Richard Spencer and Hannibal Bateman unveil their new occasional podcast, "Cucksplaining" . . . or "Cucking Out" or "The Cucking of the American Mind" or whatever they end up calling it . . . in which they get triggered by "conservative" silliness so that you don't have to. The inaugural episode begins with a doozy, "Christianity Is For Cucks," in First Things, by Matthew Schmitz. Notes James Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation Gangs of New York, “Nigger in the church!” Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief (1932) Waugh, Sword of Honor (1966) Sword of Honor (film, 2001) 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
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the inaugural episode of Cucking Out.
We get triggered so that you don't have to.
I am your host, Richard Spencer, along with my co-host, Hannibal Bateman.
Hello, Hannibal.
Hi, Richard.
How are you?
I'm doing very well, but I'm about to be doing a lot worse.
because we actually have to read the worst examples of conservative thought.
Or really, we shouldn't say worst, we should just say quintessential examples of American conservatism.
This podcast was your idea, because you're often sending me an iMessage or something like that, just some of the cuckiest, most ridiculous conservative movement articles.
And so we decided to turn it into a podcast.
So what we're going to do is read a...
We'll jump in and I believe through this close reading process, very Straussian, that we will get a better understanding of how conservatives think and so will you.
So we will get triggered.
We will really get inside the cuck mind.
The first essay that we're going to look at is...
Basically written for this podcast.
Like, he might have actually tried...
He had this podcast in mind, even when it didn't exist.
Oh, yeah.
It was almost like he wrote this article looking to goad us to create this podcast.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
Actually, you know, now that I think about it, I even just thought of an even better name for this podcast.
Since you mentioned Straussians, riffing off of Alan Bloom, this could be cucking of the American mind.
Cucking of the American mind.
We could just call it...
This is okay.
The article in question is Christianity is for Cucks by Matthew Schmitz.
This was published in First Things on September 12th, 1917.
And I will read the article and we will dissect it.
So, this is a block quote to begin.
Disheveled white men were staring ahead with vague, uncomprehending eyes to the end of the room where two candles burned.
The priest turned towards them, his bland black face.
Evelyn Waugh knew that a vision of Africans proclaiming the faith to whites would startle his readers in 1933.
But it is a literal description of many American and European parishes today.
At the church nearest me, self-satisfied Irish Americans listen to an Igbo priests preach and then complain about his accent at brunch.
So this is a bit of a fantasy of Africans will save Christianity.
Yes.
I think a lot of cucks realize that Christianity is becoming a non-white religion over time.
I mean, it is certainly the Catholic Church's majority non-white.
Christianity overall, what would you say the percentages are?
I believe it still has a white majority, last I checked.
A white majority, yeah.
But obviously where it's growing the most, South America, Africa, Korea, South Korea, you know, is a big hotbed of the evangelical church.
and China, of course, and other parts of Asia.
Yeah.
Also, I think what they're getting at is this kind of like having one's cake and eating it, too, in the sense that so much of the Christian cuck right want to claim that You know, effectively to this, Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe.
The operative word there is Europe, not faith.
Exactly.
So it's a kind of, it's this notion that it's a non-racial, and in a weird way, not even non- well, it is a civilizational understanding.
It's certainly a non-racial understanding of what it means to be European or what it means to be American.
It's in a way a More complicated, dense, more defensible version of the Proud Boys, the West is the best.
Only, to be fair, here we're at least talking with people who have read about Western civilization instead of inserting objects into various orifices.
Right.
You mean that metaphorically, hopefully.
Of course.
But anyway, so they don't want to look at Europe as an ancient conception, as dating back to our pagan past.
They want to gloss over, to a large extent, the pagan elements within even the modern Europe and so on.
And even within medieval Christianity.
Within medieval Christianity, certainly within the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance was a kind of paganization of Christianity to a large degree.
within medieval Christianity, no doubt.
Yeah, James Russell's book.
It's a classic.
Everyone should...
Well, I shouldn't say everyone should read it.
Let's be honest.
It's a very dense dissertation.
Everyone should read a review of it.
But, effectively, they recognize that Europe is declining and the faith is declining as well, but somehow these Africans are going to save Europeans and that there can be a disembodied, deracialized, deracinated kind of mid-air flippant Oh, yeah.
You know, promoted by Nigerians, maybe even more so than Frenchmen, because whites are so decadent.
Oh, this gets to the point of, you know, bringing up this thought experiment by Evelyn Wall.
Evelyn Wall was, of course, a noted anti-Semite and racist who supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
But be that as it may.
When Schmitz says that Evelyn Waugh knew his vision of Africans proclaiming the faith to whites would shock at his time, I don't think Waugh intended it to shock as Schmitz says it is to be shocked.
It would be shocking to a European precisely because there is this deracinization of European man and his faith that this would be shocking.
To Schmitz, he's almost saying it in the opposite way.
I think that Wall intended it, which is that this is obviously what will happen.
Wall, being a satirist, used this to poke at the Western mind and its decline and over time.
I'm reminded of this.
I hesitate to always say.
I hesitate to use the N-word, but I'm using it objectively in the sense.
But I remember there's a very amusing scene or telling scene from Gangs in New York where there is someone starts screaming.
There is the Irishman.
They create this diversity coalition against the evil Anglos.
There's a nigger in the church!
There's a nigger in the church!
And, you know, obviously, you know, Christianity is a universal religion.
And I'm sure that many people probably thought in their minds, okay, they could be, sure, everyone should be Christian, we're all brothers at some point.
But this notion of, you know, quote, a nigger in the church, end quote.
It's this...
The stain upon something that is meant to be holy.
It's like Christianity is meant to be, or Christianity succeeded when it was identitarian, when it was an expression of a kind of holiness or idealization of a people.
And bringing a nigger into this, it stains it.
It makes it profane.
Well, not only that, it's sort of, thinking from a traditionalist Catholic point of view, To make it a national religion.
that there would be this sort of free market of priests floating around sort of in a deracinated homogenous culture is almost, you know, it is anathema to the historical spirit of a lot of tradition Yeah, I mean, it's globalist and libertarian and deracinated, as you point out.
The strengths of Christianity is its ability to be adapted.
I mean, voodoo is effectively, you know, Haitian Catholicism.
And that's an extreme example.
But obviously, there's a degree to which German Protestantism, even German Catholicism...
Oh yeah, look at the stave churches in Norway or Sweden.
And Italian Catholicism.
These are different...
Or Russian Orthodoxy or something.
These are...
They're obviously connected on a deep level, but they are national folk expressions of the religion.
Again, it's not like we just have this itinerant Negroes across the continent who will come and preach the truth to various peoples.
Again, it's this idea that Christianity had a strength when it was able to be molded by, and mold to a large degree, but also be molded by indigenous folk and ultimately pagan cultures.
Look at this in contradistinction to Islam, which does that to a certain degree, of course, but is remarkable in the way in which it obliterates ancient cultures.
I mean, it actively attacks them, attempts to uproot them and destroy them.
And there is a kind of like Islam as a franchise.
And yes, I'm well aware that there are divisions within Islam, blah, blah, blah.
When I was in Turkey and I walked by a mosque, it looked like this foreign spaceship that just landed on a hill.
It looked like something out of Saudi Arabia.
You think about this.
A lot of pagans that we know always bring up ancient Christians tearing down statues of Apollo and whatever.
But it should be noted that in Europe, a lot of these things were still there.
In medieval Arabia, a lot of the remnants of the earlier cultures and religions are just obliterated.
I mean, look at Zoroastrianism in Iran.
It's reduced to smaller sex of people.
A lot of its images in great temples were destroyed.
Islam is sort of this pulverizing force in a way that Christianity just was not in Europe.
Anyway, let's move on.
This is how long we're going to talk about two paragraphs.
This is the next, quoting Schmidt, next paragraph.
On the level of the universal church.
The Guinean cardinal Robert Serra has become the most full-throated defender of Catholic faith.
When he quotes John's apocalypse, European bishops are baffled.
I cannot imagine what they think when he promises that in the battle against secularism, Africa, like the Vendee, will resist.
The Holy Ghost Fathers, who rigorously catechized Sarah, are long gone, as are the French colonial textbooks that taught him he was descended from the Gauls.
Even so, I sometimes think we are heading towards the world described by Waugh.
He got the idea from John Gray's novel, Park, whose hero is transported to a future in which savage Englishmen live underground while civilized Africans cultivate England's greens and pleasant lands.
celebrating splendid Latin liturgy, studying the parodotrys, Well, this just reinforces a lot of what we were saying earlier.
But the interesting point...
You could maybe not blame people who thought in this way because they had not truly experienced...
Africa.
Again, these are satires written by Europeans for Europeans.
Right.
It's not actually about the Africans doing this, but it's about what is going on in the souls of European man, that he is reduced to this station.
It's not about this literally happening.
Right.
When I mentioned Waugh's story on Twitter recently, I was inundated with messages from members of the alt-right, oh, gasp, who told me that Christianity is for cucks, short for cuckold, a slur they hurl against whites who don't subscribe to their racial theories.
I think I was even called a social justice warrior.
Who guessed that Evelyn Waugh would one day appear as a paragon of wokeness?
Yes, yes.
This is just...
One, he is conflating his views with Evelyn Waugh's, which I think is incorrect.
On another level, he just...
His mind is still so baptized and marinated in liberalism that it can't think its way out.
I also, I really get tired of these paleocons or, you know, first things, trad, Christians or so on, who, particularly when they're older, and they...
Haven't been directly forced to think about race.
They've lived in a white country.
I mean, the conservative movement was, you know, materialized in the mid-1950s.
It is interesting that, like, the Sharon Statement, you know, their manifesto didn't even mention race or anything like that because they didn't have to.
I mean, they didn't want to address the Negro question, segregation, etc.
And they didn't have to think about this because no one outside of maybe a few real, you know, extreme Marxist or Looney Tunes imagined that America's white majority would decline.
And so they didn't have to think about this.
And I love it how.
I'm a great trad con, and I don't see race or something because I'm just so traditional.
And it's like, you are not traditional.
You are lucky or cursed, depending on your perspective, to have existed in this oblivion for your childhood and early adulthood.
And that's why you, quote, don't see race.
But don't claim that you're somehow more traditionalist than an 18-year-old shitlord who is seeing his town being overturned.
Experiencing anti-white bigotry at an orientation session who just sees race everywhere.
There is a woeful ignorance to race on their part, too.
Again, to go back to Evelyn Wall, who is actually one of my favorite writers, you know...
Wa wrote a novel, Black Mischief.
Part of the plot of the novel was this African who was educated at Oxford and goes back and tries to cargo cult a lot of Western technology.
He has this ball for contraception where people are wearing condoms and various things like that.
Have you even read the same novel?
He's clearly...
Wah, who traveled to Africa extensively, is clearly poking fun at this from a decidedly racialist angle.
Right.
Okay, next paragraph.
Maybe it shouldn't be so surprising.
Wah is usually caricatured as a bellowing, gin-swilling bigot, the collective id of pimply conservative boys.
This is about as accurate as my youthful impression that Jane Austen was a writer.
Oh, fancy that.
Christianity really is for cucks.
And no one knew it as well as wah.
All right, well, let's get into the argument before we dissect it.
One sees this most clearly in Sword of Honor, his novel about one man's disillusionment while fighting World War II.
At the outset of the story, Guy Crouchbake is living alone in Italy in self-imposed exile.
As a pious Catholic, he still believes himself married to the woman who left him eight years before, but he has nonetheless been deprived of the loyalties which should have sustained him.
England may be his country, Virginia may be his wife, but neither one will claim him.
When war is declared, Guy...
At last has a purpose.
Now, splendidly, everything has become clear.
The enemy at last was plain in my view, huge and hateful, all disguises cast off.
It was the modern age in arms.
Whatever the outcome, there was a place for him in that battle.
He goes to pray at a crusader's tomb.
Then it's off to join the army.
Once in uniform, he even hopes to retake his wife.
Instead of enjoying conquest, he suffers a series of humiliating, erotic, and military defeats.
Guy tries to seduce his wife and fails.
She instead becomes pregnant by her former hairdresser, a man named Trimmer, who, through a series of comic mishaps, becomes an unlikely war hero.
Guy's aspirations to success in field and bed are deflated by perfect parody.
Virginia fears scandal and tries to abort the child before desperately asking Guy to acknowledge it as his own.
He chivalrously agrees.
He is a cuckold, a cuck.
By embracing this role, he becomes true Christian and knight.
At the end of the war, Guy is stationed in Yugoslavia, where his exertions serve merely to shore up the coming communist reign.
His dreams of facing off against an allied Hitler and Stalin have given way to the reality of midwifing red terror.
He is stripped of his last illusions when a female acquaintance denounces the militia.
And this is a block quote.
It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish everywhere.
Even good men thought their private honor would be satisfied by war.
They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed.
I knew Italians, not very many perhaps, who felt this.
Were there none in England?
God forgive me, Guy says, I was one of them.
Like Father Martin's Christ, Waugh's hero learns from a wise woman.
Oh, God.
He sees that Christianity is not a matter of blood or of race or of victory in this world.
It requires us to accept defeat in this life so we might enjoy triumph in the next.
All right.
Let's.
Okay.
This is like trying.
I've said this on Twitter a number of times.
It's like Christians are desperately attempting to prove that Nietzsche was right.
I mean, I, in a way, as someone who is critical of Christianity, I would, in a way, agree with this caricature, but it's very sad that this is what Christianity is.
I mean, it's not even a kind of, you could say, stoicism or steely resolve against all odds.
In the sense of, look, we all lose in life.
We lose with women.
We have...
Personal turmoils.
We all suffer career defeats, etc.
But the whole idea is that we have a certain resolve.
We pick ourselves back off the mat.
That is not what he's saying.
That would be a positive Christian vision.
It's actually even to deny that further Christian vision, which is that the eternal victory of Christ is within you.
And so you can overcome these defeats.
And it also overlooks the conquering Christian armies of the conquistadors.
Yeah, absolutely.
The Crusades.
The Crusades.
It requires us to accept defeat in this life so we might enjoy triumph in the next.
You must lose.
You must...
Your blood must cease to flow.
I mean, it is kind of funny that it's...
This is, again, we get this aspect, like it's only whites who think this way.
I mean...
Even if you agree with this notion that Christianity is going to be saved by Africans, the Africans are winning.
The Africans are flourishing.
Their offspring are triumphing.
They are taking over civilization.
Someone's winning.
All this is is just a philosophy of losing.
It's not even for losers.
In a way...
You could offer a certain gift to the loser.
Like, don't worry, you tried hard.
Or don't worry, you'll have a gift in the afterlife or something.
This is a philosophy of losing in the sense that one must lose in order to ultimately win.
And it's an attempt to want to, in their weird way, say they're...
You know, to go back to that earlier quote from Cardinal Seurat about the Vendee, it's sort of sad in a way because this is a man, though yes, educated by the French and by all accounts more orthodox than the current Roman Catholic establishment, is reaching to the history of another people.
Dead aristocrats of France and the Vendee, the dead Catholics there.
They were European men fighting for a European civilization.
And it shows the sort of...
The thing that a lot of these cucks do, that Africa will save us, misses the point.
It's that even the best of these Africans are drawing from the well of European man.
And that it is that which gives them these glimmers of greatness within the Catholic Church.
Right.
Well, it's just also this...
To go back to something earlier, it's almost like the...
There's a certain arrogance, or you could even say...
Right.
Yeah, I think it's a great thing.
It's a desperate hope that you don't have to defend your own people.
And so it's a kind of love thy enemy in this terrible way.
Like, don't worry.
All of those refugees who have IQs in the 70s and are raping people and are just totally dysfunctional and terrible.
Oh, don't worry.
They're going to all become priests.
And then we're going to all read Aquinas today.
Pope Francis has said Europe becoming more Arab will be a good thing.
These people are really...
The worst.
And this is where I despise these people far more than I despise the left, actually.
Because these are the types of people who are presenting themselves as traditionalists and conservatives.
They are the closer, nearer enemy.
They are far worse.
Oh, yeah.
And they can kind of poison good minds.
And the way that a leftist, like, it's true that many people kind of flirt with the left and be youth or what have you or whatever.
But to be a true leftist, like...
Leftism poisons a bad mind, I would say.
It poisons rotten people.
I'm not talking about Whole Foods swipples here.
It makes bad people worse.
Yeah, you could say that as well.
I'm not talking about Whole Foods swipples.
I'm talking about the people who are really destroying civilization or even taking that further, like the Antifa person.
Those are not good people.
They are not good people.
Morally, mentally, physically, etc.
They're just terrible human beings that are attracted by this.
The problem with this kind of cuck Christianity, or Christianity, you could say, is that it poisons good minds.
It makes people who want to be part of some deeper European story...
Essence of civilization.
...that it poisons them into thinking this.
But anyway, let's move on here.
A Catholic cannot be certain that his line will continue or his country thrive.
He only knows that the gates of hell will not prevail against Christ's church.
Yeah.
Again, because hell will take over the church.
So, I mean, again, it's like your enemy will take over the church and then you'll ultimately win.
That's the argument.
It's absolutely stupid.
This is why Waugh could happily entertain the idea that black men would bear forth a faith and culture abandoned by whites.
Perhaps it will not happen, but no Christian would mind if it did.
No true Christian would mind if St. Peter's was run by an African and it was filled with Arabs who had adopted the universal faith.
No true Christian would mind that.
Okay, well, good luck with that.
Going back to an earlier point in this, to get literary, I guess, for a second.
Well, one, there's a James Bond reference to be made.
Sword of Honor was actually made into a movie with Daniel Craig starring as Guy Crouchback.
One of his earlier roles.
When was that?
This was in the 90s, yes.
I'll have to go check that out.
It was one of his first films, I believe.
However, the other point is, again, the author is missing sort of Waugh's despair at this whole situation, at the destruction of European civilization at the end of World War II.
And to his point about cuckoldry, you know, you read one of Wall's earlier novels, A Handful of Dust.
The character is cuckolded by his wife.
And similar to Crouchback, instead of having to take the stain of divorcing his wife in English society of the time, he decides to say he was the one who committed adultery and run away to South America, where he's lost in the jungles of South America and is condemned to have to read Charles Dickens to a crazy man for the rest of his life.
This gets to the deeper point that it's...
When civilization dies, that is what happens.
This is despair.
This is not something to be proud of or be triumphal about.
To read it that way is to miss the larger point about meditation on the decline and fall of who we are and the innate spiritual sense of European peoples.
Right.
And if Christians, if conservative trad Christians like this, and I know there are obviously many counterexamples, but if the Christians like Schmidt...
The most telling thing is that they and their people will not lead the revival.
I mean, it says it all.
Like, we can't really do it.
It says something about white guilt that's burdening them.
It says something just about their lack of energy and drive.
It says also it probably reveals a kind of hidden doubt.
That secret doubt that this is not true, that this is not leading us towards a revival, that you would say something like this in the sense of like, we can't do it.
We can't lead this revival.
We're going to have to rely on Africans.
It's sad.
It's innately even unconservative in a way in that it's not conserving anything but praying for Armageddon.
In a way that he wants to immunitize the eschaton, to use that old conservative phrase.
Come Armageddon.
Come the tides.
Come Armageddon.
Come Armageddon.
Come.
Yes.
Morrissey reference there.
Do you think Christianity is inherently four cucks?
Do you think it's inherently a cuck religion, a god on a cross, a universe?
I mean, look, one could argue that Christianity, from the perspective of the ancient world, is atheism.
In the sense that the old gods died.
God did not live in the world.
In fact, a lot of the latter pagans attacked Christianity because they saw it as atheistic.
But in a deeper sense, though, to defend Christianity, it is a universal religion, meaning it's not just a religion for cucks, but it should be a religion for all types and verities of the human spirit.
That's a good point.
To privilege this sort of mentality is very sickening and weak.
It's revealing because it's only cucks who are trad Christians, basically.
And, you know, I wouldn't say...
Only trad Christians are cucks?
No, I wouldn't say that, but only cucks are trad Christians.
And when we're talking about these trad Christians, we're talking about people like Rod Dreher, who is probably one of the best examples of this type.
Yes.
We're not talking about...
We're actually not talking about your average Midwestern Catholic.
Or even your alt-right trad Catholic.
No.
And there certainly are some.
But put intellectuals aside, we're actually not talking about your average Midwestern Catholic who voted for Trump and actually sees his church as the place where he goes with his family and meets up with friends.
And it's a source of community and meaning in their life and part of the calendar and the seasons and all that kind of stuff.
We're not talking about those.
We're talking about people who write for First Things.
Yes.
No, yes.
The illustrious...
The illustrious cucks.
Yeah.
These people need to go.
I mean, I do think that there probably will be another generation of them.
I mean, obviously they're all old and flabby.
But they probably will be replaced.
There does seem to be just a certain personality type that emerges in the Western world that is this type that's attracted to be the priesthood or being a monk or denying the world and just not even striving to achieve.
look at all of that with a quietest.
Oh, yeah.
Well, in a way, if we, if we, if we meditate for a second on the sociology of, uh, of right wingers, it is the exact opposite of the personality type that becomes an alt writer for an, for example, right.
Both sort of have a disposition to, Right.
I will say that I do think a lot of these first things guys probably do conceive of Western civilization and believe in it, but they take a different turn than someone like you or I when they're confronted with what does it mean to believe in this.
