard at our justification for why the system is the way it is because everyone's winning.
So why check under the hood?
But when you end up in this situation where the elites clearly aren't operating in the benefit of the people and the expense directly thereof, it starts to strain the political formula.
And Mosca said, eventually, if you have a political formula that's completely cynical, where just no one believes it and everyone just kind of echoes it because they have to, because otherwise the state will just kind of, you know, drop them into a dark pit somewhere, then you get incredibly brittle regimes.
And that's when things start to kind of break down.
And so I think you're right that we're seeing this kind of end of the political formula.
And that's a scary place to be because it's like, okay, well, everyone was just pretending this was okay because we were winning and now we're losing and everyone realizes it's not okay anymore, but no one knows what to kind of do from this point out because it seems like the ruling elites are just going with, well, keep, you know, keep repeating the line or otherwise, you know, you're in serious trouble.
And so I think everyone is kind of up in the air in this moment trying to figure out what that means going forward.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's exactly right.
And by the way, your point about how there will always be ruling elites, I would say, and let's close on this because we got to wrap up.
But there's my favorite Tucker Carlson quote that he ever said.
And I bet you know what I'm what I'm going to say already because this was really going around a lot.
But he goes, there was someone called him a populist and he said, I'm not a populist.
I'm an elitist.
I just believe in impressive elites.
And I just think it's such a great line, a perfect way to describe it.
And I feel exactly the same way.
And in fact, I think that there are a lot of libertarians who kind of get this wrong, that they're like, well, that's, you know, it's almost like they're just like so many people in today's age.
It's like they are indoctrinated into the worst aspects of the kind of neoliberal order that it's like this egalitarian poison has punished them.
Like, oh, there should be no elites.
It's like, well, no, if you really believe in a free society, then there's going to be like a lot of elites and they'll actually be really impressive because that's the way to become elites.
Unfortunately, we have very unimpressive elites.
Aaron, I really enjoyed this conversation, man.
We got to do this again sometime.
Enjoyed Nuanced Conversation00:01:13
Anything you want to close on or let people know?
Any thought about anything you want to say?
And then let people know where they can find your stuff.
No, man.
I think we, you know, I really enjoyed the conversation.
Like you said, we didn't disagree enough.
I'm sure we'll hear before.
You didn't argue at all.
I was looking for the knockdown drag out.
But yeah, like I said, I think it's one of those things that on Twitter is really hard to communicate.
It's hard to get the nuance across.
That's not what Twitter's for, guys.
So everyone just calm down when you don't get an 80-page essay on the nuanced difference between reactionary thought and libertarianism.
It's going to be okay.
That's what conversations like this are for.
It's a much better forum for this kind of thing.
But I really appreciate you having me.
And yeah, people can find.
My stuff on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey.
It's all Oren McIntyre, the podcast.
And then I'm over on Blaze TV.
My columns show up on the Blaze over there as well.
Okay, absolutely.
And I'll put your links in the episode description.
And please go check out all of Oren's stuff.
It's really, really good and really thought-provoking and interesting.