RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Fish Out of Water

Oct. 5, 2016 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:18:40

Fish Out of Water

Ryan Landry (@SOBL1) of Social Matter (@socialmattermag) joins Richard to discuss Neo-Reaction, the Alt Right, populism and elitism, social change, and, at the end, a little bit of James Bond. 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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	I know that there are people out there in networks that do read us, that do message us, but to explain the ignorance that's out there within organizations, and not just at the grunt level, but at folks who have positions of somewhat power.
	I was talking with somebody who, several years ago, they ran a campaign for a U.S. senator, and they ran it for a successful campaign for a Republican senator.
	And I was talking to him about the voting coalitions.
	And I said, you know, well, right now what the Democrats have is a high-low barbell coalition.
	And I pointed out, you know, here's what happened in 2012 where the extremely poor vote and then the extremely high-income earner, high-net wealth donor, they partner up against the middle.
	And when I explained it to him, it was a few minutes, and I walked him through some basics.
	You know, he looked at me and he goes, you know, that's...
	That's amazing.
	I've never quite looked at the angle.
	I've never looked at that angle before.
	And I sat there stunned that this is a man who ran a successful Senate campaign who did not know the basics of voter coalitions.
	He did not know at the ground level who and what he was supporting or who and what he was trying to gin up participation at the voting booth.
	And there was somebody else who was a county...
	Not the county chair, but in the county organization for the GOP that I was talking to.
	And I said, well, you know, maybe if you read Steve Saylor or maybe if you know Glenn Reynolds' Instapundent, he posts some of these things.
	And this was after chatting for 8 to 10 minutes.
	And I swear to God, they looked at me and they said, Glenn Reynolds, who's this Instapundent?
	They certainly didn't know who Steve Saylor was.
	That's maybe forgivable, but...
	And so when they're looking at, you know, when you think about the reach that we might have, I mean, the idea of the last 12 months that memes and ideas and slogans have been leaking out from whether it's near reaction, alt-right, the right stuff, whoever, that's a huge impact.
	That's a huge effect compared to the idea that a few years ago folks on the right would have no clue what they're looking at for their voter coalitions, what are the ideas that they have to do battle with or that they should be pushing.
	Right.
	I totally agree.
	And as we were just saying, I think a lot has changed recently with the explosion of the right stuff and so on.
	And I would say this, that I think all of this is very positive, because even when people are, even when some people on the right stuff apparently don't like me very much, I think even that is fine, because it's...
	Building awareness.
	And I also think even the whole Milo, Gavin McGinnis, and a couple other related people, maybe you could throw Lawrence Southern in there, this kind of alt-right light, really light in many ways, but at the very least interested in the alt-right, interested in playing footsie with the alt-right, interested in stealing some of our ideas here and there.
	I think even that is positive.
	Because they're not leading us, and they are at the very least getting our memes and just the notion that there's something else out there, that there is an alternative.
	They're getting that idea out there.
	And a lot of people...
	I don't like this, but there really is no such thing as bad publicity.
	Of course there is on some edge of if people are accusing you of being a murderer or child molester, yes, that's probably bad publicity.
	That's the Huey Long.
	You don't want to be caught in bed with a dead woman or a live boy.
	Huey Long said that 75 years ago.
	When they open up your trunk, you don't want to...
	A dead woman or a live boy in there.
	So obviously there is bad publicity on the extreme edge.
	Of course there is.
	But generally speaking, I don't think there is.
	I think every time Chris Hayes tweets something about the neo-Nazis and the alt-right, I think that's good.
	Because that's one more person that has that little germ of an idea in their mind.
	And so I think what's happened, you know, I've said this many times, I think what's happened over the past year, year and a half, has really been amazing for all, you know, variations of the alt-right.
	Well, I think one thing that's happened with, you know, American discourse is that when you have folks protesting a second-tier fried chicken joint, you know, with Chick-fil-A a few years ago, and it was all over one executive's Yeah.
	I think that that helped a lot of people go, "What is going on here?
	What am I not allowed to say or to say?" And seeing the left get just completely the bloodlust come out in almost every regard, whether it's trans, gays, race, immigration, the bloodlust they've had.
	And then when reality hits, when you see a Muslim shoot up a gay bar.
	And the left doesn't go into their bloodlust after a Muslim when they go into bloodlust over a random pizza joint that answers a reporter's question that they wouldn't provide pizzas to a gay wedding.
	You can throw it right back in their face.
	I mean, I even do this on Facebook, and somebody on MPC said, if you start saying these things...
	In the open, you're going to find out that there are a lot of people who wish they could say it, but they don't.
	And you're going to get support.
	And I stated to the folks that said, hey, I'm looking forward to all the nationwide kissings that will happen outside of mosques.
	It's going to be sweet when you guys do that.
	Aren't you guys going to get right on that?
	And of course, I would say the best mark in Twitter, there's likes or retweets.
	On Facebook, the sign that you've struck a nerve.
	Is when nobody responds.
	When not a single soul on the left responds.
	Because they know that you got them by the balls.
	Yeah.
	That's how...
	For all those years that I was writing things that no one recognized or read, I should have just been telling myself, this means that I'm becoming wildly popular and powerful.
	No, no, I I totally get your point.
	I was just making a quip.
	Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.
	One thing that I would add to it is that...
	I think a lot of normies, for lack of a better term, you know, mainstream conservatives or people who don't even care about politics that much.
	I would say that previously they used to say things like political correctness is lunacy or it's stupid.
	It's so ridiculous.
	What are they going to do next?
	you know, protest Chick-fil-A for something the CEO said.
	You know, they thought of everything as ridiculous and as unfounded, as irrational, and things like that.
	And yeah, sure, you can find plenty of crazy feminists like, you know, Jigglypuff or something that, yes, they fit that stereotype.
	But I think what really...
	And it is consensual in a way.
	No one is really pointing a gun at anyone's head and forcing them not to say something or to say something.
	The most I've ever seen was my...
	Adventure in Hungary and even at that point...
	At no point did I feel, fear that I was going to be brutalized, not to mention killed.
	You know, we live in the end of history in a very Pacific, you know, we live in a big safe space in the West.
	But I think people are recognizing the rationality of this totalitarian system that we live in.
	That it's not ridiculous.
	It's actually all too rational.
	And it has a logic and an evolutionary logic to it.
	Where two years ago, we would be pointing out Caitlyn Jenner as the former Bruce, as this brave, amazing, moral human being.
	And then two years later, we're criticizing him for being a fascist and being of white male privilege.
	It's not that kind of...
	Evolution is not just some schizophrenia.
	It actually has a logic to it.
	And that we are living in a kind of totalitarian environment.
	I think also the Confederate flag controversy that happened just around a year ago after Dylan Ruth apparently murdered those people.
	The fact that just within a 24-hour period, because there was like a...
	A 48-hour period of a limbo.
	People didn't quite know how they were going to pitch this.
	You know, is the right to blame?
	Is it a gun rights issue or gun control issue?
	And then they fixated on the Confederate flag.
	And once that was chosen, it was like this hive mind just sprung into action and worked in unison.
	So within a 24-hour period, you could not buy a Confederate flag on Amazon.com.
	It wasn't just that you couldn't buy it.
	You couldn't search on Google for it.
	You'd get zero results.
	Because I ended up tweeting that, that Google took on the Stalinist strain and said, you will not even get a result for it.
	And you are right that that hive mind behavior is ballistic and scary.
	The other thing I'd point out is that that was the week of...
	fags and flags when there was gay marriage.
	Right.
	And then that shooting happened all in one week.
	But within that, for me, I think the lesson was that you saw, one, the GOPE roll over incredibly quick with the gay marriage thing.
	And then two days later, take the voters that they've been earning their bread from and eating fat off of and just threw them under the bus over a flag that really had nothing to do with the shooting.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And you do see what they could do if they really spring on us.
	Just that Google thing.
	I mean, this gets to a topic that I've talked about and others have talked about this as well, but the shuttening and how the kind of totalitarianism we're going to be facing.
	Is a very different form than what people were facing in, say, the 20th century and in the 1930s in particular.
	A lot of this is exaggerated, of course, but we do have images, and a lot of this is based on fact as well, of dictators having censorship squads and removing things from newspapers, or someone said something ideologically incorrect and he was airbrushed out of a photo and things like that.
	That kind of stuff did happen.
	And we like to point to that as just the ultimate expression of evil, and that would never happen in America, and so on.
	And it probably won't happen.
	I don't think what's going to happen in the coming decade is going to be President Clinton sending me to a rock-breaking gulag in Nebraska or something.
	Although, who knows?
	Things do change.
	I think what will happen would be something like Google censoring search results.
	And where if you Google neo-reaction, or if you Google Richard Spencer, or if you Google alt-right or something, you get no entries.
	And it's a kind of worse totalitarianism.
	It's a consensual totalitarianism.
	But it's actually worse in terms of the thought prison.
	I mean, we're already there with the 1984 that Winston Smith, you know, Ministry of Truth, who goes back and constantly has to readjust the past to fit whatever now is.
	And to bring up somebody you've already mentioned is that Bruce slash Caitlyn Jenner.
	The moment that he came out of the trans closet, or I don't even know what they used for that, but the moment that he revealed that he was trans, you saw the little squads, the volunteer squads, go on Wikipedia and completely rewrite his history.
	They changed every pronoun.
	They changed all these bits in his life that were on his Wikipedia page.
	They went in and they changed every single thing so it would fit what it says right now.
	We do get that.
	And you can do that digitally in a way that you can't do that to a book.
	Famously, in the Soviet Union, there was airbrushing of ideological M&M's or Trotskyist or something.
	That's actually hard.
	Got airbrushed the moment they had to have him take the fall for Stalin.
	Right, right, exactly.
	I mean, that's a good example.
	But that's actually difficult to do.
	Are you going to airbrush 10,000 copies of a book or something, or take out a page of this book?
	It's difficult to do.
	You're always going to miss something.
	The fact that we know about it demonstrates that it's difficult to do.
	But digitally, it's not difficult to do because we live in a digital world of infinite reproducibility.
	And so you change one little keystroke and that is changed everywhere.
	And of course, there's the way back machine and so on.
	But you get my point.
	There's a kind of consensual digital totalitarianism, which is much more powerful than any...
	Yeah, and you know, you could look at it with Joe Cox, the parliament member who was shot.
	And didn't the media run with that the shooter screamed, Britain first, death to traitors?
	Right, yes.
	That was the first 24 hours, then you had every image out there, everything online.
	And then I believe the police came out and said, no, he didn't say anything like that when he shot her.
	But that was out there, and it was a complete propaganda move for 48 hours to set the narrative.
	If they ever did say...
	Have to go back to something like that with Joe Cox.
	It's out there on the record, or even things that would be released saying, no, this never happened.
	It can be easily changed.
	I think The Running Man had it with the edited video of proving Arnold's evil deeds.
	Yes.
	The documentary known as The Running Man.
	That we've grown into, yes.
	That prophesied the future accurately.
	We have completely grown into it.
	It's either that or the fact that Robocop hit the nail on the head about Detroit 2019.
	Well, he didn't.
	Robocop was a very optimistic film, in a way.
	So express that 80s optimism that everything's going to be okay.
	Detroit's far worse.
	Yes, yes.
	Well, Ryan, why I wanted to have you on, I'm interested in just talking about the varieties of the alt-right, where you're coming from, how you as a neo-reactionary might differ in important ways from, say, an identitarian or the alt-right shitlord on Twitter type guy.
	And I just wanted to have a conversation about these basics.
	So why don't we just...
	Go into that.
	It's often good to start out with the personal.
	So, you know, you use a pseudonym, which I completely understand and support, but just talk a little bit about your pseudonymous career and where you are coming from intellectually and where you've gone and things like that.
	I was probably your classic, like, Alex P. Keaton, you know, young conservative kid from a purple state growing up.
	And then as the GOP changed, I also changed, became more of a libertarian, ANCAP type, and found the corruption a little disgusting on both sides.
	And then eventually...
	When was that?
	That was probably mid-2000s.
	Okay.
	Probably the peak.
	Of the W lot delay years.
	Right.
	When they were overreaching and on top of that just being outright disgusted with the way the left already was anti-white.
	But once you see a little bit of how the sausage gets made through friends who are on campaigns and trying to figure out what's reality down there.
	And then for someone I've already mentioned, I discovered Steve Saylor's writing.
	And then Steve Saylor and Moldbug kind of came together.
	And being able to look at history from a different way, going to primary sources, really got me thinking of, okay, the fish doesn't even know it's in water.
	So you have to know you're in water.
	And me understanding that, okay, I'm a product of not just a democratic nation, but a world system where that's the dominant world system.
	So how can you even tell if it has value or if it's worthy?
	I was critical of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History.
	I remember in college, I had a couple of professors who were all gaga about that.
	And I already kind of saw that.
	No, it doesn't seem right.
	And that never fit well with me.
	Kind of looking at the way that the system is, is that the left has a stranglehold on the media.
	There's the inner party, the Democrats, the outer party, the GOP.
	There's false opposition.
	They own academia and the media.
	So I've been drawn to the idea of you have to delegitimize their institutions, point out their mistakes, point out their lies, but then you also are going to have to build parallel institutions.
	You can't just criticize.
	You're going to have to build.
	And if you're going to talk about the truth, you've got to provide it.
	You've got to deliver it.
	Yeah, no, there's a lot to chew on there.
	I would just mention real quickly on the end of history, you could, of course, read Fukuyama Against the Grain.
	You know, the subtitle of his book is, after all, And the Last Man.
	There's maybe a secret longing for the return of history and an accurate depiction of this kind of ideological ossification and closing off of other possibilities and options and ways of life that has occurred.
	I think it's difficult to argue.
	I think you can argue around the edges about the end of history of whether we're...
	Whether we're really there, there are actually all these contradictions and conflicts within the global system, and of course there are.
	You know, NATO and Russia being an obvious example, the war on terror and all these little conflicts within the Middle East.
	I think that's all true.
	But in a way, it was an accurate depiction of a global collective nihilism that we've descended into.
	With what Fukuyama was going at, I mean, it's that period where we had finally beat the bad commies.
	But somebody had once explained to me, because there was someone who said that the Cold War was technically World War III.
	A lot of neoconservatives would use that terminology.
	James Burnham also used that terminology.
	Yeah.
	But there was either one visiting professor or somebody came and gave a talk in my college who said that what really happened was that right after World War II, when America set up its system, it actually had to fight the old European powers to get rid of their...
	They're empires.
	So really, World War III was America, because the Soviet Union was decimated after World War II.
	So really it was America beating France and England and Spain and Portugal into submission and coming under American heel and American rule.
	And he had cited the Suez Crisis.
	Along with getting the French to just finally surrender in Vietnam, that decolonization was a war that America kind of fought against European powers.
	And then after that was done, America could focus on the Soviet Union as a rising threat.
	That's an interesting perspective.
	I think there's a lot of truth to that.
	And you could say it's also a battle between two or three globalisms, one of which was communism, which, you know, the Soviet Union, I think a lot of, when we look back at it now, I think people tend to, we can now understand that people exaggerated the Soviet Union's ability to dominate the globe.
	But granted, we see that in hindsight.
	But that was a globalism.
	There were seemingly two other globalisms, one of which was the old colonial model, the old imperial model, the British Empire being first and foremost, but certainly many others.
	And then there was this other global model, which really was the American global model.
	And I think to go back to that metaphor of a fish in water doesn't perceive that he's in water.
	It's very easy for us to look at the old models, the British Empire, and say, oh, that's just totally backward.
	You're screwing over all the poor people who are subjects and so on.
	But when you see it that way, you don't perceive the kind of hegemony that America was bringing forward, which is a neoliberal hegemony-based.
	I would say first and foremost on the dollar is the currency reserve in 1944, but also, you know, all these related institutions like the World Bank and the IMF and all that kind of stuff.
	And so it was really kind of a battle of globalisms, and you could say maybe there were three of them.
	One of them was damaged but not down, and that was communism.
	Another was fatally wounded.
	And that was the European imperial model.
	And the other one was kind of young and resurgent, and that is the American model, and the American model won.
	Yeah, you know, when you talk about, like, European imperialism, there was somebody who once told me that the French never got rid of their empire.
	They just changed how it was administered.
	And so their lesson, and this was mostly also because de Gaulle was a tough nut, But what they did is that they pulled back from having overt, very open control of their colonies to having their colonies basically be controlled by French banks.
	And the French banking system could always kind of pull the strings of what was going on in those countries, and yet those countries would retain the French language and often seek help from French-trained experts or would-be trained in French colleges.
	So they tried that type of kind of like hidden sovereignty, if you will, and that's how they got around it with the American hegemony.
	But you could argue and say that now that so many of the former French colonies are switching over their official language to English, that that route ended up losing because it didn't have direct control.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it was kind of a halfway measure.
	And wasn't the full-on neoliberal global hegemony that America achieved.
	I think it's kind of interesting when we talk about this because we're now almost in a new limbo period where America still has a great deal of legitimacy.
	Remember, legitimacy is very different than power.
	The legitimacy is the basis for power.
	And you can't just point guns at people.
	It works to a certain degree, but that's going to fail at some level.
	You know, similar to the Soviet Union gained legitimacy when it started to...
	When it started to tap into structures like the Russian Empire, it gained legitimacy that I don't think an extreme, violent Bolshevik regime would ever have.
	So America still does have some legitimacy.
	A lot of people still want to come here.
	They want to go study at a university.
	They like American movies.
	And music and things like that.
	So there is a lot of that soft power is kind of legitimacy.
	It does seem like hard power is waning and that legitimacy is waning.
	There's just so much, you know, it's the difficulty of being the top dog.
	When global America is on top, there are going to be more people aiming at it, more people seeing their liberation as liberation from the U.S. And so I think we definitely are seeing the decay of both legitimacy and power.
	But no one knows what's really next.
	Is ISIS next?
	I mean, I don't, I certainly hope not, but I don't also think so.
	I think that's a kind of like, I think Romain Bernard described it as, it's this almost like extreme reaction, like photographic negative of Americanism, and it's not really, I don't see, I certainly hope that that is not the coming world order, but I don't think it is, realistically speaking.
	But what is next?
	Obviously, there's a lot of nationalism that's resurgent, but I certainly count myself as a skeptic of a lot of the Brexit stuff, the Euro-nationalism, which clearly has legitimacy, clearly is on the rise.
	Kind of a skeptic of it, I think it has a ceiling, A, but B...
	The degree to which that is a real challenge to American hegemony, I think, is questionable.
	I think there has to be something else, but we don't know what that is.
	I guess this gets back to this metaphor of fish and water.
	We take for granted American consumerism and...
	Democracy, whatever that means.
	You get to vote every couple of years and send in your local sociopath so that he can accomplish nothing, maybe some evil things, nothing much good in parliament or something.
	But it's hard for people to think outside of that.
	That's the only way we know how to perceive the world.
	That's the only way we know how to rule the world.
	Well, that's the point that you brought about the difference between legitimacy and power.
	And there's something about the American system with pitching it.
	And part of it is that we just pitch it all the time to everybody that, you know, you vote and if you participate, that gives you true legitimacy.
	That's something that even when the Chinese, when they have statements, when they talk about things.
	They still fall into the framework of, well, maybe democratization will happen and we're not ready.
	Or they still kind of give it credence while simultaneously they tell foreign countries, we will respect you no matter what form of government you have, just as long as you keep the raw materials coming.
	That's something where once the Chinese stop giving into that frame, once they stop falling into that frame and go with their You know, authoritarian capitalism, whatever blend they have.
	Once they run with that, you know, you have then somebody that you can kind of look to and go, okay, this is an example.
	Yes, they're a mega state.
	Yes, they're going to be one of the big poles of a multipolar world.
	You know, but they're an example of what we could do and how you could live a decent life.
	As you mentioned when you were talking about America's material wealth.
	And yes, we still pull in people and we have that.
	Dominance, that intellectual sovereignty, that consumer dominance, selling the American lifestyle.
	Yes, that's a big pitch.
	How long does that last, and especially in an open borders world, how long does that last until, say, America's, I don't know, 35% Mexican-American?
	There's probably going to be a ceiling on that.
	That's a problem, and that's something where I'm big on just watching around the globe.
	For looking for whether it's a smaller state like what's happened in Hungary or a larger state like what's been going on in Russia or China, paying attention to what happens out there.
	I mean, even one interesting nation that I found since their coup was Thailand.
	And when you look at what Thailand's done and when you look at how Thailand's looking at the global chessboard...
	As you said, we're in a period of flux, and we probably won't have things settled for a couple of years, but there's a lot of interesting actors out there.
	Or a couple of decades, I would say.
	Maybe a hundred.
	There are people who are making moves that it's interesting to take a look at what they're doing, how they're doing it.
	See if you can apply that.
	And then on top of that, if a country like Thailand says, nope, we're scrapping voting because too many folks were voting for gives me that in Thailand.
	And look, they're still a competent country.
	They're still a country where it's not anarchy.
	It's not wildness.
	And that you don't need the power of just casting your ballot, as you said, to send a sociopath to a state capitol or to D.C. You don't need that to have a competent state.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I would push back a little bit on that just in the sense of maybe the ultimate...
	The ultimate outcome is a kind of authoritarian capitalism and authoritarian consumerism.
	Or you could even say consumer socialism, where the government basically does not believe in any kind of free market or open marketplace of ideas and products.
	It basically believes that we need to pacify masses, probably even transnational migrating masses, and keep them happy buying stuff and strap.
	And so on.
	And that...
	In a way, the Chinese model isn't really a contradiction to Americanism taken to its logical conclusions.
	And that these are both just two kind of variations on nihilism.
	And there's nihilism with Chinese characteristics, and there's nihilism with American characteristics.
	Even someplace like Russia, which certainly has an imperial consciousness and a national consciousness, and those things are different.
	But even a country like Russia isn't really challenging this.
	I think someone like Putin, or you could say Viktor Orban, who's similar, I think they're navigating the world, and it's almost like they're...
	They're on a sinking ship, but they're still kind of able to maneuver it and turn it.
	But they're not really offering a world alternative to this consumer nihilism that we're all kind of trapped in.
	That's a good point about, like...
	not sinking as much.
	I think that's a huge indictment of just how far the West has gone.
	When people will look to the former communist bloc as a possible salvation area, that That's a damning indictment of the West.
	Well, they're innocent.
	It's a horror.
	It's an absolute horror to go back to something we were saying earlier.
	When you see folks, for me, if somebody comes out as trans, I mean, yes, I'm disgusted by it.
	But if somebody comes out as trans, the people that I'm more horrified by are not the folks that are coming out of the trans closet.
	It's the person that says the first comment, the first statement, that is like the person who won't stop clapping for Stalin.
	They sit there like, this is the greatest thing on the face of the earth.
	This is brave.
	This is courageous.
	I want to give you a big hug.
	That's the person that I'm more frightened by and that we have them in such great numbers now in the West.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, that's the kind of thing.
	This fish out of water, I think, is a good title for this episode.
	And it's a really good metaphor because it's so difficult to see things.
	Like, you know, I remember there's a joke that I often find quite amusing, which is that Stalin was at a small party conference meeting of, you know, 100 people.
	And he was talking and someone sneezed.
	And he said, who sneezed?
	And no one raised their hand.
	And he looked to his guards and he said, okay, machine gun the first row.
	And they do that.
	He goes, all right, I'll ask again, who sneezed?
	No one raises their hand.
	And they machine gun the next row.
	And then finally, a good comrade who did not sneeze stands up and said, you know, Comrade Stalin, I sneezed.
	And he was prepared to sacrifice himself.
	And Stalin says, ah, gesundheit.
	Jesus.
	I don't know if that's apocrypha or not, but it's as realistic as anything you've heard from the guy.
	Yeah, no, I mean, maybe something like that vaguely happened.
	Did you ever read Court of the Red Czar?
	I've never read that book.
	I know of that.
	Is that Monteforte?
	Yeah, it is.
	It is a phenomenal biography.
	I would recommend it to all your listeners.
	It's a phenomenal biography.
	Biography that doesn't paint Stalin as a cold technocrat, which so many people have been accused of writing biographies of him and portraying him that way.
	I mean, he's portrayed as a horrible human being, which he was, but a three-dimensional horrible human being.
	Yeah.
	No, I'll definitely check that out.
	I've seen that book.
	But we can look back on Stalinism, of that kind of totalitarianism and that kind of fear and conformism, and we can...
	Laugh at it in a morbid type way.
	But we don't see the shocking conformism of today.
	Like what you're saying, that people claiming that you're brave if you come out as gay at this point.
	One of my favorites was a couple of years ago, some state university is literally offering undergraduate degrees to people with mental retardation.
	And, you know, so there was this horrible video, I'll go find that, of this kid, of someone suffering from Down syndrome or some kind of serious mental ailment.
	And he gets his acceptance letter from, you know, the University of Tennessee.
	And, you know, he starts jumping around, hooting and hollering like a kind of a monkey.
	Oh, I got in!
	I got in!
	And it's like, to look at that, it's just so...
	Awful.
	Like, you're...
	It's like...
	You're dealing with someone who, even if they're mentally retarded, they're still a human being.
	You're treating them like an animal, and you're basically putting their parents are going to now take out student loans so that their retarded child can go attend some mock university lecture for who knows what reason.
	It's the most shocking American egalitarian consumerist socialism I've ever imagined.
	We're looking at that.
	Oftentimes, comments are good.
	Like, you know, comments in the New York Times.
	You'll get a lot of shitlords going in there, the National Review.
	But all of the comments on YouTube was, this is just the most amazing thing.
	You've made my day.
	This is just so...
	I'm inspired.
	I'm going to try to...
	And again, it's all those subjects like saying, who sneezed?
	Everyone's quiet.
	No one's pointing out what is shockingly, patently obvious, which is that this is an evil and stupid system that we live under, where we are taking out debt in order to send retards to a fake university.
	I'm going to stop you for a second, because I want you to think about it from a different perspective, because I agree with you that that's egalitarianism gone nuts.
	Who is that?
	Because they'll say, well, this really helps the self-esteem for disabled individuals.
	Whose self-esteem is truly being prodded?
	Is it the individual or is it their parent?
	It's their parents and the society.
	I mean, the university wants money.
	The financial world wants to give out more loans, and they've reached peak undergrad, and so they want to find new undergraduates, and they're going to people with mental disabilities.
	The kid who is retarded has no self-esteem problems.
	That's one of the benefits of being mentally disabled is that you don't get depressed or you don't, you know, record podcasts about the end of history.
	Things like that.
	He was not depressed.
	He was jumping around.
	You could have given him a toy or something.
	I bring this up because I've heard this more and more from people who either have a sibling, a relative or whatever that is severely disabled and not just physically in a wheelchair or has to use crutches or whatever.
	Somebody who cannot talk, cannot communicate.
	And they talk about their relative going to school.
	And I'm like, oh, are they kind of in a program that's going to help them adjust to, you know, interacting with regular folks or maybe prepare them if they have mild downs.
	Maybe prepare them to have a job and live on their own.
	And it'll be, no, no, no.
	My cousin's like three foot six, has severe mental and physical retardation.
	And they go to school every day and they'll get a certificate for completing.
	And I look at that and I hear it.
	And I have people in my social circle who have gone through that.
	So is the certificate for the child who has no clue, or is the certificate for the parent so that they can go, okay, this is my struggle as well.
	I'm being a good parent.
	I'm doing this.
	Yeah, to ask the questions to answer it.
	For me, it's completely bizarre, and especially since we're just a few decades away from where doctors would go to people and say, Yeah,
	yeah.
	I'm reminded of Idiocracy, where, you know, it's no big deal, my wife is tarted.
	She's a pilot now.
	Yes, yes.
	But I guess it also gets to this sense where there's really no limit.
	Like, people really do live out their ideologies.
	And this is where a lot of white nationalists or similar type people will talk about some things that, well, once there's an economic collapse or even a major downturn...
	Well, then, at that point, people will stop living these lives of luxury and letting in immigrants and refugees and sending retards to college, and we'll start to get down to brass tacks and so on.
	And I actually don't agree with that opinion.
	I guess I am an idealist.
	I think that the mind changes and then the world will change.
	I think even if...
	Germans were starving.
	They would still be allowing in refugees because the ideology is taken hold to such a shocking degree.
	And that doesn't mean that a lot of people wouldn't change.
	That doesn't mean that some people wouldn't rethink things if there were an economic collapse.
	But I don't think something like that is really an answer to anything.
	I talked about this in this...
	I gave a couple years ago called Why Do They Hate Us?
	And when you think about people in Rotherham who would rather children be raped by a bunch of Muslim savages than they be called a racist.
	They literally made that calculation.
	Maybe even somewhat consciously they made that calculation.
	And I think that just gets to this whole...
	A, the degree to which we're religious beings, we're ideological beings, and we do have thought patterns that reproduce themselves over and over in our minds, and that leads us to pursue ways of life, you could say.
	I don't like lifestyle.
	Ways of life.
	And that it's really those kind of religious-like...
	The fundamentals that we hold are all important in determining how we act and how we view the world and so on.
	So at some point, even if there's an economic collapse, these Americans are going to still be sending retards to college.
	Because they're just so gone.
	And that doesn't mean that things don't change.
	I think clearly religious outlooks and ideological outlooks, clearly they do change.
	And maybe it has to be a die-off.
	Maybe a generation is going to be better or at least different than the last.
	Maybe you just have to go through this process.
	But I do think that we're going to have to go through a total psychological reorientation.
	I don't think this is just something about, you know...
	Changing some policy or, you know, a depression would save us or something like that.
	I think it's going to have to be a very profound, deep psychological change.
	It's going to have to be on the level of being in the world and being.
	It's going to have to be that deep.
	Well, there's going to have to be a struggle.
	Yeah.
	Like an actual pressure and struggle to survive.
	And then you're going to have your fight.
	You know, the folks who are going to fight and the folks who are going to flight.
	Or the folks who will die.
	Yeah, and you could argue that even within states and just total fertility rates for, say, whites in different states, that that's what's been going on.
	And some folks are choosing to cocoon, use their adult coloring books, never have kids, never really have an adult relationship, and then they're going to live out the next 50, 60 years, I guess, like that.
	And then there are other folks who are like, no, I'm going to build a family, build a community.
	But even those people can often be really cucked.
	Like the state of Utah, for instance.
	Yeah, or that Christian couple that had the three black embryos, the triplet girls, those on the Washington Post.
	I mean, it's ridiculous.
	But that guy, the husband had total cuck face.
	The thing that I'd say with...
	You were asking minutes ago about, say, a difference between the identitarian movement and alt-right and near reaction and all that.
	I think the identitarians, the way I view it is this way, is not all white people are white and not all white people are white people.
	I don't want to live in a state full of Massachusetts individuals.
	And no offense to yourself, I know you're originally from Massachusetts.
	But I don't want to live with a bunch of mass holes.
	And that's what we called them when I grew up in Maine.
	When I go back to Massachusetts, the bizarro way of their life and their religious, the way they kind of view the progressive beliefs as in their religion, I don't want to live with them, but that state's 85% white or so.
	You want to live with townies, though.
	They voted for Trump at 85% clip.
	Yeah, beyond the 128, more the 290, I-495 crowd maybe.
	Maybe that's it.
	But that's something where I don't just purely view the white identity thing in that way.
	I'm proud to be white.
	I love being white.
	But that's kind of where I split off or where I see new reactions splitting off.
	The other big split I'd say is I think that, and I love that all these all-right memes are out there, but...
	I think that the alt-right folks are more of a mass movement, let's get out on the streets.
	If there's blood on the streets, we go for it.
	And that they still believe that there can be change through the ballot box.
	And I believe with new reaction, it's more carving out a space.
	One, even if you win a vote, it's going to get overturned somehow to timestamp this.
	Yep, Hillary Clinton might have done a bunch of things that would be illegal and would get normal people sent to jail, but shucks, we're a banana republic, she gets off scot-free.
	The new reaction crowd is going to carve out a space for an elite to say, for the elites to look and go, here's a system we can design.
	Here's a sword.
	Here's Excalibur that you can use.
	You just have to wield it.
	Because when the Russians gave up, you know, big C communism, they only gave it up because they had Western capitalistic democratic government to switch to.
	So if we can design a system.
	Mm-hmm.
	that can pull in enough folks, whether they're tastemakers or just folks who are, say, a positive socioeconomic status, The elites, and someone, say, recently who's been getting a lot of heat just for funding a lawsuit against Gawker, someone like a Peter Thiel could go, whoa, whoa, whoa, this makes some sense, and have a safer space for them to go to and be able to withstand the heat.
	I mean, all the hate that he's received in the media the last month and a half, whether it's being a Trump delegate or the Gawker lawsuit, you carve out a space for one of them to defect from the current regime.
	Then others will follow.
	And they need, just like a little college student needs a bit of a safe space, yep, even multi-millionaires need a safe space.
	Yeah.
	No, I agree.
	I think a distinction could be made between certainly white nationalism.
	I think white nationalism is...
	I don't want people attacking me.
	More people attacking me.
	I think white nationalism has kind of run its course.
	I think in someone who's really WN of this kind, it does sound, sometimes when they talk, it sounds a bit 90s.
	It sounds like something that's...
	You know, a bit curdled milk or it's never gone anywhere.
	It's too populist.
	It's too, you know, we've got to stop the illegals.
	Our race is under threat.
	It doesn't seem like you're really solving the full issue.
	I would say...
	Identitarianism probably has, at least identitarianism as I understand it, probably has more, a deeper connection with neoreaction, even if we might disagree here and there.
	It's just in the sense that this is going to be a holistic problem that we're going to have to solve, that identity is not just your genetics.
	Identity really is a spirit.
	It's a social form.
	And that social form is not about the people finally having their say.
	Every society is going to be hierarchical.
	And the elites of variations, obviously economic elites, but political elites, military elites, cultural elites, spiritual elites, these people matter more.
	These people inform society.
	And they create the forms that normies operate in.
	That all of these things need to be changed.
	I would say, you know, one...
	don't get me wrong.
	That being said, I think they could be in for a major disappointment once the election occurs, whether win or lose.
	Certainly if Trump loses, I think that would be demoralizing, and I don't want Trump to lose.
	But Trump winning could be equally demoralizing, because Trump might not really get it at some level.
	And Trump might not really...
	You know, we're not going to...
	We're not just going to kick out the illegals and get better trade deals.
	We're not going to enter a new world.
	And I think it's actually important that we have identitarian groups, neoreactionaries, and so on, who are willing to say these kinds of things and willing to push us forward.
	Because I do think that we're going to be...
	We're going to be in a different point.
	When is the election?
	November 8th or something?
	We're going to be in a different point on November 9th.
	We're going to be in a new world.
	And whether that's a Trump loss, that's going to probably immediately open a lot of possibilities because I think people will start to grasp that we're not going to win this through the ballot box.
	But a Trump win, I think we're going to have to have leaders.
	Because we can't just buy into this idea that we need a better trade deal or we need to kick out the illegals.
	The problem that our race and civilization are facing is so much deeper than this that we need to keep pushing and we need to keep going further.
	And I think that's where leadership comes in, to be honest.
	Part of that goes into the hole in the soul of Western man and woman.
	That is just a hole and we can't fill it.
	There's no struggle.
	There's nothing that we have to fill it.
	And that's where when I've witnessed firsthand the response people have to Trump is this is a casino magnet, a construction reality television star who's just going out there and saying what so many people wish they could say and could say on camera and have it be broadcast to America.
	I thank him for opening the Overton window.
	I thank him for touching every single third rail in politics this election cycle.
	It's amazing to watch it happen.
	I think that wherever you are on the alt-right, there's going to be a day that's going to come where a true governor of any state is going to say, this is the weekend that we kick out the cartels.
	And it would be, they'd probably have to call the National Guard for assistance, and it would be a bloody weekend or whatever.
	They'd have to do full access to folks in the media to say, look, I'm going to be here.
	This is our crisis center.
	You'll be able to see us in action.
	And that person, in whatever state it is, is going to get rid of the cartels.
	They're going to give a great speech about why they did it.
	And they're going to encapsulate just the decay of so many small towns, heroin, what's happening in schools, what's happening in small towns.
	I thought you were referring to the media cartels.
	Sorry, I was talking about the narco cartels.
	Once they go after that, and when that governor, and I assume it would probably happen, when that governor in the Midwest or out West does it, there's going to be a huge upswell.
	There's going to be a huge surge of, you know what, you're going to have to take a stand at some point.
	And like I said, fight or flight.
	Some won't.
	And they can just curl up with their adult coloring books and their video games and die off.
	But there will be a lot of folks who will stand up and fight.
	And I mean, one thing I'd say, too, that's the strength of the alt, right, in general, is it is decentralized.
	Yeah.
	It is decentralized.
	And that's something that I think is fantastic because it's like catching.
	It's like trying to, you know, catch it.
	Slap a butterfly with just a flyswatter or catching a butterfly in a net.
	When you're in a net and things fall in, you can wrap around a lot quicker.
	The rapid reaction that folks have, whether it's social media, writing, and then amplifying a signal, it's amazing to see that...
	I think Ricky Vaughn might have said it or tweeted it that roughly 1,000 anonymous accounts, maybe even fewer, but 1,000 anonymous accounts and one billionaire destroyed the GOP pundit class.
	And that's just kind of a strength of it doesn't matter what time of day it is.
	If you say something, you're going to be called out by 10 to 500 accounts.
	And it pierces their bubble.
	And that's a huge thing to let them know because the regime and the regime press, they live in that bubble where they think everybody loves me, this is perfect, oh, just they're uneducated if they don't accept me or they don't believe what I believe.
	Once you pierce their bubble, you show that they're vulnerable.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I totally agree.
	That is why I think...
	The neocons and other conservatives are right to be terrified about Trump.
	I think one could make the argument that, oh, this is so overblown, you guys should just go along with it.
	Obviously, people in the Republican establishment are going along with Trump, and they're just kind of saying, okay, well, we're going to probably lose this time, but don't worry.
	We'll hit the reset button, and we'll be back to talking about family values and capitalism in 2018 or something.
	But I don't think it really happens that way.
	I think there is a way where you open up space and you can't really go back.
	And I certainly hope that's the case.
	What's his name?
	Who's the Japanese anime guy?
	The Republican pundit slash media consultant?
	Oh, Rick Wilson.
	Yeah, Rick Wilson.
	If people like Rick Wilson and others, if we do go back and they become re-employed or something, I would be pretty depressed, to be honest.
	But I generally think that doesn't happen.
	You don't really go back.
	Things change, and something new is going to take their place.
	Well, that brings up a good point, because I think something that's been so powerful about Trump's campaign is...
	It's the failed rally in Chicago.
	It's the rallies in California.
	And there are some of those photos in California where it is just a family of three, four, five.
	They're going to a rally, and they're just walking in, maybe with a Trump shirt, maybe with a Trump sign, and they're being shouted at by a smorgasbord of ministry meets and minorities.
	It just strikes me that something has fundamentally changed in America.
	Something has fundamentally transformed.
	In California, it's fantastic that it's showing these folks, no, that America from 1950s that the GOP pitches to you, that's gone.
	It's not coming back.
	Do you think that white conservative normies don't grasp that?
	Because one thing that I would say about white conservative normies there, Very naive people, very good-natured, conformist in their way, people who want everything to just work out, people who deal with you in good faith, and they expect and assume that everyone else is dealing with them in good faith.
	Do you think that they grasp...
	The kind of edge we're on.
	I mean, I think sometimes they do.
	Even the Tea Party phenomenon, which, you know, it devolved into this Glenn Beck nonsense.
	But just the fact that it existed was an expression of people were perceiving that something was going wrong.
	Do you think that they grasp that they're on the edge and that we can't go back and that it's not going to be okay and that there's going to be a crack-up in their world?
	It's not going to be a Norman Rockwell painting.
	Because it seems like liberals get it more than conservatives in that sense.
	I do think you're right about that.
	The blinders are on.
	And I would not blame them as much for the folks in Michigan, the folks in Pennsylvania, who might not be exposed to what's been going on, say, in the Southwest or giant immigration states like Florida.
	Exactly, yeah.
	They're isolated.
	Yeah, and that's something about Trump going to those states to show the people in the Big Ten states, to show the people in Michigan, Iowa, Ohio, this is your future.
	This is your future if this keeps up.
	I do think some of them have their head in the sand, but I do think that some of them, you know, it's just genuine atomization.
	I mean, my parents were teasing, you know, my parents are middle-of-the-road boomers, like right in the middle of that generation.
	And they were teasing some of my younger male cousins who were aged 21 to 25 about, you know, when are you going to find a good girl?
	When are you going to do this and that?
	And so one of my cousins turned it around to them and he goes, define a good girl.
	And so my parents threw out some traits.
	And my cousin goes, I've never had a girl even offer to cook me anything.
	And my mom was like, wait, what are you talking about?
	And he goes, I don't even think most of the girls I dated could cook more than mac and cheese and ramen.
	And it was kind of shocking for a boomer who's completely out of touch with the dating game.
	And then he showed them Tinder.
	And he said, because I had mentioned my parents were like, oh yeah, there's dating apps that are really just sex apps, like in Logan's Run.
	And my parents were like, what?
	And my cousin, who actually had a Tinder account, was showing, you know, all I have to do is message.
	And I can get sex.
	And his big pitch to my parents was, I can get sex anytime I want.
	To get a girl to stay longer than three weeks or four weeks, that's the challenge.
	And it's not, you know, like, that's not my parents having their head in the sand.
	It's just my parents being completely detached from that.
	And that's part of that atomization between regions, genders, generations.
	Very few folks truly know what someone else is going through.
	And then the only people they're hearing it from are folks in the media.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And just this default notion that it's going to all be okay.
	I think that we probably evolved to have something like that.
	I mean, white people evolved to have longer time horizons.
	That's very important.
	You actually invest, you plant, you reap it later.
	So on.
	You make it through winter?
	Exactly.
	We had to make it through winter.
	Come on, if you make it through winter, man.
	It would be nice if we were just lounging about and, you know, bananas are falling off trees and things like that.
	And we could just go, just live off the land like that.
	But no, we had to make it through winter.
	We developed a long time horizon.
	We also probably evolved a certain kind of naive optimism of collaborating with others, conforming to a degree.
	Conformism is very important.
	It's a little bit silly.
	Even when I was bashing the conformist to people on a YouTube comment, well, humans are going to conform.
	We would never have evolved to where we are if we were this race of atomized individualists who were all a bunch of hipsters contradicting everyone at every possible outcome.
	That's not going to work.
	But I think also we probably did evolve a certain optimism that it's going to be okay, because that is a motivation to keep on getting on or whatever.
	It's going to work out.
	And that is important for society.
	We probably evolved to have that trait.
	But we see the dark side of that in a moment where there is about to be a paradigmatic shift or a major collapse.
	And people just don't want to grasp the kind of threat that is before us.
	And again, we don't have an elite that tells them about threats.
	I mean, a tribe, you need people telling them about the barbarians at the gate.
	We don't have that elite anymore.
	That was probably fundamentally a military elite.
	Our military elite now are a bunch of doofus football coaches who go out and bomb some Iraqi village and then rebuild it.
	We don't have a military elite really talking about the other.
	And we don't have that.
	We have a media and political elite who are hopeless progressives.
	We are the empire.
	We run the global empire now, and globalism looks for clients.
	It looks for deepening ties.
	And one thing that why the left got in on the global intervention, it wasn't just the old Wilsonian, let's export democracy.
	There was the idea that the business interests, Bob Strauss, I think it was Robert Strauss, was a lawyer in a huge...
	Kingmaker, political connector on the left, and he helped orchestrate the 76 Democrat Convention, kind of lining up everybody for imagery to be behind Carter to unite and win.
	But his law firm made tons of money off of consulting and doing things with international clients.
	So the idea that you make more trade agreements, and more trade agreements will eventually become...
	If something happens with the internal politics of that nation, you then have an actual interest to go back to the seat of the Empire's power in D.C. and go, we need to intervene here.
	We need to do something about this.
	I'm losing money.
	I'm one of your donors.
	So part of it's the political system.
	We're not truly ruling and reigning our vassal states.
	We're doing it through intermediaries, and then only when stuff hits the fan do we jump in.
	And it's not that different from when the Brits switched over from colonialism and stuff to imperialism.
	It's not that different.
	And if you look at even what Lord Cromer went through in Egypt, the immediate intervention in Egypt was this weird unification of the jingoists and the super patriots.
	And, you know, it might sound like an echo from today, these left wing folks who want to spread the great ideals and the joys of British civilization to the Egyptians.
	And then quickly, within a couple of years, those folks on the left all turned on that intervention.
	And then Cromer was constantly spinning plates, did a fantastic job with it, but he's constantly spinning plates.
	So it's not that different from today.
	It's just that like the scale of what we can do for damage and destruction is so much greater.
	hmm well Well, put a bookmark in it.
	This was interesting.
	A very theoretical conversation.
	You should come back.
	Thank you for having me.
	I have to ask this, because you do these 5,000 word reviews of James Bond films.
	But what's your favorite Bond film?
	Oh, I thought everyone knows that.
	I would say my favorite is On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
	Oh my god, are you kidding me?
	No.
	Really?
	No.
	I think that's the best.
	I think that's the best made Bond film.
	It's not my favorite.
	My favorite is Goldfinger.
	Okay.
	But that's more because I view looking at Bond films not from what the story is, but from kind of the idea of a little bit of the cheese, a little bit of the themes of Bond.
	Whereas on Her Majesty's Secret Service, you are right.
	It's the best.
	Yeah, it's the best story.
	Goldfinger cemented all the icons and all of the tropes and the aura of Bond.
	That wasn't quite there, because From Russia With Love almost feels more like a John le Carré tale or something.
	It's a little bit more shadowy.
	Although you're in Turkey, it's less of the splash and exoticism and fun.
	And Dr. No, I think, is actually a brilliant film.
	But that, you know, that was very low budget and so on.
	It was Goldfinger that cemented it all.
	But I don't think Goldfinger is the greatest movie.
	I think its story kind of, I mean, it has all the, it has some brilliant elements, like, you know, the man himself and some of those scenes.
	But the story is, I don't know, it doesn't really, It doesn't really excite me, whereas on Her Majesty's Secret Service, it definitely touches me, the story, and then also, I don't know, there's this kind of mythic element of there's a dragon up in a castle, and you have to go slay the dragon.
	Up in the Alps and save the princess.
	There's something deeply mythic about it that I like.
	On Her Majesty's Secret Service, first off, if Connery or Moore is in that film instead of Lazenby, then that is the Bond film from the 60s, 70s that is always on TNT or whatever.
	That's always a Sunday matinee after the NFL's done.
	If it was just a different lead, because it's...
	Probably the most realistic, probably the most believable guy and girl get together and fall.
	Yeah.
	Like the one time where you're like, Bond is not just nailing some exotic foreign tail in like five-word pickup, you know, or a five-line pickup.
	Like there's an actual development of a relationship.
	Yeah.
	I think Lazenby is believable.
	Whereas Moore would have...
	I mean, I like Roger Moore.
	I'm a Roger Moore defender, but only in the sense that I don't take him that seriously.
	I like the fact that it becomes wild and stylized and ridiculous and cartoonish.
	He kills a snake with his hairspray.
	You've got to love Roger Moore for that.
	I love how Lazenby doesn't, in OHMSS, Doesn't the British, because he goes up there and it's the rare diseases.
	It's all these hot chicks with rare diseases.
	Not like realistic, like it'd be ugly chicks.
	And that British, blue-eyed, super-Brit-looking, maud girl writes in lipstick on his inner thigh because he's got a kill song.
	And that's brilliant.
	And Lazenby plays it cool.
	He plays it cool, and I like that about him.
	Are you okay?
	A slight stiffness coming on.
	Yes, yes.
	But see, I do a killer Sean Connery, and I do it all the time.
	And I will do it here.
	I haven't even been drinking.
	But hold on.
	You can't trust the communists, whether they're Chinese or showbiz.
	So there you go.
	That's one of my Connery lines.
	But if I'm drinking...
	Which film is that one from?
	I don't recognize...
	No, I just made that up.
	Oh, you just made it up.
	Okay.
	I just made that up.
	That's from some imaginary James Bond film that should exist.
	Yeah, or he'd be like, the Japanese.
	They have small women.
	Like, just you bring out the Connery voice when you need it.
	Yeah.
	And he's such a, like, I mean, again, I love Connery too.
	But, you know, he has this animal sexuality where, you know, he almost...
	You know, there's one line where he says something like, you know, why do Chinese girls taste different than Japanese girls?
	He says, you know, there's something about him that's just this animal, like he consumes women.
	Whereas Roger Moore, like, you know, makes love to them.
	You know, Connery just ravishes them, basically.
	And so, whereas Lazenby...
	Does seem to be a...
	He's a more genuine person.
	He seems uncomfortable in that film.
	I don't think Moore or Connery ever seem uncomfortable.
	They're always wildly arrogant and confident.
	Lazenby's actually afraid.
	He doesn't really know what he's doing.
	He makes mistakes.
	And that's why I think in a way Lazenby's the perfectly cast and you can't just plug someone else into that film.
	That it really was more realistic.
	It was definitely more of a Fleming bond, because Fleming's bond is this kind of unhappy, broken young man who has bad relationships.
	It's a very different person.
	But look at MI6 and CIA.
	That's believable.
	That's totally believable.
	What do you mean, today?
	No, but couldn't you just see MI6 and CIA guys being completely miserable human beings?
	Oh yeah, definitely.
	That's the kind of dark side to his character, is that he is this person with good instincts and a healthy outlook, but who's in this kind of dark, modern world.
	I mean, Fleming's Bond is a lot closer to a John le Carré world than you might imagine.
	If you go to the books fresh and you don't go to the books after just watching the movie and then you kind of like project the movie onto the books.
	If you go to the books fresh and you try to like discover them for the first time, it's a very different world.
	But yeah, that's why I think Her Majesty seems to be the best combination because it has...
	I mean, it has that.
	It has a real genuine love story.
	It has tragedy, obviously.
	And it was much more of a Fleming bond.
	So that's the one that I'll return to.
	There's some other movies that are certainly good.
	Casino Royale is a really well-made...
	I'm talking about the 2006, not the 1966.
	But yeah, basically Daniel Craig's First Effort is a really good film.
	And yeah, those are what I would say.
	But you know, it's funny, I don't watch Goldfinger that much.
	See, I will watch it if it's on.
	I mean, I will just listen for Shirley Bassey.
	Oh, yeah.
	Just for that completely ridiculous theme song.
	Yeah.
	But, I mean, if you saw Skyfall, I mean, that...
	That theme song that Adele sang is just cut from the cloth of those early years, and just whether it was Nancy Sinatra or Shirley Bassey, going completely over the top, selling you on this action film.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, I know that there's been criticism, whether it's Black Money, Penny, or a decade, or sorry, 20 years ago it was Female M. I mean, yeah, that kind of pause seeks in there.
	Well, Live and Let Die might be the film where it...
	I don't watch that one as well.
	That seems like they wanted to jump on the counterculture and they wanted to jump on blaxploitation movies, which is a very weird thing to do.
	The series can get paused, but I think ultimately Bond is this myth of the mid-century modernity.
	And in that sense, he's both kind of progressive, if you look at him in the context of the 50s and 60s, but he's very regressive from our standpoint and kind of wildly conservative and out of place, like a fish out of water, to go back to this metaphor, where the whole Bond film is this indulgence.
	indulging in this idea that you have a mid-20th century kind of semi-aristocratic, semi-modern fish out of water, but he's still saving the world in 2015, the last one.
	And that's the fantasy.
	And that's why I It's interesting that, in a way, James Wan is still so relevant and so resonant.
	Like, how many people...
	Whenever you, if you just Google James Bond, you'll see all their like tons of blogs or even news items and like the telegraph.
	Oh, who's going to be cast as the new James Bond?
	Who's going to sing the theme song?
	Like everyone's focused on it, obsessed with it.
	And I think that that says something about society that we kind of need that.
	I will say this.
	I know that there was the, because they always joke if they're going to make Bond black or a female.
	I think the one.
	The opportunity they had to do, say, like a one-shot, let's make Bond female, would have been if they had set it up instead of it GoldenEye, instead of it being Pierce Brosnan.
	They brought in Liz Hurley for one movie.
	You know you would have lined up for her in a plunging neckline dress, doing witty things back and forth.
	She still has to kill women because now they're her sexual competitor.
	And I mean, that's something you could totally do.
	You know, some Russian she's got to shoot, you know, in the back of the head or whatever, like taking her man or whatever.
	It's the same thing.
	I think that was the one shot that would have done it.
	Right.
	You're being very insightful because a female Bond, it would be different.
	Like, Bond ultimately does this for England, you know.
	I love my favorite scene is when he's just before this great scene of Inspired Love Me where he skis off a cliff where he's with this, you know, hot.
	Scandinavian babe in a cabin.
	And then she's like, but James, I need you.
	And Roger Moore goes, so does England.
	Connery says other things like, oh, the things I do for England when he's about to have sex with this dangerous German woman.
	But anyway, he still is dutiful.
	He still supports the regime at some level.
	I think, in a way, what you're saying is very insightful, because if it were a female bond, she would be, like, killing her female sexual competitors.
	Like, she would have no sense of true duty or sense of nationhood.
	It would be like trying to murder female agents who are competition for the affection of a man.
	I'm sad to say.
	But no, I wouldn't have liked that.
	I mean, Liz Hurley is obviously hot, but I would have, even me when I was like 12, I'd be like, no!
	I'm doing the math in my head.
	You'd have been a teenager.
	Liz Hurley, 1994.
	You would have been all over it.
	You can deny it to the listeners, but I know what would have happened.
	No, no, no.
	I was a very sophisticated young man.
	I would have opposed this.
	And I'm glad they haven't done it.
	If the Broccolis and Michael Wilson weren't in charge of the franchise, this would have happened long ago.
	The fact that this family controls it is the reason why we still have this mid-century fantasy going on, that we're just replaying over and over.
	If Fox controlled it, or who was that horrible...
	Amy Pascal or something, she was suggesting that Bond be Black.
	If those types of producers, and she's also the producer of the new Ghostbusters film, by the way.
	If those type of horrendous women were in charge of Bond, he would have been Dwayne Johnson.
	It wouldn't even have been Idris Elba, who's kind of an interesting actor.
	I want him to be a Bond villain.
	I think that would be cool.
	But I certainly don't want him to be James Bond.
	But it wouldn't have even been Idris Elba.
	It would have been Dwayne The Rock Johnson or Lil Wayne.
	Or like Chris Tucker in the Rush Hour.

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