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July 17, 2016 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:02:50
Assassination Insurance

Reactionary Tree (@ReactionaryTree) joins Richard to discuss Donald Trump’s choosing of Mike Pence as his running mate. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Okay, Reactionary Tree, thank you for being on this emergency podcast.
I appreciate it.
I've been meaning to have you on for a couple of months now, but it's unfortunate you have to be under such frustrating circumstances as Mike Pence, but welcome.
Well, thank you.
When the future king of the white race calls, you answer, so here I am.
That's a good answer, Tree.
We joked about this.
I said it's going to be kind of weird calling you tree, but we're getting in touch with our Native American heritage.
Yes, great tree.
We're harkening back to paganism, getting around, tree-hugging, worshipping Odin.
We're going to get into it.
That's what we're into.
But why do you think Trump did this?
I guess that's a loaded question because I obviously think this was a very strange move and a very boring move, a very un-Trumpian move at the same time.
But what do you think his rationale was?
What is the strategy for doing this?
There's one of two things, and they both probably go together, is since Paul Manafort has taken over his campaign, it's kind of to water down some of Trump's kind of anti-establishment, I guess you could call it radicalism, even though he's actually quite moderate on all issues.
He's just an anti-establishment guy.
The other thing is that it's meant to appease the Republican establishment.
I think it's both.
I think you're both right on that.
I've heard a lot of strategery on Twitter about winning over the Midwest and things like that.
I'm not sure Pence could do that.
I'm not sure any VP pick can really do that.
I've actually read some articles that are very skeptical of how much a VP pick really matters.
But yeah, I think we should take Trump at his word.
In his address, which he gave today, which I actually just listened to before coming on the podcast, he explicitly said he goes, one word, part of unity.
And I think that is what he is doing.
But I guess I just find this such a strange strategy, because Trump, from the beginning of his campaign up to now, one of the reasons why I admire him, despite whatever criticism I might have, and criticism of the whole system in general, what I admire him, he is willing to do things that...
Just demonstrate that he has balls, that he doesn't give a fuck, that he is just going to go for it and double down on Trumpness.
So when he was in South Carolina, if I were his campaign manager, I would have told him, don't talk about the...
The war in Iraq.
Don't talk about the 2000s, because that stuff was actually popular here.
But no, Trump, in the debate in South Carolina before the primary, he went on this impassioned...
Anti-Bush family and anti-Iraq war tirade, which I liked.
I mean, I agree with everything he said, and he was clearly emotional about it, but it seemed a bad strategy.
But the fact is, I think people, even South Carolinians who might have been pro-war, pro-Bush, just admired the guy, that he's this ballsy and this genuine.
And he was just, he was doubling down on being, separating himself from the field, being the badass in the field, and all this stuff.
And he would always do this.
He would double down.
Like, when, with the whole wall thing, when he got pushed back from the Mexican, or Vincente Fox, the former Mexican president, he said, all right, the wall's going to be 10 feet taller.
He just keeps pushing.
The Mike Pence thing seems to be just the reverse.
And what I don't understand is that Trump has miraculously defeated all of these forces.
The GOP establishment obviously does not like him.
They are not willing to go to the mat.
They are not willing to disrupt the convention or disrupt the whole...
I don't know.
Anyone could disagree with that.
The cucks don't like him.
The religious right leadership, at least, or at least most of the religious right leadership, does not like him.
Jerry Falwell Jr. and one of these Dallas guys, notwithstanding.
thing.
Just the mainstream Republicans do not like him.
There is actually reason to believe that Mike Pence does not like him.
A man named Dan Sr. tweeted just when this happened, I can't believe someone would work with Trump who expressed privately the fact that he found Trump unacceptable.
So Trump beat all these people.
And then now, after he beats them, after he...
Demonstrates that they're not relevant.
After he's now entering the general election, where you don't need them as much, where you've got to reach new people, you don't have to reach conservative movement ideologues, now he throws them a bone.
Now he lets them win.
I just, I don't get it.
It just makes no sense.
I've been thinking about this for about 24 hours, and I do think that what you said...
The Paul Manafort idea that he is coming in.
He clearly has the backing of the Trump family.
As someone who has a lot of experience, clearly Trump trusts him.
And Paul Manafort is just watering him down and weakening him.
But you don't win that way.
You win by going bold.
These past couple of weeks, I've actually been reading the art of the deal.
Trump would always talk about this.
One of his deals that he did...
In near Lincoln Center, there was another developer whose name I'm forgetting.
And Trump actually says, I really liked that guy.
He was a genuine, nice man.
But he was doing something called Lincoln Center West, I believe.
And he didn't promote it correctly.
It wasn't interesting.
It wasn't exciting.
There was no reason for it being.
And he ultimately got in over his head and couldn't handle the financing and had to sell to Trump.
Trump went in and the first thing, he called it television city.
It was going to be this new city on the Upper West Side.
It was going to have literally the tallest building in the world.
This never was realized, of course, but it's just an expression of his boldness, his willingness to shake things up, to go against the grain, to go totally out of left field sometimes.
I was I was part of me was expecting that he was going to do something wild like he was going to pick someone that we'd never heard of.
He was going to pick a nonpolitical person, maybe or maybe a Democrat or, you know, I was really thinking that he was going to do something fascinating.
And instead, he surprised us with the most boring man I could imagine.
I don't get it.
It doesn't make any sense, you know, and you're right, he...
Donald Trump is this anti-establishment wrecking ball, and he just literally destroyed the entire Republican Party single-handedly, and then now he's the guy, and he's just bringing them back in to the woodwork.
It doesn't make sense.
He should have done, obviously, is done something that is more fitting to his character and roll with some type of out-of-left-field pick or just double down on someone who agrees with you on one or two of your issues very strongly, like Senator Jeff Sessions would have been a great compliment because...
Jeff Sessions is a hardliner on immigration.
He probably played a very strong role in developing Donald Trump's immigration plan.
Yeah.
And it would just make sense.
It would just strengthen the ticket.
It would really say that this is what this campaign is about.
It's about immigration.
It's about trade.
It's about globalism.
And that we're not going to stand for it.
The most basic bitch conservative he can find that exists, and that's Mike Pence.
If you're looking for your average milquetoast conservative, and that's going to be your presidential campaign, then yeah, Mike Pence makes a lot of sense.
But for Donald Trump, it doesn't make any sense at all.
Donald Trump used to talk about, we're going to have a different strategy.
We're not going to assume that all these blue states are going to be blue states.
We're going to win New York.
We're going to win California.
Okay, granted, maybe that's aspirational, delusional.
Okay, but maybe it's not.
Massachusetts went so intensely for Trump that clearly there are those townies out there.
We always associate Massachusetts with Elizabeth Warren, but there are tons of people outside of Boston, and maybe many in Boston, who are totally good for Trump.
Why not just...
Try for something like that.
I think, you know, we've actually had pretty conventional Republicans try to do this red state strategy that we've been doing really since 2000.
And, you know, they're more or less the same swing states.
Small changes, but generally the structure's there.
And, you know, it can't work anymore.
You know, didn't Romney prove that?
Didn't McCain prove that?
I think if the GOP is going to be a party, it's got to go outside the box.
And the GOP keeps getting whiter more and more.
Every year, it keeps getting whiter.
More white people, it's like a percentage and a half, are going towards the Republican Party.
Because basically the Democratic Party is the party of minorities and crazy liberals and so on.
And the Republican Party is not so much the conservative party.
It's basically the normal person party.
It's the people who are offended by Black Lives Matter and so on.
And so there are tons of people that do not resonate with religious right kind of stuff, which is what Mike Pence always plays footsie with, and that's probably who he is, if there is something there.
I'm not sure there is.
He's so boring.
But, you know, why not become this nationalist candidate where it's like, we're going to bring back the jobs with strong, some tariff barriers.
We're going to not go into these crazy Middle Eastern wars.
We're going to start protecting the environment.
Because, you know, Trump talked about that.
Something that Republicans never talk about.
Our infrastructure is crumbling.
I'm going to fix the infrastructure.
Why doesn't he talk about that?
Let's protect the environment.
That's just a total win issue, particularly with these normal, middle-of-the-range white people who are our people.
Our movement shouldn't just be about the religious right.
And yet, he does this where it's like, I don't think he has decisively lost these middle-of-the-road people.
But I don't think we should also underestimate the way that Mike Pence alienates them.
Yeah, when you look at the, for example, if you're looking at the election map, your swing states are going to, the big swing states that you're going to need to win if you're a Republican.
You're going to need Ohio.
You're going to need Florida.
You're going to need Virginia.
You're going to need states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
You know, sure, in the more...
Rural parts of those states, you're going to have your evangelical, strong Christian conservative types, but you're right, your average white American is fairly moderate on religious issues, and they're really not feeling like the whole...
Christian conservative right, like the snake handlers and all these kind of nutty people out there, that doesn't resonate with them at all.
And Trump's nationalist message of populism to a degree and resisting third world immigration and also having a foreign policy that's sensible.
People don't want...
To get involved in the Middle East anymore.
And when you look at someone like Mike Pence, he is the neocon.
He's totally a neoconservative.
He supported the Iraq War.
He opposed setting a withdrawal date on Iraq.
He supported the surge in Iraq.
And he supported intervention in Libya.
Even your average conservative nowadays who probably supported the war, everyone has gone sour on this militarism over in the Middle East.
And so that's another reason why this pick doesn't make any sense.
People are more concerned at what's going on here at home than they are overseas.
And people are more concerned about, will I be able to put food on my family's table?
Will I have job security?
Is there going to be a future here in this country for my family?
Yeah, I would echo everything you just said.
And I would add to it, I don't really know who Pence is.
I mean, I was actually forcing myself to watch some I don't know if there's any there there.
He is one of the least compelling people.
But yeah, as you were saying, and lots of people have mentioned this on Twitter, so I should give them credit, but Hillary Clinton can literally run ads where she can quite...
Legitimately say, oh, really, Trump?
Like, you want a better foreign policy?
Why did you pick this guy?
Oh, really, Trump?
You want a Fortress America, you know, tariff barriers and so on?
Why did you pick this guy?
Because he goes along with Clinton and this whole kind of neocon, neoliberal, you know, mishmash on all of those issues.
So it just undermines everything he did.
It just doesn't make sense.
Also, just to push a little harder on Pence himself in terms of the gay wedding cake stuff, I had never heard of Mike Pence until about a year and a half ago when Indiana became this meme for the culture war.
And this was over an Indiana law that basically usually goes under the rubric of religious freedom and allows people to not I have a difficult time talking about this because I don't want to say that I oppose such
a law because I am in complete support of freedom of association.
I think that anyone has the right to...
Deal with anyone or not deal with anyone for any reason.
I have the right to not go to this restaurant because I don't like their food.
I have the right not to go buy something at the store because I know the guy who owns it and I didn't like him in high school.
What I mean by that, I cannot patron someone's business for any reason, whether it's rational, irrational, stupid, or intelligent.
And I think businesses have the same right.
A business that is your private...
You don't have to serve everyone.
If I make cakes and someone says, make me a giant dildo cake for my horrifying gay wedding, I can be like, you know, sorry, life is short.
I don't want to do that.
And, you know, no, you know, a hundred bucks, that's just not worth it for me.
So I'm sorry.
You can go somewhere else.
You can make the cake yourself.
So I totally support everyone's right for that.
The problem with this religious freedom nonsense is that these people will...
The Civil Rights Act basically violates these basic rights of a free association.
They explicitly do it.
A business owner should have a right not to serve a black person.
Sorry about that, but it just is what it is.
If we're going to live in a free society, you can do that.
The Civil Rights Act obviously...
So the religious right who will endorse Martin Luther King will deify Martin Luther King and say how much they love the Civil Rights Act.
But apparently, if you have a monotheistic or religious commandment not to do something, then it's okay.
So they don't even support true freedom of association.
They just support this...
Bullshit freedom of association that if you can lawyer up, go to court, and claim that my holy book made me do it, and therefore you don't have to service a gay wedding.
I mean, it's just...
Look, I don't want to say that I'm against this free association, but the religious freedom as defined by the religious right and the conservative movement is totally stupid.
And I'm sorry about that, but that's what it is.
And that Indiana law, first off, explicitly said in the law that the federal government can override this law whenever it sees fit, which they don't even have to say because that's implicit.
We live in a federal structure.
But anyway, so the law was basically meaningless.
I mean, if someone claimed their religious freedom, like a Mormon claimed his religious freedom not to serve people with the mark of Cain or something, that would kind of be hilarious.
But clearly, the federal government would come in and stop that.
So the law was totally meaningless.
After that law passed in the state of Indiana, in the Congress of Indiana, and they had all this pushback, and the media was going wild, you know, Tim Cook of Apple wrote his stupid op-ed against all this kind of stuff.
After Mike Pence felt the heat, he backed down, and he watered down the law even more.
So he wanted to have his cake, he wanted to have his gay wedding cake and eat it too, so to speak.
He wanted to signal morally...
I almost respect a dyed-in-the-wool creationist or a really deeply serious...
I respect them for the courage of their convictions.
I don't respect someone like Mike Pence, who lacks the courage of his convictions.
He's just a morally signaling fake conservative.
And so the other thing...
Mike Pence is going to get a ton of heat.
He is going to get so much pushback by the fact that he's associated with Trump, because Trump is associated with white nationalism, with Russia, with, you know, let's throw out other things, you know, radical conservatism and so on.
And all we've seen from him is that he's just this milquetoast...
Weakling.
So when he gets pushed on something, I guarantee you that Hillary, because Hillary's smart and crafty, and she's getting old, but she still has some craftiness left in her.
I just listened to an interview with her.
It's not like this woman is senile.
She's still an intelligent bitch, and she's going to push him into a corner, and she's going to get him in a way where she's going to make him basically disagree with Trump.
And undermine Trump's nationalism.
And I guarantee you this is going to happen.
Yeah, they're going to purposely try and divide the ticket because Mike Pence is nothing at all like Donald Trump.
He's, like you said, he's this basic bitch, milquetoast conservative who doesn't really compliment the ticket in any way.
He brings nothing.
And if anything, he's just dead weight.
I mean, from here on out until the election, we're just going to be witnessing weekly struggle sessions for Mike Pence on the cable news networks.
When they're going to pull up like, oh, Donald Trump said this.
Do you disavow white supremacy?
Do you support Vladimir Putin who is guilty of all these human rights violations?
Do you believe all these things?
Where do you stand on gay issues?
Because Donald Trump said he'd let Bruce Jenner use the ladies' room at Trump Tower.
Would you do that?
He doesn't stand with Trump on any of the issues that Trump has really formed his campaign out of.
And so from here on out, that's going to be the strategy of the Democrats and the Clinton war machine.
Is to basically make Mike Pence look like a fool because he essentially has to flip-flop on the wars.
He has to flip-flop on the Christian conservative values because Donald Trump, I don't really think he believes in any of the Christian conservative rights stuff.
And I think he's always, he's just signaled like, oh yeah, I'm pro-life now because, you know.
I had this change of heart, and I just think it's really bad.
It's really a lighthearted attempt to just appeal to the Christian conservative right in order for him to get the nomination.
He's from New York City.
He seems like a fairly secular guy, probably libertarian in his social beliefs.
So I don't think he really cares about any of those issues, to be entirely honest.
He seems more concerned about the issues he's formed his campaign around, and Mike Pence doesn't stand with him.
So it doesn't make any sense.
Mike Pence doesn't stand with him on LBG.
He doesn't stand with him on trade either.
Donald Trump wants to reform trade deals.
Meanwhile, you have Mike Pence here, who...
He supported the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
He supports TPP.
He supported free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, Peru, Panama, Oman, Chile, Singapore.
And Donald Trump is against all of those things.
Yeah.
Yeah, I just can't believe it.
So, do you know a lot about Manafort?
I mean, all I've heard is he's a former Reagan hand, and then he's kind of...
I've been around the world and was involved with Yanukovych, who was a pro-Russian president in Ukraine, who was overthrown by the Maidan revolution.
So I've heard things like that, and I've been like, oh, this guy sounds kind of interesting.
But I almost imagined him to be this Machiavellian, cold person.
And maybe he is, but I almost feel like just because of his age and his experience in the American context, he's just kind of a movement conservative cuck.
And so we're seeing his tendencies.
And Corey Lewandowski, who...
Look, I don't think we should totally lionize Corey Lewandowski.
I mean, the Trump campaign was just basically Trump's, like, Twitter feed.
That was, like, their campaign.
They didn't have a ground game.
And Trump overcame it all, which is great.
But, you know, I don't think Corey Lewandowski...
He looked to be a little bit out of his league, although he seemed to be a genuine guy.
And I think I've heard this story.
I don't know if you've heard it as well.
There was a sign in the campaign headquarters which said, let Trump be Trump.
And whatever you want to say about Corey, he made some mistakes, but that was probably the best strategy, is to own it.
One thing you got with Corey Lewandowski is Corey Lewandowski came out of the Tea Party movement, and regardless of what you think about the Tea Party movement, it was kind of an anti-establishment, grassroots backlash against the system.
And Corey Lewandowski has kind of – he came out of that movement, so he does hold some anti-establishment views himself, and so he was the perfect manager at the time for Donald Trump.
Because Donald Trump's the anti-establishment guy.
Donald Trump represents – he's become the shelling point for all these right-wing groups like the Libertarians, the Tea Party, the white nationalists, the agrarian people, the nativists.
And he just popped up and everyone just naturally gravitated towards him and like this is the wrecking ball we're going to use.
And that was what Corey Lewandowski was kind of helping lead the charge with that.
But now Corey Lewandowski's gone.
You've got Paul Manafort, and I'm looking at his Wikipedia page now.
And sure, he's a consultant.
I don't even think he's necessarily a basic bitch conservative.
I think he's just a party guy.
He's been an advisor to Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Dole, Bush II, McCain.
He's just a Republican.
He's a Republican Party guy who comes in and this is probably why he was brought in, was to help with the convention because that's important that Donald Trump not get screwed out of the convention.
But also it seems that Paul Manafort has perhaps neutered the Donald Trump campaign to some extent by not allowing Donald Trump to be Trump.
And instead he's trying to whip up the party to get everyone behind Donald Trump so that they could win an election, which ultimately that's the goal here is to win an election.
But Donald Trump is also leading a political movement.
It's not just, oh, we're going to win an election and do some conservative things.
this is about changing the political discussion and when Paul Manafort comes in and he pulls someone like Mike Pence and decides this is going to be the guy we're going to put It really takes away from the message and ultimately it hurts the movement in the short term and in the long term because this just sets up someone like Mike Pence.
to run for president in the future, and you know that it's going to be back to business as usual.
And we know that Donald Trump doesn't even necessarily like the Michael Pence pick.
There's some news stories that came out that says that Donald Trump was even hesitant to pick Mike Pence as his VP.
And so Donald Trump's not going with his gut here, which is something he's been essentially doing the whole time.
Going with his gut and doing what Donald Trump does, and it seems that Paul Manafort has taken over the campaign of Donald Trump.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's actually two reports.
So they might have been reporting from the same source, or perhaps they were reporting from two sources.
But basically, they were saying that Donald Trump was making these last-minute phone calls on Friday night, seeing if he could switch gears, if it were too late.
And it was too late.
I mean, he shouldn't have allowed it to go that far.
Yeah, I mean, that is one piece of evidence, certainly not definitive, that Trump's gut was not in this and that he wanted to throw out a wild card.
And instead, he picked a successor who was just a return to 2000.
Bush-era conservatism.
It's everything he defeated.
It's everything he was overcoming.
He just said that, no, my successor, my right-hand man is that, in its essence, in its most purified and therefore most boring form, is Mike Pence.
Let me ask you this.
How would you gauge the alt-right Twitter reaction?
Because I have my opinion, but I want yours.
Because obviously, it's difficult to measure this scientifically.
We're kind of going with feedback we're getting.
But what is your sense of the alt-right Twitter reaction?
I think it's mixed, but mostly negative.
I don't think anyone's really impressed by the pick.
A lot of people think that...
This is just a pick to appease the conservative establishment.
Vice presidential choices are entirely irrelevant.
And Trump was just going to pick a non-important person to be on the ticket because Donald Trump is the main event.
Sure.
There's nothing that you can put on the ticket that would really jazz it up in a way that would make it more exciting than it already is.
Yeah.
No one's going to go to the convention for Pence.
Exactly.
And also I think there's probably some apologists in our sphere for the pick.
Maybe they're a little more emotionally invested in the Donald Trump campaign than they should be.
And so they're going to, anytime Trump has a slip-up, they're going to immediately come to the defense because ultimately they just want Donald Trump to be the candidate.
But I think most everyone is not really impressed.
They find it boring.
And then a lot of us are repulsed by the pick.
We just think it's stupid and it doesn't make sense.
Yeah, I think that's my impression.
I have felt the wrath of people.
I feel like they're rationalizing.
More than anything.
And they'll make arguments like, well, he's not black.
Or we need to win over all these people.
Which is, again, it's like...
The religious rights stuff does really rub people the wrong way, and so I don't buy that.
I don't buy that he's going to deliver the whole Midwest.
Pence is actually having trouble within his own state.
He might very well have been elected, but that was actually in question.
It's a very close contest.
And Indiana is going red anyway, so I don't really see what it is.
And they just seem to be rationalizing.
I think there's a lot of also, like, keep calm and put your faith in Trump, because Trump knows.
And, okay, you know, this has worked so far, but, you know, Trump actually has made some pretty big errors.
The abortion thing, I think, was clearly an error.
I don't think that was, that brought him absolutely nothing, and he backtracked and flipped very uncharacteristically.
He effectively apologized.
So, I don't, you know, he has made some major errors, and I think there's reason to believe, there's evidence, not definitive evidence, that his gut really wasn't in this.
And so, I don't know.
I think our movement is going to be—we're going to gain more respect, and I think we're going to have more impact and influence when we criticize people.
If we're taken for granted as the Trump cheerleading squad, people aren't going to respect us.
And I agree.
Look, Trump has been overwhelmingly inspiring thus far.
I always knew there was going to come a time when you have to push back, and I think this is definitely a time.
This is not definitive.
I don't know how many people are really off the Trump train.
There are probably a few people like that, but I think generally speaking, even the people who are rationalizing it, I think if they really were honest with you, they would admit that this is really uninspiring.
It's kind of like a punch in the gut.
It's not what we wanted.
And it's just not exciting.
Again, like, choosing Jim Webb or something totally outside the box, that would have been awesome.
Another interesting pick, you know, generally when you're running for president, another move is to pick someone that you are running against.
So, Chris...
Christie, maybe, but not really.
But also an interesting pick, kind of an out-there pick, would have been someone like Rand Paul.
Rand Paul is appealing to a lot of Midwestern types because he's kind of like his father in some ways.
Very libertarian, very sensible person.
He's not necessarily one of these...
Culture war, the Christian conservative right that's more concerned about gay weddings and gay conversion therapy.
He seems to be more concerned about foreign policy and government surveillance.
And those are things that a lot of Americans are concerned about.
it has some appeals even though Rand Paul cucked himself by calling himself a Detroit Republican that was just kind of a goofball move but that would have been a more interesting pick I agree.
I think Rand shot himself in the foot by going, he was effectively never Trump, or at the very least, pretty viciously anti-Trump.
During the early primaries, before he dropped out.
I remember he went on one of those post-John Stewart daily show, like the black daily shows that are now running.
And he was like, oh, he's an orange-faced clown.
That kind of stuff was really unnecessary.
And also, when you're down, it just looks cheap and easy.
It's like, of course you hate this guy.
He has many multiples more support than you do.
The sad thing is that this movement was ran to Paul's to kind of take over and to be this grassroots populism, let's take back our country, rah, rah, rah, and instead he's in Detroit throwing the federal tax code in a wood chipper, and he just looks like a goofball.
Yeah, you know, I pointed this out.
This whole election was Rand Paul's to lose.
And we forget that now.
But he was in early 2015, I think he was announced as the most interesting man in politics by Time magazine.
He was an early favorite.
Lots of people picked him.
But I think more than that, the Trump movement was his to lose because his father had a little mini Trump movement going.
And his father was genuine, and I think you had a lot of genuine people who would have gotten on board with Rand if he had been this kind of libertarian-conservative amalgamation synthesis.
And instead, he became this left-libertarian-Black Lives Matter synthesis, which...
Yeah, prior to Donald Trump getting into the race, if you would have told me a few years ago that I would be voting for Donald Trump and not for Rand Paul, I would have said that you're crazy.
And I'm sure a lot of the guys in the alt-right are like that.
I was a big Ron Paul person.
I know lots of guys in the alternative right.
We're Ron Paul people.
And in 2012, we were looking at this like, oh, Ron Paul is going to be the guy.
This is going to be it.
And he just really dropped the ball, to say the least.
Yeah, it's like he pursued a strategy that was...
Somewhat similar to what Weld and Gary Johnson are pursuing, which they'll say things like, oh, we're socially liberal but fiscally conservative, as if they're the best of both worlds.
But what they really are is the worst of both worlds.
Because they seem actually rather squishy on foreign policy.
They're definitely not populist about it.
They want all the stuff that turns off grassroots conservatives.
They seem to love all that kind of stuff.
But then, you know.
I'm sure they would say nice things about BLM and so on.
But then they're also like, oh, but also, by the way, we're going to take away your Social Security.
It's just like, you know, if you wanted to construct a less attractive candidate, I'm not sure you could.
I'm for BLM and against your pension.
Vote for me.
You're welcome, America.
And Rand Paul had a little bit of that going, where he was drawing on all the wrong aspects of left and right.
And Donald Trump draws on the positive aspects of left and right.
He's not a religious right person.
He draws on the nationalism, the anti-immigration stuff, the let's bring the jobs back, let's protect what we do.
We have this, like, basic conservatism that is very appealing.
And then he'll pull some things from the left.
I mean, he, as many have pointed out, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump sound very similar on a lot of issues on Wall Street and so on.
That's interesting.
And so, I mean, that's the kind of, I mean, it's just clear.
That's the kind of thing that you can start a movement and shake things up.
And again, I just, I don't know what to say.
I'm not...
I mean, I'm not never Trump at this point.
I still think the whole thing's fascinating.
I admire Trump.
But this is a blow.
I mean, this just seems to be pointing in the wrong direction.
And it's all symbolism.
Because, again, the VP does not have a tremendous amount of power.
He's basically the...
He presides over the Senate.
I mean, it's not...
And he's in the cabinet.
And Trump doesn't...
Trump listens to Trump.
Mostly.
He's not always going to listen to his cabinet.
But nevertheless, it's symbolism, and symbolism matters, and this symbolism is very bad.
Yeah, I don't know if you read the piece in Breitbart.
It was written about 10 days ago by Ann Coulter.
But she was saying that, yeah, Donald Trump...
Picks any one of these insider Republicans.
It's going to be garbage.
They're not going to add anything to the ticket.
If anything, they're just going to weigh the ticket down because now the media is going to attack and try and prime apart and, like we mentioned earlier, put Michael Pence through a weekly struggle session of...
being an apologist for Donald Trump being, you know, a nasty racist who hangs out with white supremacists on Twitter and all this shit.
I don't know if they would ever do this, but she said that if Donald Trump were elected with one of these Republican insiders like Michael Pence, that the Republican Party would then...
lead an impeachment campaign against Donald Trump to kick him to the curb and then put their party establishment guy into the Look, I mean, let's go there.
I mean, I've heard this bandied about on Twitter, and for good reason, I think, and that is assassination insurance.
Rand Paul is definitely not his father.
Definitely not.
But I think Rand Paul would have given some assassination insurance.
Because the neocons have never trusted Rand Paul.
Liberals don't really trust them because they see in his father and the libertarian movement, it has the whiff of white racism about it.
They don't like it.
I think Rand Paul could have been assassination insurance.
I think a total wild card could have been too.
Jim Webb, total assassination insurance.
Jim Webb.
Who knows what he would have done?
Exactly.
Jacksonian America, you know, reborn or something.
So, but yeah, Mike Pence, he's not only is he a generic basic bitch Republican, but he's just, he's weak.
And so I think they, I think a lot of the...
I think someone tweeted at me just before we went on this podcast that it's a Gerald Ford type figure.
Gerald Ford actually was a fairly smart guy, but he's generally remembered as a pushover, as a total middle of the road, no real ideas, pragmatic to a fault doofus.
And that is Mike Pence.
Can you do it?
Can you find a reason to gin up hatred against Trump, to get enough people in Congress, including Democrats and Republicans, to impeach him, to do something like this?
Yeah, of course you can.
And there is the terrible thing that I don't even want to talk about because it's so distasteful.
And that is the assassination kind of thing.
Look, if these people, trillions of dollars are at stake, the future of the world's at stake, things like foreign geopolitics, foreign policy, they're willing to kill people over that.
So I don't think we should be Pollyannish and say, oh, they'd never do that.
I don't, again, I don't like talking about that because it's just so distasteful.
But yeah, you know, get rid of Trump by impeachment or some other means and you have this doofus up there who's going to appoint some other doofus as his new VP and we're back to square one.
I think that is a possibility.
I think also just to add on to that and to talk in less sinister terms, I think this is generally what the GOP wants.
The GOP establishment never wanted Trump.
I think they're comfortable with conservatism as their dominant ideology.
And they're not at all comfortable with nationalism as their dominant ideology.
So even if some of the far reaches of the religious right might offend them, they generally would prefer that to.
I think this is generally what You know, the kind of nationalism that Trump is putting forward.
So I think they ultimately want a reset.
I think that they were experimenting with different rules here and there, that they were, you know, there's this rule, what is it, rule 40, that to be nominated by the floor, you have to have won, what is it, eight primaries?
Do you know the details of that?
Paul rule, essentially, from 2008.
You had to win, yeah, I believe it was something like, it sounds right, eight states.
You had to win eight primaries in order to be eligible for nomination on the floor.
That is the rule.
They doubled down on that rule, actually.
So the Never Trump movement, you know, William Crystal's wet dream of having Doug French be the nominee or whatever, that's done.
So that's done with.
That ain't gonna happen.
But now we have this new thing where now we have basically a total establishment party insider guy who is...
Right there, one breath away from the White House of being the president.
So perhaps they could try to impeach Donald Trump and that would have the support of both sides.
That would be the only bipartisan support that would ever happen in Washington.
It would be kicking out Donald Trump because the left wants to get rid of him and the Republicans also want to get rid of him.
So, yay!
Impeaching him, that'd be great.
The left will love to see the Republicans eat themselves alive, and the Republicans would rather die a cuck than live a proud white man.
So that's a distinct possibility.
I mean, Donald Trump is, this is a phenomenon, this is never heard of before, this total outsider running on these radical new ideas that don't fall within your typical left-right divide.
We live in very interesting times, as we're always saying.
And it's true.
I mean, the future of this country is at stake.
The future of Europe is at stake.
We don't know what is going to happen.
Everyone has lots of anxiety about the future.
And if we can squelch that by kicking Donald Trump out and going back to business as usual, then the establishment would definitely want to do that.
Yeah.
And that would just piss off – that would just piss all of us off.
I mean it would piss off everyone who voted for Donald Trump.
Well, I think they originally wanted to keep Rule 40 last fall and winter before the primaries because they felt that Donald Trump wouldn't get to eight states or whatever it is.
And then they kind of got to this new situation where after he was winning, they're like, oh, well, maybe we should get rid of Rule 40. It's Rule 40B.
I'll put this in the show notes.
That basically says maybe we should get rid of it so that we can have a never-Trump contested fight.
And Ted Cruz will get up there.
I think at some point, the Rents Priebus's of the world basically sat down.
And look, these guys are nothing if not pragmatic.
I mean, they're brutally pragmatic.
And they sat down and said, look, if we...
After what's just happened with the creation of this movement and also just Trump's success, winning New Hampshire, South Carolina, and on, that if we were to take it away from him, that might seriously jeopardize the Republican Party going forward.
And so I think they came to an accommodation where they said, let's lose this time.
Let's give them what they want and then basically say, we told you so.
You can't do this stuff.
And then they'll just...
Go to a reset, and we will be back with a battle between Jeb Bush and Mike Pence for the presidency in 2020.
It's just going to be back to that same boring nonsense.
They're just going to ride out Western civilization.
You know, and I don't think you can go back.
I think Trump has unleashed energies, and in many ways unleashed energies unwillingly, to the point that you can't go back.
But nevertheless, I think that is their strategy.
I think they're just going to reluctantly hold their nose and give the nomination to Trump.
I think the possibility of a contested convention is approaching zero.
And they're just going to do that with the hope that we'll just reset it in 2017.
So yeah, I think that's what they want, but I don't think they'll get that.
But again, if Trump blows this and Trump allows himself to be impeached and then Mike Pence is there, if Trump sets up Mike Pence as his successor, which just seems ridiculous in a way, just look at this guy.
I think that we could see that this was just kind of like this moment had all this potential but didn't really go anywhere.
And that would be very, very sad.
It would be, and it would hurt a lot.
Because while the alternative right...
It's not necessarily as emotionally invested in Trump's success.
Middle America is.
I mean, they're going to rallies where they're putting their lives in danger, and they're getting attacked, they're getting beat up.
In a lot of ways, they do view a lot of middle Americans who they're very much married to the idea of what they think America is or what it was.
And Trump getting totally neutered in that way would really be, I think, heartbreaking to a lot of them.
And they in many ways might give up on Trump.
Right.
I think that's...
Very poignant, what you just said.
To a very large degree, the alt-right is intellectually and ideologically post-American.
I know I am.
But a lot of people who might even call themselves alt-right now because the alt-right term has exploded.
It's certainly not defined by me anymore.
I mean, it's definitely not.
I'm a small part of it, actually.
But definitely a conservative Trump type.
They are not intellectually or ideologically or emotionally post-American at all.
And they have a lot more of their heart at stake in this election.
And so, yeah, I think for them it is very sad because conservatives have been terrible to them.
Conservatives have just consistently sold them out.
And it's like they finally found a guy who wouldn't.
And then it's looking like he might.
Yeah, it's...
And that's the thing is...
They're not going to know where to go because a lot of the people, the middle American, the Mars, as Sam Francis put it, the middle American revolution, they're not willing to do what people in the alternative right do.
I mean, in a lot of ways, we have completely uninstalled America and installed new post-American thinking of how we're going to operate in this new environment.
Once that Americana is uninstalled from their minds because it essentially has been destroyed by the destruction of the Trump campaign, they don't know where to go.
And we're the scary, anonymous racists on the internet.
They don't want to be racist.
They're generally...
They're not racially conscious in the way that we are.
They view themselves as they're Americans and they very strongly believe in the ideas of America.
And when Trump, the man who's going to stand for America, goes down...
Then it's back to business as usual and they don't know where to turn and they're going to be very afraid and hesitant to turn to people like us, which is we need to get those people.
We need to get those people regardless if Trump is successful or not because that's where the movement is.
That's white America.
That's where we want the movement.
We need those people and they're going to be lost and they're going to be defeated, I think.
Yeah, I agree.
And I don't think we should just assume that they're going to come to us.
I think we should be honest with ourselves that we're going to have to come to them a little bit also.
You know, we don't...
When I'm speaking with people who are already initiated, I think that is the time to go full red pill, talk about the coming European order, talk about being post-America.
But yeah, let's be honest.
We're going to also need to speak to people on their level.
And that doesn't mean that we're lying to them.
There's a very big difference between trying to manipulate someone and just understanding your audiences and speaking to them on their terms.
And maybe not giving them the whole red pill all at once because they're not going to swallow it.
So I think that is definitely a major challenge for us.
Yeah, basically, we have to take these radical, I would say, non-American ideas or post-American ideas and package them so that these people who,
they are diehard Americans and Basically, we need to take alt-right thinking, package it in Americana and give it to these people so that it's not foreign and weird to them, that it's something that resonates with them.
And so that is going to be a big part of what the alternative right has to do.
They have to Americanize the message, and not in a bad way, but appeal to the American spirit.
And there's a lot of things that Americans...
Should be proud of.
And there's a lot of things here.
The revolutionary spirit of the American Revolution.
The archetypes of, like, the pioneer.
The cowboy.
The cowboy.
The astronaut.
We went to space.
We went to the moon.
We've done a lot of great things here in America.
We all love to shit on America.
America is shit on by all kinds of people all the time, and we do it ourselves.
But it's time to start – it's time to stop shitting on America.
It's time to see what do we have here that we can really work with that – can we get it to resonate with American people?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We can actually build a society around.
If it's strange and it doesn't make sense to American people, then it's dead on arrival.
It's not going anywhere.
Yeah, I agree.
I think we need both because I think the intellectual side and the totally red-pilled Evolian or Nietzschean side, I don't think we should ever lose that.
Sometimes you do have to think for people.
You've got to develop the software, so you've got to know the whole ins and outs of it.
And I think also, one thing that we can start to do, because the environment's changed so much in terms of technology, but also in terms of legitimacy, is start to really replace the conservative movement in terms of intellectual activity, and that is in terms of publishing and so on.
And that's not going to be, that's an achievable goal.
That's not going to be too hard, because the conservative movement really is brain dead.
Yeah, I was going to say, you're implying that there is an intellectual movement in American conservatism.
Right.
I mean, there was, to a degree, it was a, you know, Buckley...
Hammered together a bunch of things that didn't quite fit together.
There was a kind of old right libertarianism clobbered onto a...
This European Catholic traditionalism that was brought to them from immigrants, including many Jews.
It was a weird thing that they started to create.
And you had people like Russell Kirk kind of imagining that he was the next step in this tradition and so on.
I think I described it as a jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces didn't fit together.
And that is definitely...
Pretty accurate.
But I think we can replace them because, you know, there's not a lot of gas left in the tank.
I mean, they were a more intellectual movement.
I think at this point, their intellectual side are these, you know, Ann Coulter book, knockoff books with, you know, one word title, you know, like treason, Hillary Clinton's.
They plan to appoint Osama bin Laden to the Supreme Court, and they have a picture of a hot-looking conservative talking head with bleached blonde hair, and she's holding a salt rifle and standing against a brick wall wearing a prom dress.
That's basically what conservatism is.
Yeah, it is what it is.
Like Dana Lesh, she's got a cowboy hat on and her flannel shirt.
She has six shooters.
There's a picture of Dana Lesh's books, a new book.
It's called Fly Over Country or something.
She's got, like, four layers on.
She's got, like, a leather jacket and a vest and a T-shirt and a, like, something.
It's just this, like, layered cowboy hat.
And then she has, like, gun, like, Western-style bullets holster and, like, a six-shooter.
I mean, it is so ridiculous.
Yeah, it's like a caricature in a way.
It's very tacky and, you know, it's very unappealing.
To young people, and that's another reason why the alternative right is growing, because they look at that and they just think that's goofy shit that only really appeals to boomers, and that's really all that it does.
And so that's why also Ron Paul is popular, because he has ideas.
He's actually talking about philosophers that have influenced his way of thinking.
He's actually a pretty interesting guy.
And then if you stuck around long enough, the rumors are true.
Ron Paul leads to racism, and you'll be having a podcast with Richard Spencer.
Well, on that note, let's put a bookmark in it.
All right.
Thanks.
I should have you back on again, Tree.
This was fun, and I think there are going to be some more things.
I'm glad also that we're criticizing Donald.
I was waiting for this moment when it was the time for us to seriously criticize him, and I think this is the moment.
Yeah, it's important that we're not just cheerleaders for Donald Trump.
We are our own...
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