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April 12, 2017 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:34:23

Richard Spencer Debates Dave Smith (04/12/2017)

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	Read my lips.
	No new taxes.
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	I remember landing under sniper fire.
	There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles.
	I will close Guantanamo.
	I will restore habeas corpus.
	You're listening to Part of the Problem on the Gas Digital Network.
	I can be the freest country in the world when you lock more of your own people in cages than any other country in the world.
	The lesson of 9-11 should have been to never fund another young rebel group in this part of the world again.
	America started as the smallest government in history and it's become the biggest government in world history.
	At the end of the day, it's all about freedom.
	Here's your host, Dave Smith.
	What's up everybody?
	Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
	Oof, we got a good one for you today.
	This one should be pretty juicy.
	I just wrapped up a conversation with Richard Spencer.
	I think we talked close to an hour and a half, and we had not planned on going that long, but we ended up talking a lot.
	And, yeah, I thought it was a very interesting, thought-provoking conversation.
	I hope you guys enjoy it.
	Before we play that, I have a couple pieces of business.
	Real quick, a couple of plugs that I want to let you know about.
	Of course, on the 30th, which is now coming up this Thursday, March 30th, one night only, I will be in Boston co-headlining with Louis J. Gomez, and we're also bringing Tim Dillon out for the show.
	It's at Nick's Comedy Stop.
	It's going to be a lot of fun.
	Post-show party.
	You get the info at the stand-up show.
	So come on out to Nick's Comedy Shop in Boston on Thursday, March 30th.
	Me, Louis J. Gomez, and Tim Dillon.
	That's going to be a fucking really good time.
	Make sure you come out to that.
	Also, okay, here's the big announcement, guys.
	Big, big announcement.
	Which, of course, is the date and venue of yours truly's first comedy special.
	Okay?
	I've basically, you know, as a lot of you guys have come to know me from the world of podcasting and, you know, the TV stuff and the radio stuff, and this is kind of where I've gotten my entire audience from.
	And everybody kind of knows that I do stand up, and I've been doing it for the last 10 years.
	But at a certain point, I've gotten sick and tired of waiting for the industry.
	Gas Digital has done more to help my career than anything else.
	Since I've been in this game.
	And they're going to produce and direct this whole thing.
	I'm very excited about it.
	So, June 1st at the Triad Theater.
	It's on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
	We're going to have two shows.
	I'll have a link out this week for tickets.
	Part of the problem, children, if you are in the New York City area, you've got to get out to this show.
	This is the night.
	It's going to be a huge event.
	You get to see our special album.
	Before anybody else does, before it comes out, and there'll be an after party that everyone's invited to.
	We're going to do a whole thing.
	So, don't forget, June 1st at the Triad Theater.
	Very excited about this.
	Make sure you guys come out.
	And a huge, huge thank you to Gas Digital, which is really just going above and beyond.
	This thing is going to be a legit comedy special, and I'm very excited.
	We're just getting into the meat of really planning everything out, and it's going to be pretty cool.
	So, anyway, okay.
	Those are the plugs.
	I wanted to say, just maybe preface this conversation with the fact that I get some heat for having Richard on the show.
	And I understand that the mainstream media has decided that Richard Spencer is some evil person.
	I know that a lot of my left-wing friends on Facebook who follow the mainstream media's The marching orders have also decided that he's a Nazi and the most evil person ever.
	Look, I have a lot of disagreements with Richard, and I think we get into some of them in this conversation.
	But the idea that, as I've made this point a couple times now, but the idea that I can sit down with someone at the CIA, or I can sit down with someone in the military, I can sit down with people who are actual killers, I can sit down with people who advocate the next war.
	But I can't talk to an ethno-nationalist.
	I don't see the logic in that.
	On top of that, I also, or not on top of that, but on the other side of that, I also don't downplay the concerns about the alt-right.
	Believe me, I'm the Jewish libertarian who's the son of a Holocaust survivor.
	I know the dangers of right-wing groups.
	Anti-left-wing uprisings.
	That being said...
	I gotta say, I've felt this way passionately for a long time.
	Well, number one, I guess the preference is that I don't like the sloppiness of calling Richard Spencer a Nazi.
	I don't like just throwing...
	I actually, if you want to play this liberal game, the lefty game, where they get offended by things, which I don't really like getting into, but if you want to be offended by something, I'm actually more offended by the fact that people on the left think we'll throw out the term Nazi whenever it's politically expendable for them.
	That they'll just label anybody, the group who was responsible for murdering a whole lot of my family.
	That kind of bugs me, because I think that should probably be reserved for actual Nazis.
	That being said, as all of you guys know who listen to the show, I reject this entire paradigm of the current government media structure that we have.
	I look at the fact that, you know, look, I think we get into this a little bit in the show.
	I think that if you want to talk about Western culture or European culture, the most horrible movements in the world were the socialists and the Nazis and these awful organizations.
	And then what rose up after the Second World War on the communist or socialist side was absolutely terrible.
	And then the NATO side, which doesn't have as many deaths on its hands as the socialists and certainly hasn't killed as many of its own people, although the USA does imprison a lot of them.
	There's somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million Muslims have been killed by US-NATO wars.
	No one seems to be morally outraged to this.
	We're not as morally outraged about that as they are when Richard Spencer says, hail Trump.
	And I don't think that's right.
	I don't think that's fair.
	And I'm not going to go along with them, with these people who are apologists for this regime, when they say this is the thing that we should reserve the most moral outrage for.
	I mentioned this in the conversation, but if you really hate Nazis, you would probably make it a big deal that the U.S., after World War II, shipped in a whole bunch of them.
	And we brought in a whole bunch of Nazis.
	That would be something maybe you would care about.
	And then on top of that, so I'd say I find it offensive to just label everybody a Nazi, and I don't think it's accurate, and truth is kind of what I'm after.
	I would also say I don't agree.
	So in this kind of the Western post-World War II world, and I'll tell you, I don't know if the general public knows this or knows much about this.
	Maybe I just happen to because I'm like, you know, in a Jewish family that is, you know, Jews are kind of obsessed with never forgetting the Holocaust and we were actually involved.
	So this is all kind of, you know, I've been kind of steeped in this.
	But right-wing tendencies, right, and right-wing fascist-y leaning groups in Europe and elsewhere in the West didn't just go away.
	They've been under the boot of statism for a while.
	You can't print Nazi writings in Germany.
	You'll go to fucking jail for it.
	Even in Canada, some guy, I don't know if he actually went to jail in Canada or he went to jail somewhere else, but he was charged in Canada for being a Holocaust denier.
	You don't have the freedom of speech in a lot of these countries.
	If they deem you hate speech, which is essentially anything that was pro-right-wing fascism, you'll do fucking jail time.
	And so they're kind of pushed.
	You know, by force into the darkness and not allowed to make these arguments.
	And you see this spirit alive even when Richard Spencer gets punched and people are celebrating that.
	And I just wholeheartedly reject all of that.
	I reject all of that shit.
	I don't think the way, even if you think that everything...
	If somebody's saying is wrong, I don't believe that you should outlaw their ability to make the case, get rid of their freedom of speech.
	If you want to, on any level, and this is something I try to get at through our conversation, but if you want to, on any level, judge something as morally superior, or one group is morally superior, the reason Nazis are bad is because they didn't allow for this individual freedom, and of course they ended up robbing people of the most important freedom, is your right to life.
	So this is why we consider them morally wrong.
	Now, the counter to that is I don't think to also embrace fascism and authoritarianism.
	So anyway, I've always kind of felt like this is a bad way to deal with something.
	And what's happening with the alt-right, as we get into in the interview, the rise of the alt-right at this point is something that just can't be denied.
	And I think it's ridiculous to say we shouldn't have the conversation.
	We shouldn't.
	Look, say whatever you feel about Richard Spencer.
	He's making an intellectual argument, and I think we either have to win the argument or have the conversation and at least find out what's really going on.
	And that's kind of what I attempt to do.
	And I think we have a pretty thought-provoking, interesting conversation.
	Look, I try to pin Richard down at one point on what exactly, you know, he is willing.
	Or will accept being done to people.
	We agree that it's morally wrong to kill people of other races and it's morally wrong to aggress against them.
	Although he seems to accept some gray area of what might be acceptable in reality if times get rough.
	And anyway, I don't know if I was quite able to pin him down on that in the way I would have liked to.
	But maybe that exchange in itself will shed some insight.
	Anyway, I enjoyed the conversation and I appreciated Richard Spencer for coming on the show.
	I think this one should probably get some people on all sides nice and provoked and triggered.
	So I'm looking forward to the reactions.
	Alright, is there anything else I had to do here?
	No, I don't think so.
	Alright, let's go to the interview with Richard Spencer.
	I hope you guys enjoy it.
	All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show.
	The president of the National Policy Institute, Identitarian, Richard Spencer.
	How are you, sir?
	I'm doing very well.
	Thanks for having me on.
	Yeah, thanks for coming on.
	We had a conversation when I was guest hosting the Gavin McGinnis Show, and I thought we had a very thought-provoking, interesting discussion.
	This time, instead, I would like to just yell fascists at you, if that's okay.
	Oh, good.
	You could just remain silent.
	And I will, fascists!
	This will just be an hour.
	Fascist!
	Alright.
	That's good.
	I think we've successfully defeated the alt-right.
	It's really productive to do that.
	So, what's going on with you, man?
	As I said last time on the show, on Gavin's show, I got somewhat familiar with you around a year ago, maybe a little over a year ago, and your stuff as I was trying to look into this alt-right phenomenon.
	And this was before you had kind of blown up.
	In the way that you have since then.
	So what is it like?
	Let's start here.
	What's it like to be you over this last year or couple years where you started with kind of, you know, dabbling in this idea that there should be an alternative to the right wing?
	You coined this name Alt-Right.
	And then to, you know, being almost called out by name by Hillary Clinton.
	To, you know, saying, hail Trump in this media storm, and then being randomly attacked in the street.
	Whatever you want to touch on.
	What's it like being Richard Spencer over this last year?
	Well, it has been a major change, and I don't say this to seem narcissistic or something, but it is the life of a celebrity to a degree.
	I'm not at, you know...
	Tom Cruise levels or something, but it is a very different place than where I was a couple years ago, where some fans obviously knew who I was and so on, but the wider world had zero consciousness of who I was, or who I am.
	But yeah, I get recognized at airports.
	I'm usually a little bit worried when someone comes up to me and asks, are you Richard Spencer?
	I don't know if they want to shake my hand or punch me.
	I just kind of stand there braced for it.
	But yeah, just little things like that, having to worry about when I go out in public.
	I mean, again, I don't want to exaggerate where I am, but the fact is I never worried about those things before, and now I have to worry about them.
	Every little misstep I make makes a headline.
	That's also rather annoying, but it comes with the territory.
	But then at the same time, I can send a message so much more easily now as well.
	So, you know, attending CPAC was a way of sending a message.
	I didn't quite know what was going to happen, but I definitely knew that something was going to happen, that there's going to be stories about it, that there was going to be some controversy.
	That ability to send a message like that is really invaluable.
	It's something you can't put a price on.
	I feel like our ability to reach the mainstream, even when we're being attacked as Nazis or white supremacists or whatever, nevertheless, our ability to reach average people has increased by a factor of 100.
	You know, in the last couple of years.
	And I can only take that as a good thing.
	Right, because they say, you know, it's kind of like the old saying, all publicity is good publicity.
	You are almost the best case study of this ever, because you have gotten outrageously horrific publicity.
	I mean, what you've been accused of in the mainstream media is basically being the most evil person on the planet.
	And, of course, look, I was, as I told you last time we talked, I had defended you a few times on this show, and it's not that I was really defending much about you personally or your ideology or anything like that.
	I thought I was essentially just defending civility.
	Like, if someone's making an argument, you shouldn't shout fascist at them or punch them for making that argument.
	And that the idea of, like...
	Putting a man, just on any man level, if you go putting on a ski mask and running up and throwing a sucker punch and then running away, it is just like the most bitch move.
	Every man should look down on that.
	Anyway, to me it was a fairly uncontroversial thing to say, although I found out pretty quickly it wasn't.
	But when you talk about this stuff, I would imagine...
	That's kind of scary from your perspective.
	Yeah, I had a liberal atheist whom I've been talking with on Twitter.
	He showed me this tweet where he basically said, we should not punch Richard Spencer.
	And he was called a Nazi for that.
	Nazis did always advocate not to punch their political enemies.
	That was always their thing.
	Nazis advocated nonviolence.
	Yes.
	Ironically, they are rehabilitating the reputation of German national socialism.
	Well, I actually had one thread where I was defending you on social media.
	Basically a similar type thing.
	And someone posted to me, they said there's no problem...
	Some like Antifa thing, and was like, I have no problem punching Richard Spencer in the face.
	And I said, don't you find it kind of ironic that you're using violence to chill political speech in the name of anti-fascism?
	And she corrected me and said, not anti-fascism, anti-Nazism.
	So as if you have now crossed the difference, somehow you've crossed that threshold.
	And I just find this thing where maybe as a libertarian, as a kind of Rothbardian libertarian, I've seen how much they mischaracterize us in the mainstream media.
	So when I see these gross mischaracterizations of you guys, my tendency is to go kind of like look into it.
	And try to find out for myself, that's not to say that I agree or disagree with you guys.
	I just don't get into this kind of, like, there's a pretty big difference between the fascist movement in general and the Nazis.
	And there's a pretty big difference between alt-right and fascist.
	At least it seems to me.
	I also happen to be of the opinion that our current government is pretty fascistic.
	So even if you are advocating fascism, it's not really that out of line from what we already have.
	Well, we've reached a weird stage of fascism.
	I agree that you can call it that.
	The idea that the United States is some libertarian paradise or something is beyond ridiculous.
	So it is a kind of fascism, a certain kind of corporatism.
	But it's one that it seems like the only people who benefit from it are people involved in the...
	Military-industrial complex or the insurance industry or certainly Goldman Sachs and the financial industry.
	Yeah, I'm glad you make that point.
	Let me just add to that because I feel like that's lost a lot of times on the alt-right.
	I mean, I'm really glad to hear you say that because the truth is I get this impression a lot and maybe this is just how you kind of rally people up.
	But when you get into the alt-right identity politics, a lot of times the message that's preached is that everybody else is winning, or the government is doing all these services for these other minority communities, and it's all anti-white people.
	But from my perspective, I kind of agree with you.
	I think there are these policies that have kind of been destructive for everybody, except a handful of people who have bought off government.
	I don't look at any of the government policies over the last few decades and been like, oh man, they've been helping out the black community so much by destroying them.
	I think you're getting something very true when you say this.
	I'm thinking through this.
	Look, the government isn't one thing.
	The government is this huge collection of apparatuses, and they're used in totally contradictory forms.
	They have contradictory energies and spirits.
	They come out at different times, and they'll hang around for decades, and people forget they exist, and so on.
	So what we have is something like this total state.
	As Carl Schmitt defined it.
	And the problem with this, and it's a state that tries to do everything.
	It tries to, you know, improve nutrition for black families.
	It tries to spread democracy in the Middle East.
	It tries to blow up ISIS terrorists.
	It tries to socialize the insurance industry and so on.
	It tries to do everything and basically can do nothing.
	Can do nothing right.
	I think that's the situation where we're in.
	A tremendous amount of government programs and even private programs, corporate programs and so on, are actually anti-white.
	And to kind of misunderstand them, I think, from a libertarian's perspective of saying, oh, well, no one benefits from socialism.
	Well, look, someone benefits from socialism.
	It's almost axiomatic.
	Someone is going to benefit from this.
	When new money is created, the person who gets it first really benefits from it.
	As, you know, Rothbardians know well.
	And certainly in an affirmative action program.
	Now, you could argue that in the long term, affirmative action is bad for blacks or so on.
	But, you know, look, clearly they are benefiting from the fact that corporations actively want to hire less white people.
	That government organizations actively want to hire less white people and so on.
	Okay, let me just get into this a little.
	I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but not the entirety.
	So let's try to unpack it a little.
	Okay, so I agree with you completely.
	The government is this big thing with all these different forces.
	You're right.
	We do too often think of it almost as a monolith, like they all have this goal.
	They have lots of competing ideas, contradictory goals and outcomes and all this stuff.
	That being said, and I agree with you.
	And maybe where I am sympathetic to the alt-right the most is that I find the blatant racism of the left, the anti-white racism.
	Just outrageous and disgusting.
	It's cartoonish.
	I can't even believe they're so open with it that they wouldn't keep it in their pocket.
	I mean, I'll say whatever you will about the right wing bigotry.
	The right wing bigotry is always in your hip pocket a little bit.
	I mean, they just put this thing out like they openly love the idea of a white male genocide and the demographic and all these things.
	And rhetorically, it's so acceptable to be anti-white throughout the last, you know.
	Say, like, last few decades in American society, there are these blatant programs.
	The only, like, in terms of actual laws that are in themselves discriminatory and prejudiced, the only ones are anti-white laws, like you're saying, like the hiring quotas and things like that.
	Like, I get that.
	That's true.
	That also being said, welfare has on net been incredibly destructive to the black community.
	The war on drugs on net has been incredibly – so the idea of what I'm saying, just for the metaphor, the simple metaphor, if there is like a house slave and a field slave or whatever, it doesn't – you can point to where one person is benefiting and the other one isn't.
	I agree with you.
	Socialism has to make someone benefit.
	I was talking about before.
	I think there's an elite group that are benefiting off of this.
	But the point overall is that while I am sympathetic to this – This horrible, rhetorical, anti-white thing?
	I don't know.
	The people who have been most fucked over by the government, I'm looking more at the people in Iraq, the people in the poorest communities.
	And it's not just black communities, but a whole lot of them are black communities.
	If you look at the 70% legitimacy rate that the black community had just a few decades ago compared to what it is now in the teens or something.
	It's 70% illegitimacy rate, I believe.
	Right.
	So it flipped, almost.
	I mean, it's outrageous.
	I mean, I don't believe that this is a result of some newfound poverty or some newfound racism out there.
	This is a result of government subsidizing the worst behavior, criminalizing nonviolent behavior, and creating these huge black markets.
	So I'm not painting an oversimplistic picture when I say these things fuck everybody over.
	That's more or less what I want to say.
	Right.
	I mean, I would, again, I think in some ways we are going to actually have a lot of agreement.
	I think it's a question of emphasis to a degree.
	I mean, look, of course, Iraqis have been screwed over worse than white Americans.
	I mean, in the sense that a million of them now no longer exist.
	I think the way that I would look at this, though, is that...
	The United States was a white country as late as the mid-20th century.
	And we still have the kind of echoes of this, even to this day, in the sense that what a truly multicultural, multiracial America would look like, we don't quite know yet.
	Because in a way, America still is white.
	The flag is white.
	Patriotism is white.
	A speech before Congress is...
	Very white.
	He's speaking before fascistic symbols, interestingly.
	So I don't even know what a multicultural, multiracial America is going to look like.
	So if you look at this grand trajectory, we've gone from a point of the United States in the 18th century.
	And I'm, of course, not talking about the North American continent.
	Obviously, that is...
	Very different racially and so on.
	The United States, since the 18th century, as effectively an Anglo-Protestant country, as a revolutionary offshoot of Britain, being transformed across the 19th century into a more European country that is taking in new immigrants from Ireland, from Southern Europe, from Eastern Europe, and so on.
	That's where we started fucking up.
	That's where we started blowing it, Spencer.
	Well, I mean, I kind of agree in a way.
	I have accepted the racial dimension of America, but I do understand as well the power of not just being part of this big racial civilizational family, the power of being part of an ethnic family where everyone is on the same page in terms of religion and language.
	And culture and so on.
	There is actually a lot of power to that.
	But I would say in the 20th century, we emerged as a nation.
	I would say by, say after the First World War, there really was an American nation where you would have a lot of Irish names and Italian names and English names and German names.
	All of those regional and ethnic differences had been dissolved.
	And it was a kind of melting pot.
	I think melting pot is a kind of left-wing metaphor, but the reason why it's so powerful is that it speaks to something.
	There was a European family that emerged in the 20th century.
	And for older people, that is basically their starting point.
	For people who are our parents' age, the baby boomer generation, Can't help but think of America as it's a white country and we should help out some of these plucky minorities who have just come here.
	That's the way they think about it.
	They don't grasp where we are, where white people are going to be a minority in this country as soon as 2040, where the entire culture is geared against dispossessing white people, where we pat ourselves on the back.
	When a corporation like Apple announces, we've hired less whites.
	Congratulations us.
	Oh, look, this new superhero movie will have 10% less white actors.
	This is the direction we're moving.
	And we're certainly moving into a delegitimization, morally speaking, of the white man as a source of authority.
	Now, I would, just because I'm fair, I would actually probably say that...
	This is deserved to a degree because it has been Jewish people and a particular kind of white person who in a way is deserving of his illegitimate at this point that has actually created this terrible world that we live in now.
	So I think I would be remiss to say that Jews and some white people.
	There's a particular kind of white who's made up the leadership plan.
	No, but you're saying it's all Jews?
	Is the implication there that every one of us is on board with this plan?
	No, listen.
	All right.
	I get what you're saying.
	I'm jumping on it.
	That may be a silly point.
	Look, I agree with you on this, and this is something I find very interesting.
	Okay, so when you talk about the demographic changes, In America, what they project into, say, you know, 2055 or whatever, where we become a, you know, pretty soon we're like majority minority, and then we become a majority Hispanic nation, basically.
	And this is a, however you feel about it, it's a pretty profound shift in America.
	I mean, whatever your thought is, and it seems like we have the rules right now are, if you're going to discuss this in public, you are only allowed to praise this.
	And how wonderful it is.
	Like, the left can talk about it and be like, well, this is the greatest thing ever.
	And they never really seem to have to give a reason why it's great.
	And I don't know, honestly, how I feel about it.
	But I think it's something that maybe should be discussed more.
	It's pretty profound.
	Let me jump in.
	Sure.
	It's an event horizon.
	Like, we don't know what it will be.
	And I think one of the traps that we fall into, and again, this is a very baby boomer trap.
	I think a lot of younger people think about this differently.
	One of the traps we fall into is we think that it's all going to be the same.
	People will just have different skin color.
	We'll all be watching Fox News and watching the Cowboys and the Redskins play football.
	We'll all be waving flags and going to war in Iraq and living in the suburbs.
	But we'll just have different skin colors.
	This is one of the fantasies of...
	I don't think it's going to be like that at all.
	And I'm honest enough to say that I don't quite know what it's going to be like.
	Because when you change the racial and therefore the cultural dimension of a country, we don't know what it will be like.
	I mean, when Anglo-Saxons would go to somewhere else, go to another continent, we would create an organization like Australia or New Zealand.
	And there are some very important differences between, say, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, etc.
	But there was this common ground where it's a recognizably European, even Anglo-Saxon, civilization and culture.
	So it's not like the Australia of the Aborigines.
	And so when you change the racial dimension, the whole...
	Thing changes.
	And so no one knows what America is going to look like in 2050.
	And we're wrong to assume that it's just going to be the same thing with different skin colors.
	It won't be.
	It inherently won't be.
	And whether these norms that we love, you know, the love of the law, the love of democratic institutions, a lot of the cultural things that we take for granted, the 4th of July.
	You know, Christmas, all this kind of thing.
	The idea that these are just going to be the same thing 50 years from now is totally wrong.
	I don't know what the world will look like, but I do know that it will be radically different.
	Well, look, I mean, it's radically different already than it was 50 years ago.
	I mean, I comment on this a lot on this show, but we've been through quite a cultural shift that is pretty insane.
	I mean, you know, we went from a time where, like, teenagers' pop culture...
	50, 60 years ago in this country was watching a sitcom where someone was like, gee, Pa, let me help you with some yard work, and I sure do love being in America.
	And now they're listening to music that's like, put your pussy on my face.
	I mean, it's the most drastic cultural change you could imagine.
	And it just, I don't know, it seems like there's no, I do agree that I think there's no critical analysis of this, and these are profound changes that we should be able to at least discuss.
	And I don't think, what I will defend, say, the alt-right on, is that I don't, and not just the alt-right, this is bigger than that, this is really, like, whatever you want to call it, but the whole Trump phenomenon.
	But the idea that if you reject the idea of these demographic changes and you just say, I don't like it, that you're now the most evil person in the world.
	I know a lot of alt-right people have made this point before, but I just don't know, like, if you went to Italy and you said, hey, everybody, you know, in 50 years, this is going to be mostly French.
	I think they'd be like, well, no, that's bad.
	And I don't think that makes them evil for wanting to maintain their country.
	Again, I don't know necessarily that I'm on board with you using the force of government to maintain this, but I do reject the idea that you can't have this discussion or you're somehow branded evil for having this discussion.
	We're going to have to use government.
	And this is where I would say libertarianism...
	People get it wrong when they see libertarianism as a purely economic doctrine.
	Libertarianism is a profoundly moral doctrine.
	Yes, sir.
	Obviously the non-aggression principle is at the core of it, but it's not just the non-aggression principle.
	I think libertarians have an allergy.
	A profound allergy to state power in general.
	That whenever the state does anything, it is almost inherently illegitimate.
	Because it is violence.
	It's almost inherently non-consensual.
	If it were consensual, we wouldn't need the state.
	The state is about power.
	And I guess my rejoinder to that...
	The stupid conservative rejoinder to that, or the liberal rejoinder to that, is no, the state isn't about power, because the state is about us, and it's about law, and we give, if the state only acts democratically, we create the state out of our own, like, that's all bullshit.
	The state is about power.
	It is totally irrational in its basis and in its constitution.
	So, but what I would, my rejoinder, the true rejoinder, is that yes, it is about power, but the state is an existential entity.
	There is always going to be one entity that is exceptional, that can use power, that can legitimately use force, that will determine who is, what's a friend and enemy, that will determine what is exceptional and what is not.
	There is the one entity, almost like a force of nature.
	There has to be a center to the whirlpool.
	Someone will break the law in order to establish the law.
	What do you base that assertion on, that there will always be one?
	I mean, there's not a world government, so why does there have to be a central government?
	What makes it have to be 320 million people in America?
	I mean, where are you basing the idea?
	Nothing.
	That's fairly arbitrary.
	That depends on history.
	That depends on the nations that are ruled by the state.
	And the other one is...
	There's always a state.
	I mean, there's always someone who is going to be able to legitimately use force.
	There's always going to be a source of authority.
	When you say legitimate, do you just mean accepted as legitimate by the people?
	Like, where's this legitimacy?
	Yes, that's what I mean by legitimate.
	I don't mean morally legitimate, like, from a God's eye view.
	Or just a morality perspective.
	God's eye.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	Go ahead.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	That is, again, the problem of libertarians that...
	I think we might joke that they're autistic.
	It's a harsh joke.
	Several of them actually are.
	Well, the alt-right.
	If they cured autism, the alt-right would just disappear overnight.
	It would be terrible.
	It would be our holocaust.
	Except this one really happened.
	Right.
	Right.
	but uh Where was I?
	Yeah, so we joke about libertarians being autistic in the sense that they're focusing on this super morality, this God's eye view of the world where all force is illegitimate.
	But the fact is, we have to understand that the state is legitimate because people think it's legitimate.
	And that's a real thing.
	It's subjective, but it's a real thing.
	The state can go to war.
	The state can arrest you and put you, throw you in prison.
	The state can do all sorts of things that private governments can't do.
	And we have to recognize Yeah, look, I get that.
	Some entity that has that power.
	I feel like this is what bugs me.
	Okay, and I feel like this is somewhat of a cop-out But I think ever and it's okay.
	You are coming Yes, you're not coming at it from the liberal or conservative nonsensical point where they argue that government is not force I grant you that it's a much That's just ridiculous.
	Denying what is reality.
	But what you're doing is I feel like what a lot of people do when the topic of libertarianism comes up, which is that if I get to the moral issue of why government and initiation of force is inherently immoral, you go, well, I'm not trying to look at this bird's eye moral view.
	Let's dismiss morals.
	We're not going to get into that.
	However, I'm sorry, I wouldn't be able to read one alt-right article, and this is true for the left, the right, conservatives, everybody, where morals don't become an issue.
	There's so much of what you reject about the current government that is its immoral behavior.
	So why is it that we get to talk about morals, but then when we take it to its logical conclusion, which is moral legitimacy?
	I understand there's a difference between what people accept as legitimate and what's right and wrong.
	Are you throwing out the idea of right and wrong altogether?
	Or is it just whatever is accepted as right and wrong?
	No, I'm not throwing out the idea of right and wrong altogether.
	I totally agree that morality, the world is shot through with morality.
	This ideology inflects everything.
	It inflects art.
	It inflects how we deal with the shop owner.
	It inflects political discussions.
	I definitely grant you that.
	What I'm saying is that there is this Tragic and seemingly contradictory aspect to morality.
	That morality is founded on immorality.
	And that legitimacy is ultimately founded on violence.
	And that basically gets to the tragedy of human existence.
	And don't claim that that's another cop-out.
	No, no, look, I understand what you're saying, but it's still not answering.
	Look, I'm not even saying we're going to live in an anarchist libertarian paradise tomorrow.
	I also don't think we're going to live in your ethnostate tomorrow or whatever any of us are advocating.
	We're all pretty radical in our politics by today's standard.
	But I think if we're going to get into this and we're going to acknowledge that there are morals, I would want to talk about what's morally correct.
	Look, I want to make this point quickly here before we continue.
	We can continue on this.
	Where I started on the Gavin McGinnis show when we were talking, which I think is just important to assess here, one of the main reasons why I enjoy having these conversations and why I take...
	Or one of the things I should just say that I enjoy about, or that I agree with you the most on your views, are being anti-war.
	And this is something that never comes up when they're talking about how, you know, you're the most evil Nazi ever.
	That you are against not just the horrible European wars of the 20th century, but these awful wars in the Middle East.
	And we talked about this last time, and we both agreed.
	And you agreed with me that there's a real moral issue to slaughtering Muslims in their homeland.
	Like, whatever you believe about identity or cultural preference or any of that, it's immoral to kill.
	So we all agree it's immoral.
	We'd agree it's immoral to enslave people.
	We'd agree it's immoral to throw people in gas chambers, I think.
	I don't mean to be patronizing when I ask this.
	It's just you're painted by the mainstream media as somebody probably who wouldn't agree that those things are immoral.
	But if we all agree this, I think where the rubber really meets the road between this identitarian versus libertarian thing is like, what are you okay with doing to these minority groups?
	Or forget you, what are you okay with the government doing?
	Because my position is that everyone has natural rights and it's immoral to violate them.
	So you want to live in an ethnostate, essentially, right?
	So, like, I'm okay.
	I don't have anything against, you know, like the Amish or something like that.
	Like, not that that's what you want to live.
	But I don't have anything against you wanting to live with people who you prefer.
	But what line do you say, well, this is immoral.
	We can't do this to other groups.
	Or is it just like, hey, whoever's got the might is right and they win.
	I'm going to return to this tragic dimension of political life, and that is that the United States was founded on violence.
	At the end of the day, the United States would not exist without the revolutionary violence against a legitimate ruler in the form of London.
	That is the reason why the United States exists.
	The United States would not exist in its current form if there wasn't effectively a conquest of the continent by white Anglo-Saxon men, mostly, who took the continent.
	And there was undoubtedly terrible things that accompanied all of that.
	But at the same time, we would not have the political order that we have now.
	So what I am saying is that there is a tragic dimension to There's a John Ford movie called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which I think everyone should watch.
	It's a brilliant film.
	It's almost as good as The Searchers, which is about many of the same themes.
	And there's a scene at the end of it where Jimmy Stewart with his wife is on a train.
	And they're remembering their previous life when they were in their 20s and they were living in a Wild West wilderness of gunfighters and these Mexican gangs and chaos and so on.
	And she says, you know, this was a wilderness, now it's a garden.
	And that line, which seems like a throw-off line, really gets at the tragedy of establishing political order.
	Political order states are built on violence and conquest.
	Now, we can claim that they're therefore illegitimate, or we can claim that in the wake of that tragedy, we can establish something good.
	And that's what I'm saying.
	So it's not a case of like, I don't think, I think that if you're not white, oh, we should just, you have no rights, we should just throw you off a cliff, you're garbage.
	No, that's not what I think.
	I oppose, I mean, as you said, the United States government has done a lot of many terrible things against Arabs and non-whites in my lifetime, and I oppose almost every one of those actions, if not every one of them.
	But that being said, I'm not going to also deny that in order to establish a new order, that there is going to be a kind of chaos, exceptional state of emergency period that would probably be at the base of it.
	I don't know what that's going to look like.
	I don't know what that's going to happen, but I do think...
	That we are headed in the direction of some kind of paradigm shift.
	That we are headed in the direction of a kind of civil war.
	We're headed in the direction of a fragmentation of the United States nation as it is.
	And that we're not headed for a nice, happy American utopia where we're all citizens, we all love each other.
	I think we're headed for something much bloody and much more tearful than that.
	Well, look, I think I unfortunately, I think you could be right about that.
	I think there's lots of signs of a lot of economic troubles, you know, from as I know, you've you've read up a bunch on Austrian economics and stuff.
	And that's really kind of my my jam.
	And I think there's a lot of reasons to suspect there's a lot of economic instability.
	And obviously, there's a lot of cultural instability right now.
	And a lot of people who are demonizing other, you know, I mean, the people are so it's not like they just have political disagreements.
	People have really fundamental, as I'm sure you're.
	Well aware of kind of passionate moral disagreements.
	I do agree with you that the whole thing is kind of, look, all of humanity, it's not so much just government, but it's all kind of based on a big pool of violence and conquest and what would be by any moral current standards considered kind of heinous immoral activity is permeated throughout all of human history.
	But if you're going to, you know, see, like, I guess...
	If we're going to talk about history or European Western history, which I think is what you guys really love, to me, from my perspective, what is kind of amazing about Western civilization or the greatness in Western civilization...
	Does kind of come from the Enlightenment and the Renaissance and classical liberalism and the idea of saying, hey, look, we understand all of humanity has been founded on this violence, but we can find a kind of more, we can base society more in reason, in morals.
	I'm not saying anything was perfect, but we moved in this direction and we, you know, I think in the 19th century...
	We, you know, look, again, you can demonize any time period you want to, but we did some pretty amazing things for human innovation.
	I mean, we abolished slavery in the West.
	We had an industrial revolution.
	We had the biggest advancement in terms of the standard of living and the history of humanity.
	And to me, I credit a lot of this to the classical liberal thought, the idea of freedom and natural rights and logic and reason taking over.
	And what happened after that was these other ideologies, like socialism.
	And then what I look at is a very counter, you know, kind of cultural move, which was fascism or a counter-cyclical kind of thing rose.
	And these ended up being really, really horrible regimes that ended up, you know, but these European people who you care about so much suffered more and got slaughtered more by these ideologies than anything else, than any other threat that you could possibly imagine.
	And I wonder if, you know, what concerns me is that when you throw out the...
	Kind of respect for natural rights, or even as you just said there, where you go, well, there's going to be this chaotic time in the middle, and then there's kind of, I don't know, so that's a gray area where we might have to round up and kill out, you know, or do something to the people we deem we don't like?
	The gray area where I think people like me will likely be rounded up, to be honest.
	I mean, I'm just saying.
	It's a lot more likely than you getting what you want.
	I don't mean that in some...
	You know, a tacky way.
	I'm just saying if you look at the idea of right now who controls the government, the media, the mainstream, you guys have done an amazing thing over the last few years.
	I just meant stepping back objectively speaking about popularity.
	But yeah, if you're talking about who the government's going to initiate force again, you're a safer bet than any of your enemies right now.
	I agree.
	I'm realistic about that.
	But just to go back to what you were saying, I mean, I...
	I think you have a bit of a romantic view of the Enlightenment.
	I guess that's kind of an ironic thing to say, since the romantics were kind of reacting against the Enlightenment.
	Yes, right.
	I think you have a romantic view of the Enlightenment and a non-tragic view of the Enlightenment.
	First off, just to go back a little bit, in terms of innovation, the 19th century was truly miraculous.
	We underestimate even...
	The invention of the bicycle, like how important something like that is.
	I mean, it's, you know, and it's obviously not just that.
	The scientific discoveries and innovations like the invention of film, the invention of photography.
	And in this time period, you have everything like in terms of, I mean, like economics, biology, like all of these things are pretty much what we all consider the basics of them are developed in this time period.
	I agree.
	And I'll grant...
	Enlightenment thinking some credit for this.
	I will grant them some.
	However, to look back across the whole swath of European history and think that we were just living in caves, grabbing women by the hair and dragging them back for mating purposes.
	Well, that sounds fun, so maybe we just should go back to that.
	Fuck the Enlightenment.
	You know, caveman.
	That was when we were truly alive.
	Yes, no, I understand things started before that, yes.
	Obviously, like, the philosophical explorations of the pre-Socratic philosophers was amazing.
	You know, when you really put that into context or understanding the invention of geometry, basically the...
	The Ur version of philosophy as we know it.
	And the inventions in the Middle Ages.
	So look, I don't really want to give all credit to the Enlightenment.
	And if you want to credit the Enlightenment for a bit of this explosion of innovation, which I will, because I'm fair, you also have to blame the Enlightenment for something like the crimes of the Soviet Union.
	And you really have to.
	The Soviet Union is fundamentally based on the concept of creating a new society.
	Well, yeah, you know, you know.
	You're right.
	Ironically, the Soviet Union inherited a lot of traditional aspects of the Roman Empire.
	That's one of the interesting aspects of history.
	But it's animus.
	What was driving it?
	What was its energy?
	Its energy was to create a purely rational society.
	Exactly.
	When you throw away the idea of natural rights and private property and all of the stuff that was built up by the classical liberals and you throw all of that away, yes, they were able to build off of the wealth that was formed in this previous era all across Europe.
	Mostly by monarchies, to be honest, is the system that this was done under.
	And you throw all of that away and you decide that government is going to become the rational actor, as you said before, in an organization that inherently can't be what they're claiming it to be.
	Yes, you're going to have lots of problems.
	So I'm just wondering, honestly, because I don't actually know your opinion on this, but what are your thoughts on, talking European style here, if we're looking back at the 20th century, what are your thoughts on socialism and what are your thoughts on fascism?
	I have a lot of deep thoughts.
	I think it would be very easy for me and probably propagandistically good for me just to be like, oh, fascism was terrible.
	I have nothing to do with it.
	I think fascism arose from some contradictions that were very important.
	To a degree, it was a direct response to the Soviet Union.
	It was an attempt to not just respond, but in a way kind of outdo the Soviet Union.
	To have a different version of socialism and Mussolini's sense of corporatism.
	You know, Hitler drew upon some of those economic ideas, many of them not.
	I mean, Hitler never nationalized a single industry or anything like that.
	I think it was also a kind of way of reaching a synthesis in the modern world where it was...
	Fascists were modernists, and they fundamentally did understand that, A, the classical liberals were weak, that they were always going to be bulldozed by socialists, by people who are more energetic, more willing to use power than they were.
	They also realized that traditionalism, in a root sense, was kind of LARP-y, as we might say, live-action role-playing.
	We have passed that point.
	And so there was an attempt, and you can see this a lot in fascist art, you can see this a lot of fascist public projects like roads or public buildings.
	There was this attempt to kind of marry modernity and the ancient world, in Mussolini's case, or marry modernity and a kind of traditional Central European world, in Hitler's case.
	So there was a, it was this attempted...
	It was a response to modernity and it was an attempted synthesis where we would have aspects of modernity.
	We'd have the technology, the cars, the roads, the new big buildings, so on.
	But we would somehow connect that to a deeper tradition.
	And I think that's what fascism was attempting.
	Can I just interject, just to say, and this is somebody who's a Jew, and my grandfather was a German Jew, did not have a very good life over there.
	Although, again, a lot of Europeans in that time did not have a very good life.
	Even for myself, I do think the conversation of fascism gets, in modern American history, I can literally hear people as we're having this conversation.
	It's literally the thought is just people being thrown in ovens.
	Like that's what they define fascism in their mind.
	And it was actually a much bigger movement.
	And to me, Nazism was the most brutal form of fascism.
	And I think they're horrible and did a lot of horrible, evil things.
	But it is interesting to talk about, you know, even when you're saying like the countries like Mussolini's fascism and –
	This idea that Mayon was, oh, well, I'll unite with workers of the world, and this is how I identify, is against the proletariat or against the bourgeoisie.
	This is crazy, and that you can't throw away tradition and all of this nonsense and force.
	And they understood that you needed business to some degree, but they also wanted to have their authoritarianism as well, and this was kind of their idea of the marriage.
	I do think, in a way, there's something much more What's the word I'm looking for?
	In a way, there's something much more sustainable about fascism than socialism.
	Right.
	Even though it didn't last as long.
	Yes.
	But that was only with help from a much less fascistic government, from my point of view.
	Right.
	The Soviet Union, it had its run.
	It lasted kind of three quarters of a...
	case.
	You're right.
	But you could actually look at it.
	Fascism is this kind of synthesis of seemingly contradictory things, is a synthesis of modernity and technology and with traditionalism and paganism actually is another aspect that we shouldn't forget.
	It's reaching back to an older religious form.
	And it's a synthesis of tradition and modernity and this new thing where we're going to accept The advances in modernity, but we're going to give meaning to people's lives.
	We're not going to turn them into automaton robots.
	I think there was some Lenin statement, like at one point, mankind will all be working for the same wage in the same factory.
	It is just some horrifying vision like that.
	No, fascism wants to give meaning to people's lives.
	And so there's always been a bit of fascism to all of these states.
	There's a bit of fascism to the Soviet Union.
	Particularly after its kind of crazy Leninist period burned out, where it tried to connect with Russian nationalism.
	It tried to connect with a certain Russian imperialism as well.
	Those are two separate things, but connected, obviously.
	It tried to connect with a sense of strength and honor.
	So a part of me, whenever I hear the word fascist, part of me wants to be like, oh yeah, you call everything fascist.
	Sarah Palin's a fascist in your mind.
	Stupid.
	There actually is a legitimacy to that.
	You know, Vladimir Putin does call upon a certain kind of generic fascism, we could say, in what he is offering the Russian people, which is we're going to be modern, but we're going to have meaning.
	The United States has fascism.
	That's what I was kind of getting at before when I was saying it's a more long-lasting system.
	I mean, I'm not just defining fascism as, look, however you define it, whether it's like the, you know, I think Mussolini said the merger of corporation and state is corporatism, which is fascism, like that.
	I mean, that's what we have right now.
	I mean, the idea that, okay, we have some nationalized We let a lot of them not nationalize, but we heavily regulate them.
	We can essentially tell them what to do, use force where we have to.
	We're kind of like an empirical fascist country.
	That's kind of what I see.
	And to be honest, even when they'll say the stuff with...
	If you look at the modern kind of progressive dynamic, or what has been the dynamic that has had the most control over government media entertainment for the last few decades...
	It's, I mean, even the way they describe it, okay, well, we would call it a left-wing version, probably not a right-wing version.
	But aside from that, even when they say, like, how, if you look at the textbook definition of fascism, they'll say race is a central thing.
	I mean, how central has race become?
	To the left, the modern progressive movement, race is right at the center of it.
	It's as important if not...
	More than it is to you, to be honest.
	I mean, everybody has to check their white privilege or know that they're a black victim or LGBT.
	You are strictly defined on which one of these groups you fall into.
	So I look at it ultimately as being like, I look at it kind of from like a, I guess, like Mises talked about this a lot, but where he would say, you know, there was socialism and then government interventionism.
	And that was kind of how he distinguished the two, and then we would fall into that interventionist thing.
	Now, the other thing, since I bring up Mises, is that Mises was a guy who was Ludwig von Mises, for anyone who doesn't know, in my opinion, probably the greatest economist who ever lived.
	Maybe not in years.
	But he was a Jewish economist, an Austrian, who spent his entire life writing against the socialists and the lefties and government and how terrible government was.
	And then, what actually rose up around him, And made him have to flee Europe was not the socialists.
	It was the Nazis who rose up kind of on this hatred of the left.
	And, you know, I guess they accepted that they have to live in a hazy time.
	As you had said earlier, where some natural rights had to be violated, and he got pretty worried he was able to get out of there before a lot of other people weren't so lucky.
	So I guess at the end of the day, Richard, I guess my concern is like, I don't know.
	We live in this progressive world that I have decided a long time ago is all complete bullshit.
	I'm ready to throw that all out.
	I'm not going to think you're an evil person just because they say you are.
	I'll look at it.
	To it for myself.
	But I gotta say, this does really concern me about you and the alt-right and all the people that are advocating this stuff, is that at the end of the day, what ended up happening, right, was that you advocate all of this hatred of the left, you throw out the natural rights and the classical liberalism and all the stuff that actually, in my mind, produced the most amount, not to paint with a broad budget, but the most amount of wealth and innovation and all this good stuff.
	And what ends up happening is a big bloodbath, as you said, which we might be gearing up for in the future, in which case you guys become more of a threat to my liberties and my freedoms than this horrible government that I hate ever was.
	So am I crazy?
	Am I off base?
	Or what do you think?
	Well, no, I don't think you're right, but...
	I would say this.
	I do think that we're not entering this kind of end of history utopia.
	I think we've lived through that.
	This point where identity would dissolve and we'd all be consuming individuals.
	Natural right would animate all governments around the world.
	I do not think we're ever going to reenter that.
	I think that period probably lasted for...
	Five years in the 1990s.
	And we have now entered a new stage of history.
	But I would say that, again, I would go back to this tragic sense of liberty and freedom that I have.
	And that is that I think rights come after the establishment of the state.
	And that probably makes you nauseous or you don't like thinking about that.
	I do not think there's a natural right.
	That pre-exists the state.
	I don't think you have rights outside of being part of a collective.
	So, my answer to all of this is that if you want to maintain your identity and your rights and your basic liberties and freedom and so on, you need to be in a collective that will always support you.
	Being just a rootless individual, cosmopolitan and so on...
	They often don't fare well in societies.
	If I moved to, say, Japan or something, I'm sure that if I were able to do that, that I would be perfectly fine as a gaijin, as a westerner living in Japan.
	But if there were a chaotic time, I'm not going to be delusional or naive and say that people like me might be the first.
	To be cracked down upon, whether by society or by the government.
	And I think I could, you know, thump my natural rights at them, or I could just simply recognize the reality of the situation.
	So basically, what I would advocate for everyone is that the nationalism really is a prescription for happiness, being part of a collective where everyone is inherently on the same page, culturally and morally.
	And often linguistically and religiously and things like that, that that is the prescription for safety.
	That's where you will be able to have freedom and liberty and rights when you're within this collective that is your own, your own country.
	Okay, so I guess what I would say is this.
	I think there's a distinction.
	Whatever you want to talk about, rights coming from government, I mean, maybe in some legal way, there's truth to that.
	But as we said before, we both do agree that there is some sense of morality, and to me, that clearly can't come from government.
	By its nature, it can't come from government.
	No person can create morality or not.
	Listen, if you go and I don't know, whatever, you just fly by in some helicopter or something and you fly over like a government list area, let's say somewhere out in some, you know, the jungle or something, I don't know.
	And you just murder somebody.
	I think you've committed an immoral act and there may never be any legal ramifications or anything like that.
	And I very much reject the idea that I can either talk about what I think is morally right or wrong, or I can deal with the reality of the situation.
	No, that's not what I'm saying.
	I am not an either-or thinker.
	I think actually either-orism is...
	Well, I mean, to get really deep here, I think this either-orism is a—that is something that's brought to us by Abrahamic religions, and Christianity in particular, and Judaism.
	No, I have a tragic conception of life.
	I have a pagan conception of life.
	You can talk about morality.
	I'm not claiming that, like— Bill Clinton invented morality.
	Obviously, no.
	But morality is a collective system.
	Morality and religion is a way to bind us.
	It's a way of binding communities by saying right and wrong.
	I think once we start thinking about it outside of a collective, it's when we kind of get in this abstract, autistic realm.
	No, I agree with you.
	It comes from being social creatures, from being interactive.
	There's no need for morality if I'm the only person on the planet.
	I agree.
	It's about human harmony versus human corruption.
	And there's this kind of – yes, I agree with you on that.
	But the idea that – so to me, what matters, what is morally correct – like look, at the end of the day, I'm – I don't even – look, when you say things like identity matters.
	I can't disagree with you on that.
	Identity matters a lot.
	There's no way to argue that.
	And if you know anything about psychology, identity is huge.
	And race is a big part of identity.
	I don't disagree with that either.
	The concern at the end of the day for me is, look, the reason I'm defending you from being punched in the face when you're trying to make an argument is that that's wrong.
	I mean, it's wrong to punch someone when they're trying to make an argument.
	And if we're going to say this at all, if we're going to get into the area of saying that there's morals, well, then when you're confronted with immoral behavior, I don't know if you can just go, well, you know, there's been a ton of immoral behavior throughout history.
	You're right.
	It is tragic.
	But it's still – you still have to be – But that's what I'm saying.
	Like, look, I'm putting forth this kind of Nietzschean sense of you swallow.
	The awfulness of existence.
	The fact that we are going to all end up dying alone in pain and in sorrow.
	You swallow it all and then you're willing to justify life by the fact that there is joy and creation in it.
	That is what I'm saying about human history.
	I'm just not being a Pollyanna and saying that like...
	Oh, all of human history up until 1960 was just terrible.
	Thank God we now have liberalism.
	It's like, no.
	Look, we're the product of this historical development.
	We benefit from the fact that the state does have power.
	We benefit, at the end of the day, from so many of these crimes that were committed by our ancestors.
	I am willing to say that because I'm willing to take The slaughter bench of history and ultimately swallow it and recognize the tragedy of it, but not throw out morality.
	The worst thing to do would be to say, oh, there's been all this violence in our past.
	Therefore, I'm just going to go and randomly shoot people in the street.
	No, that's ridiculous.
	What I'm saying is that there's been violence in the past and that we can swallow this.
	We can accept it.
	When we build something that's beautiful and harmonious and wonderful, and that's the kind of challenge of existing on this planet.
	Well, look, I agree with you that I want to...
	We're getting deep here.
	Has your podcast ever gotten this deep?
	This is pretty deep.
	For me, this is pretty...
	And this is a deep podcast, but this is pretty deep.
	I like it, though.
	Look, for me, I'd say this.
	I think...
	I agree with you that there is this just...
	Like, you know, this worldview that dominates both the left and right in America that has just been, has lost touch with the reality of what human beings are.
	Like even just for anyone, whether it's I don't know exactly what to put my finger on, but whether it's the cultural relativism or the idea that to even think you could go spread democracy through the Middle East at the point of a gun.
	You you first have to have so many misconceptions about the world and humanity and the way things work.
	And I agree that the idea that, look, of course, I prefer Western civilization.
	Everybody here prefers whether they'll admit it or not.
	All these lefties prefer Western civilization, too.
	They're all choosing to stay in Western civilization over these other.
	I'm saying prefer to these other places, not that it's perfect, but, you know, like, of course, but...
	To me, even if you accept what I'm saying, the idea that people have natural rights and that it's immoral to infringe upon them, that inherently makes you not a cultural relativist because I'm already expressing a preference for Western civilization because they've acknowledged that to a far higher degree than any other civilization has.
	So I can kind of come at this from a perspective where I can sympathize with that, with that aspect of it.
	That being said, I just still maybe I'm a little bit murky on exactly what it is that you advocate for.
	So you want like a state, an ethno state, right?
	Essentially, this is your end goal, a state.
	And what is it that like, what is it when we're swallowing or in this fuzzy time?
	What are we willing to do to create that?
	Well, I mean, I would be willing to do quite a bit.
	I mean, the fact is.
	We're not there yet.
	I do think that the current order that we're existing in, the trajectory is downwards, the trajectory is towards disintegration.
	But, look, we both have very good lives at this point.
	We both can reasonably expect safety and comfort and so on.
	We are not in a revolutionary situation.
	But what I am saying is that we will be.
	America right now is kind of propped up.
	It's a house of cards built on massive debt, built on basically having an economy that's going to kind of placate some natural cultural and racial divisions that are there.
	And that at some point this house of cards is going to come down.
	And we need to have, and it's already coming down in many ways.
	And we need to have an answer.
	We need to have an ultimate solution to this.
	We can't just analyze it and get mad at things.
	I think libertarians and the alt-right to a degree and conservatives, they've been very good at just saying what's wrong with the world.
	Oh, this is bad.
	This program's bad.
	These cultural Marxists are bad, whatever.
	But we need to offer something that is a way out.
	And that's why I think actually the ethnostate is vital, that we can't be identitarians without having that vision of something beyond where we are right now.
	Let me ask you this, because it seems to me that a lot of the stuff that you're advocating, the political stuff in the ethnostate obviously would, I mean, that would be considered fairly radical politically, you know, whenever, you know, but even in the past.
	But truthfully, like your attitudes toward race, I think were all but accepted.
	In American society before, like, the 60s, maybe, or before even later than that, like, the era of political correctness or whatever.
	Yeah, probably a little later, yeah.
	Yeah, like, really, I mean, you know, it's like...
	Mid-80s to 90s, I would say.
	This is almost...
	Right.
	You're probably more accurate there.
	Like, the ideas first sprung up in the 60s and then really culturally took effect probably more when you were saying later in the 80s.
	But so, in a sense, just having an idea that race matters or an in-group preference or something like that, like, that almost isn't really...
	You know, that's been the entire history of the world, basically, until this last little artificial few decades where these progressives, or whatever you want to call them, whatever this left-wing American thing has been, kind of took over.
	Before that, pretty much all of human history, I mean, even in my grandfather's day, if a Catholic was marrying a Protestant, that was a big deal.
	You know, I mean, there was a lot of emphasis on culture.
	So I guess almost like, do you want to return to that culturally?
	Or do you, like, something kind of more similar to that?
	Even before getting maybe this ethnostate?
	No, I don't think we can go back.
	I don't think we can go back to the 1950s.
	I don't think that's possible, and I don't think that's desirable.
	For one thing, the 1950s led to where we are today.
	That's a good point.
	And, you know, as I've said many times, if you press rewind on your DVD player, I guess our millennials don't even know what that is.
	But if you press rewind on, you know.
	Your YouTube streaming video or whatever, and you press play again, you're going to end up at the same place.
	So no, I don't think we can just go back to an older America.
	I think there must be ultimately a radical solution.
	But I also think that, and my radical solution is as crazy as possible.
	We need to have a reinvention of the Roman Empire.
	But I would say this.
	We shouldn't kind of live in that utopia.
	I have opinions about the modern world right now that are highly pragmatic and so on.
	I just wrote a piece on why Donald Trump should support a public option in healthcare.
	And that would include everyone.
	That's not an ethno-state solution.
	I tell you of everything, of everything I've ever heard you say, that's the one I find most offensive.
	I don't care about the thing.
	You can hile Trump all you want to.
	Just please, stop advocating for socialized healthcare.
	Jesus.
	What do you think about...
	I can have opinions about...
	All I'm saying is that, look, I'm not a lunatic.
	I'm not living in my Dungeons& Dragons world of the ethnostate circa 2100.
	I think it is good to think about those things, and I actually think a lot of...
	You know, on Twitter, there's this account called Alt-Right Fanfic, where, you know, it will just be these totally outlandish, you know, tales of, you know, life in the ethnostate.
	I think that actually is positive, but I don't think we should ever get lost in that.
	You know, we've got to be, we've got to have one foot in the world right now, and we've got to also have kind of one foot in that fantasy world, in a way, that world that is to be.
	Because you do have to think about the future.
	The left is good at this.
	The left is very good at imagining new worlds and bringing them into being.
	The right will often kind of be like, oh, let's go back to where we were 30 years ago.
	And the left usually wins.
	So I think the right does need to capture some of that fantastical energy.
	Whether you're, you know, as I said before, we both have what are considered radical politics today, whether you're advocating for an ethnostate or an anarcho-capitalism or whatever, you know, but there is something that I couldn't agree with you more, that right now I think there's a real case to, like, believe in the possibility of a real change, a real fundamental shift.
	I mean, what's going on with the Trump moment and the deep state versus the executive branch, the collapse of the mainstream media, the connectivity of humans, the leaks that are constant that they can't stop at this point from flooding out.
	There's lots of really major paradigm shifts going on right now.
	So I do agree with you that there's a real strong case for radicalism right now and the idea of thinking about some new world and how we can create that.
	Let me ask you this because as you're kind of, you know, As you talked about at the beginning, and we'll wrap up in a second because I've kept you longer than I planned on.
	It's all right, actually.
	This is a good conversation.
	I agree.
	I very much enjoyed it, as I did our last conversation.
	So as you've built, as you mentioned at the beginning, you have a much bigger reach than you ever had before, a much bigger audience than you ever had before, certainly right now.
	I did hear this one, which I want to say, I was happy to hear you say this, but it was after that incident.
	I don't know.
	But obviously there were a handful of people in the crowd who were hailing Hitler.
	And I was happy to hear you say after that, you kind of said, look, at this point the alt-right probably should knock that stuff off.
	We were kind of like being loud and getting attention before, but it's not the best thing for selling our message.
	It's not really what you believe in, essentially.
	So I'm just curious, what do you think about, look, all the Nazis...
	Look, I can get a joke as much as anyone.
	I have no problem with a racist joke.
	Go listen to my other podcast, Legion of Skanks.
	I have...
	Absolutely no problem with the racist joke.
	I get the idea of a middle finger to the establishment.
	I get where if they're going to call everyone a Nazi, eventually instead of going, no, no, no, I'm not a Nazi, you just go, fuck you, I'm a Nazi.
	How about that?
	I get that.
	I do.
	But do you at all, does it concern you?
	Because I think it's far worse on the left wing, and I call them out all the time for it, but I will say there is just a ton of like...
	Hatred for Jews and blacks and minority groups that festers in these internet comments and kind of like the alt-right world.
	A lot of Nazi, you know, terminology.
	This is stuff that does turn a lot of people off.
	And I gotta say, as someone who's developed into this radical world, but I came from a Jewish family who, you know, like is very aware of all this stuff, I get it.
	I get why people look at that and go, oh, these people are fucking evil.
	You know, like I do get some degree of that.
	So what are your thoughts on that?
	Does that concern you at all?
	What are your thoughts?
	Sure, it concerns me.
	What I've said before, and you accurately reiterated what I've said, and I didn't give a salute for whatever that's worth.
	I raised a whiskey glass.
	I would mention that in the Republican National Convention, when I was at a cocktail party and I had a few, I actually gave a communist salute, that is the clenched fist, totally ironically, and was photographed by Vanity Fair.
	And yet no one has ever had a problem with that.
	They're like, oh, he was clearly joking.
	It's kind of funny.
	That was the most, you know, yet some people in the audience gave a Roman salute and it's like, oh my God, you know, they're going to start putting people in train cars tomorrow morning.
	So there is this kind of interesting asymmetry where there's just this obsession with Hitler as kind of the ultimate boogeyman of history.
	And if you're connected with him in any way, then...
	That you are delegitimized.
	And as you say, I think a lot of guys just get called Nazi all the time and just want to say, fuck you, I am a Nazi.
	But I think there is a problem to that.
	I mean, I get it in a sense.
	I think when people are red-pilled, as we say, when they start to recognize the reality of, say, Jewish power and influence, when they start to recognize the reality of Jewish identity, when they start to recognize the reality of race and so on.
	There's almost a tendency to go extreme.
	And I understand that.
	I just feel that what we ultimately need to have is a moderation.
	And I don't mean that in the sense of like...
	I mean that in a mediation in the sense that we do have radical notions.
	We are willing to talk about things that are taboo, but we're also able and willing to communicate with real people.
	I think we need to reach that.
	And there are going to be times when we maybe go a little too far, but we can't get defined by that.
	If Hailgate happened...
	And we were just defined by Hailgate.
	This is who we are.
	We are nothing but screaming.
	Well, right, and you're an organization that tends to define others based on groups of them.
	I mean, you know, if you're talking about Jewish identity or the Jewish problem or whatever or what blacks do, you're defining other groups based on the members that you don't like, and you're saying you have a reaction to their thing and you go too far.
	So how can you argue against anyone else to not have a reaction to that stuff in your group and define you guys as that?
	Well, right.
	We have to generalize at some point if we're going to communicate at all.
	All I'm saying is that our look should not be neo-Nazism.
	I mean, that kind of stuff has failed.
	And, you know, it's not legitimate.
	It's not going to reach anyone.
	So I just think it's important.
	I'm definitely never going to apologize to the Hail Trump.
	I mean, I would do it again.
	We were in a moment of euphoria and exuberance, and it was just like, what Trump has done is amazing.
	I never thought.
	I explicitly did not think this was possible, what Trump did.
	I argued against this happening and he proved me wrong.
	And it was just kind of like, hail Trump.
	What Trump has pulled off is the most incredible political feat in my lifetime.
	It seems like an understatement to say, but it clearly is the most incredible political accomplishment.
	I mean, he took out the Bush family and the Clinton family.
	It's just unbelievable.
	I didn't think they'd let him in.
	It actually challenged my whole view of how this whole thing works.
	I didn't think they would ever let him in, to be honest.
	A lot of people say that.
	A lot of people have eyes for that.
	We've questioned a little bit of the control of, let's say, elite groups to the financial and so on.
	I think we all have to question that a little bit just by the very fact that Trump is there.
	Yeah, I think too many people of like the Alex Jones kind of persuasion, they have this idea that like, well, the Bilderberg guys meet in a group and they have their ideas and then that's what happens to a T. And more realistically, it's like they meet, they have some ideas, they try to make them happen.
	A bunch of them fail, some unintended things happen, then they go with that, then they try to change this around.
	Because if you look at it all, it's like you can look back and see like, oh, these things come out like, oh, they wanted to take out five countries in the Middle East.
	But there's still like two on the list that didn't get taken out.
	And they didn't get the hot war in Syria that they wanted.
	And they didn't get the war in Iran.
	I think you're right about that stuff.
	Okay, well, maybe just to go with this.
	Again, I know you took...
	As you said, you defend what you said in the speech.
	And honestly, I don't think it was, at least in the mainstream media, it wasn't anything you said in the speech that they jumped on.
	It was the fact that people were doing the Heil Hitler.
	And I did make the point, as much as that does rub me the wrong way, that, like, you know, Che Guevara t-shirts are never questioned and all these other, you know, Justin Trudeau just praised, you know, Castro.
	And to me, that would seem a lot more important than what a few guys at Richard Spencer's speech are doing.
	And the other thing that I look at is, I think...
	To use your term, I would think of it as a red-pilled libertarian, or if you're red-pilled on the government at all.
	When they start calling you a Nazi, and it's like, you're the same people who don't find it...
	It's noteworthy or newsworthy that the U.S. government brought in a whole bunch of Nazis to found NASA or that the U.S. brought in...
	They don't care about Nazis.
	They don't actually hate Nazis.
	It's just that they were the big losers of this war.
	They're the boogeyman in history and they use this now to demonize everybody else.
	So I get that.
	So calling you a Nazi I don't think is fair.
	Of course, as you said before, if you give them that excuse, they will do that all day long.
	But when I say you're...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	At the same time, I don't know.
	See, I don't believe that Hailgate, as it's come down to be known, was some just unequivocally bad thing.
	We kind of survived.
	I don't believe that, actually.
	Well, it was huge publicity.
	It was huge publicity, but it also demonstrated our willingness to be badass.
	And again, I'm not...
	I look at things...
	In a very complicated manner.
	I'm not an either-or thinker.
	I look at everything involved with it.
	Nothing ultimately bad has happened due to Hellgate.
	Our movement has not been ruined by it.
	Our movement is bigger than it ever was.
	I have to conclude that we don't want to go down that road of being just idiot, neo-Nazis, whatever.
	But our willingness to say, like, "Fuck you." I think that's a good thing.
	I think it's ultimately a good thing to be edgy and to show that we're willing to be wild.
	I will tell you, it's one of the things I like most about the alt-right, is they have this kind of, like, and this is why even when I'm asking you, like, oh, look, let's just get down to it.
	What can the government do to these minorities?
	It's like, I like that the alt-right in general will put their cards on the table.
	Like, that's the attitude, and it's just kind of like, look, this is what we feel.
	I hate, hate, hate about the mainstream libertarian.
	You know, kind of establishment libertarian movements that they will run away from their principles anytime they take them to an unpopular position, you know, like right away.
	It's like, you want to legalize pot?
	Sure, yeah, absolutely.
	How about freedom of association?
	What?
	No, you can't bake a cake.
	It's like, you know, it's infuriating to me.
	Gary Johnson, he was like, you should bake the cake.
	That's the libertarian.
	Yes, yes.
	I mean, that's exactly.
	Oh, but marijuana should be legal.
	Right, it's just like.
	And then you prove the alt-right correct in the cock thing or whatever.
	Obviously, that is what you are.
	You're just bowing down to these guys.
	From my perspective, I don't really think I'm that type of libertarian.
	I'm very happy to tell them, like, yeah, you should absolutely be allowed to put up a whites-only sign or whatever.
	But I like that about the alt-right, that they are willing to say what they think and not worry about, not be in fear of political correctness, backlash, or whatever.
	I think a big part of the reason why you guys have been outperforming us for the last couple years is because you have that badass quality that's very attractive, especially to the demographic that basically we're all...
	going after, not whether we want to or not, but the demographic we get is your demographic that you like.
	Whether or not I like it, whether you're for or against multiculturalism, if you're a libertarian or anyone out on the, we're speaking primarily to young white men.
	I mean, that's the overwhelming majority of whom I just don't necessarily think, you know, I worry about going from...
	I don't know what that actually does for us in terms of advancing anything.
	And actually, I don't hate black people.
	There's a lot of them that I love.
	So I'm not really on board with that.
	I really do want to end the Fed.
	For me, what I think is kind of tragic is that libertarians have lost all the juice over the last few years and all the internet comments went from being what I love.
	Every YouTube video, I don't care what it was.
	A few years ago would have been like, Ron Paul was dominating the comments.
	And now it's your world down there.
	It's all right in Trump.
	No, it is an amazing thing.
	And I'm not saying this to brag.
	I mean, this is a clear cultural trajectory, not political, cultural trajectory.
	And that is very interesting.
	I was reminded when you were talking, one of my former...
	Co-workers named Michael Brendan Doherty had a very funny line that's always stuck with me.
	It was during the Ron Paul newsletter controversy of 2007 or 2008.
	This becomes a controversy any time Ron Paul's doing good, by the way.
	Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.
	And he said that most of the time libertarians are accused of being racist who use libertarian ideology to advance their agenda.
	But the Ron Paul newsletters was one of the sole times where libertarians were using racism to advance freedom.
	It's kind of true in a way.
	So maybe you should just say like, I hate niggers.
	Well, maybe that matters.
	Oh, God, I said that on YouTube.
	This is going to be.
	That's it.
	By the way, that's all we're putting out.
	There's the rest of this conversation will not be...
	Yeah, I don't really think you're losing any people that you would have...
	No, but there is an interesting cultural trajectory.
	And I am a little bit worried about it.
	I don't want us to ever lose the juice.
	And obviously things ebb and flow, so you do lose the juice to a degree.
	But I am worried.
	We've got to continue to be radical.
	But I have to say, and I'm not saying this because out of schadenfreude or anything like that, I do think libertarianism has lost the juice.
	I'm just saying this objectively, not trying to offend anyone.
	Oh, no.
	Look, to deny what I just said is crazy.
	I mean, I'm on the other side of this.
	But yeah, it's insane.
	It doesn't have the edge.
	Ron Paul doesn't have the edge that he did.
	Saying you're against the Fed doesn't have the edge.
	It doesn't have the edge that it would if you said, I think white people have a right to exist or something.
	That's edgier.
	And part of the reason why that has the...
	As a movement is just...
	I mean, like, what is the difference?
	I mean, between, like, the left, basically.
	I mean, it's just, I mean, I guess they don't like the government, but that's about it.
	Well, I mean, look, they pander a lot to the left, but I'm not exactly willing to say there's no difference between them and the left.
	I mean, we have a government that spends $4 trillion a year.
	The pandering is so extreme.
	As I said, it disturbs me.
	They're fighting for, like...
	Children's abilities to change gender and divorce their parents.
	I mean, once those are your key issues, it's just like, move to Berkeley, have fun.
	Listen, I want to be perfectly fair here, and I agree with you.
	Believe me, I am more deeply offended by that stuff than I think almost anybody is.
	But to be fair, it's not that their number one issue is the transgender kids.
	It's just they will...
	Pander on that issue, which is fucking insanity.
	And they shouldn't.
	But I don't think that, I'm not going to say there's no difference between what guys at Reason Magazine would do and the amount of money that Barack Obama would spend in a year.
	I mean, it's pretty drastic where they, but okay, you know, fair enough.
	I agree with you, but I do look at it, like I would say this, what you were talking about with the alt-right kind of having been taken over, a big part of the reason why it's so badass is because you are jumping on the third rail that is the third rail.
	Race is the third rail in America today.
	Forget all this other stuff about, you know, like, it is the third rail to talk about Medicare, but, yeah, it's not really, like, nearly as much, and that's because the multiculturalism and anti-whiteness or whatever is been at the core of leftist ideology and the people who have taken over kind of everything, who run all the major institutions for a long time.
	So you're kind of going against that.
	I would just say this.
	If you're talking about...
	You know, the alt-right is a fairly new phenomenon, but a lot of your people who maybe have had intellectual influence on you and, you know, there's been people who were conservatives, Pat Buchanan and people like that who were talking about issues of immigration and, you know, a lot of the similar type of things that you were talking about, but years before, maybe not all the same things and didn't take it as far as you do, but certainly was getting at a lot of the same core.
	And there was always that win.
	And Rothbard supported Pat Buchanan because he felt like, kind of like what you were saying, he was like, they got the juice.
	What you're talking about, the era of when the newsletters were actually written, is around this time where it's like, yeah, you're right.
	The feeling was they had the juice.
	There was this right-wing populism where people like David Duke were very popular and Pat Buchanan had this national movement and there were these people and they felt like that.
	And then, by the way, that did.
	Flip.
	Now, it didn't flip overnight, but when Ron Paul was having this moment, when the Libertarian was rising, people like Pat Buchanan and David Duke were doing the opposite.
	They were throwing their support behind Ron Paul.
	Like, look, we may not agree with him on everything.
	That's actually true.
	But he's got the juice he's got.
	So just because you guys have it right now, and we had it three years ago, I wouldn't like, you know, this is probably more good advice to you than I, you're alt-right people than I care to give, but don't feel like this can't shift again in a second.
	Don't feel like when the economic crash happens, this is a big part of why we had our...
	was that economic crash happened and Ron Paul told the fucking truth when nobody else did.
	These wars were out of control and Ron Paul told the fucking truth when nobody else did.
	Now, I'll be honest, Donald Trump dabbled in truth and then gave a lot of populist kind of, you know, things that will just be, well, it's a lot easier to just say this than get into the weeds of this.
	Okay, there's a reason you won that way.
	But what have you got around him?
	What are you actually going to get out of this?
	That still kind of remains to be seen.
	Right.
	Anyway, we'll have the juice, and you'll have the juice.
	I've got you saying a couple great points.
	That was kind of childish.
	All right, listen.
	I've kept you almost a half hour over what I thought, but I really do enjoy our conversations.
	Let people know where they can find your stuff and any closing thoughts.
	Go to altright.com.
	That is basically where I'm putting all of my energies these days.
	So go visit us there.
	You can find out everything, altright.com.
	Okay, cool.
	Again, man, I really appreciate you taking the time.
	People say whatever, you know, it's unbelievable to me because I'll go, I said this last time we were on, but I'll go on Fox News and argue with like a CIA guy, a Republican strategist, a Democratic strategist.
	I'll have left-wing people on, but the outrage I get when I say I'm going to sit down and have a conversation with you, and it doesn't make sense to me that I can talk to the killers.
	But can't talk to someone who you deem politically out of bounds.
	And I will say, man, for any people out there, whatever criticisms you may get, so many of these left-wing people who are outraged by you, I mean, you can just smack down their arguments in a second.
	They've got no understanding of history, no intellectual argument to actually put forward.
	If you take it to its logical conclusion, it all falls apart.
	So look, I appreciate the back and forth, and I find our conversations thought-provoking.
	I appreciate you taking the time.
	I'd love to do it again.
	It's a lot of fun.
	Alright, we'll definitely do that.
	Richard Spencer, everybody!

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