Groyper Nation Takes on the Culture War and The Rise and Fall ... And Rise? of Paleoconservatives
The McSpencer Group assembles to discuss the recent storming of Charlie Kirk’s “Culture War” tour by members of Groyper Nation. Speaking of the Culture War, the group also takes a deep dive into the history of the “paleoconservatives” and the politics of nostalgia—their triumphs, their limitations, and whether their movement and moniker make any sense in the 21st century. The hottest takes. The most esoteric sources. The McSpencer Group. 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
My question is, if the President were to enact a policy that would completely benefit the United States and her citizens, but to the detriment of Israel, would you support it?
Yes or no?
That's a false choice.
Thank you for being here.
Welcome to the October 31st edition of McSpencer Group, the Halloween edition.
And today's topics will be the Nicker Nation invasion of Charlie Kirk's Culture War series.
We'll also be talking about the...
The rise and fall of paleoconservatism.
Why it failed.
Why it's wrong to revive it.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, it's kind of like the phoenix.
Like our tarted phoenix that just never quite makes it off the ground.
Just sputters a little bit.
Slams down.
Comes back up again.
But yeah, the biggest issue kind of online on Twitter generating a lot of controversy.
Let me interject.
I think we should...
Bring some level of humanity to this discussion so that we can offer our listeners a sense of community.
So, what are you doing for Halloween?
I'm 34, Richard.
I don't do anything fun for Halloween.
I don't know.
In New York, things are so crazy that I can't deal with it.
I was visiting a friend of mine in New York.
A while ago, maybe when I was your age.
He lived in gentrified Chelsea at that time.
I remember visiting Chelsea when I was a lot younger and it was a horrifying gay neighborhood.
It was no longer that.
It had been gentrified by, you know, Wall Street people.
But anyway, and I said, I was like, oh yeah, I'll come visit you.
It was on the 31st.
And he's like, oh, you know, be sure to get here before 2 p.m.
I was like, what are you talking about?
And basically, all of the bureaus just descended upon Lower Manhattan, and you cannot cross the street.
It is a madhouse.
And it was, and I don't say this with any hate in my heart, it was just waves and waves of Puerto Ricans, African Americans, all sorts of other people who just come into the bureaus and walk around the streets for Halloween.
And then otherwise, Halloween has just become much like St. Patrick's Day.
It's just become an excuse for drunk white women to wear sexy outfits and act like strippers for a night, as if they needed an excuse.
Contrary to popular opinion, the big slur word in New York isn't the N-word, it isn't the K-word, it's actually the B-word, the bridge and tunnelers.
So that's the big one.
That's the ultimate slur in New York, is if you're from the boroughs, it doesn't get worse than that.
But try hanging out by the piers on Halloween, because ever since that wacky, crazy EDM fad from a couple years ago, it's just like wall-to-wall, cabs, lifts, and women with just the most preposterous...
I mean, frankly, it's pretty hot, but it's also totally crazy.
Guys dressed like the Predator, it's the most madcap thing.
I'm too old for that shit, to be perfectly honest.
Yes.
It's also really expensive, and, you know, there's better things to spend your money on, I think.
Yeah, definitely.
I'll be doing kind of dad Halloween, so I'm very excited for that.
So, no sexy girls, but, you know, candy and trick-or-treating, and then, you know, in by 8.30 p.m.
What about you, Mark?
Are you going to go as Apollo?
What's going to happen?
Too old.
This is the lamest cast of podcasters ever.
No, I mean, I might go with a friend to a local bar.
I don't have anything really planned.
I mean, occasionally I get more adventurous.
But, yeah, it's just not as interesting as it once was.
But, yeah, it's a good—it's one of those—it actually is one of those romantic holidays.
Like, you have to be with your girlfriend at the time, similar to New Year's Eve.
So Valentine's Day is not the only one.
Those are also Christmas as well.
So they have a kind of romantic obligation aspect to them.
These holidays haven't diminished.
All holidays in America are pretty much the same.
It's all get drunk and dress in sexy outfits.
Valentine's, Halloween, St. Patrick's Day, Oktoberfest.
It's all been reduced to just kind of, you know, postmodern.
A bar crawl, effectively.
40-year-olds doing jello shots.
Yeah, you're not dancing around the maypole or in some sort of ritualistic festival around a fire or something like that.
Yeah, a lot of girls doing that.
While taking photos.
You're giving me flashbacks.
Put on to more serious topics.
Or maybe not, actually.
So, certainly, if you spend a lot of time on Twitter and YouTube, the most important thing happening on planet Earth right now are the clips making their way across the internets of these For the most part, pretty chattly young guys, not entirely white, but often Catholic, who...
I have not watched the whole clip, but I've been told that the Q&A section was mostly the kind of alt-right side of things.
Young guys just...
He's airdropping all of these kind of alt-right, anti-Semitic memes at Charlie Kirk, and he's trying to do some Luke Skywalker, evade the laser blasts as they pass by his head.
I know you were on with JF earlier to talk about this, but there's a lot to unpack.
I guess my first question to you, Richard, is, and just to get right to the point, does any of this matter?
Not too much.
I think this was viewed as this humongous win, and it is a tempest in a teacup, and a lot of people amplify themselves on Twitter and the forums and chans and whatever, and it seems to become a bigger thing than it is.
I don't think it was a bad thing.
I mean, I went on JF and...
And we were just chatting beforehand, and I was like, well, I think I'm going to probably get some hate, even though I'm just being objective about this.
In terms of what just average people who hold our views could be doing, going to the Q&A and kind of trolling it, I mean that in a good sense.
The word troll has a lot of different meanings.
But going in, pointing out Charlie Kirk's hypocrisy, dropping some truth bombs on boomers, whatever.
I mean, none of this is a bad thing.
So I don't want to...
I'm not trying to rain on their parade or anything like that.
But it was...
There are a couple of things I want to say here.
And I want to make a deeper point, but I'll save that.
But it...
It ultimately is kind of a step backwards from where we have been.
And again, it's not a bad thing, but we need to recognize that.
This is like trolling the comments section.
We are not the article.
We are going there and jumping on someone else's jam and kind of getting our word out here and there.
And I don't think...
Charlie Kirk and company will allow this to happen again.
They'll do extreme vetting of the Q&A questioners or just cut that out altogether.
But look, it's attacking conservatives.
It's attacking the phony right.
It's dropping some truth here and there.
Maybe some boomer is going to be up all night Googling these things.
So I don't think it's a really bad thing, but I, this is not at all how I would describe winning and it, I think Nicker Nation, in general, gives us a glimpse into what the alt-right is right now.
And kind of maybe what it always was.
I mean, I had my own vision for what a, what the political movement could be.
And, you know, I, I, I've taken a step back.
Things have certainly changed.
I am completely off the Trump bandwagon.
So we're in a new place.
And we kind of get a glimpse of...
What the Groyper community wants the alt-right to be.
And I think it is a lot of stuff like this.
There's a heavy trad-cath component to it all.
There is a kind of troll-ish aspect.
There is a certain kind of anonymity of going to someone else's platform and kind of calling them out and so on.
And it is what it is.
It gives us a sense.
But certainly for 2018 and up to now, what has defined the movement is kind of this.
It's what Nick is.
Nick is a conservative.
He's a Republican who has been somewhat red-pilled on, say, Some racial issues or Israel or the Jewish question or what have you.
But those really haven't apparently changed him ideologically.
And so we are the movement as it is now is a kind of racist Republican movement.
And they want to take back the conservatism, which is effectively what they were, you know, declaring the other night.
And this is not really anything I'm terribly interested in, to be honest.
I don't want to seem jelly or whatever.
You know, go do your thing.
And there's certainly worse things that could be done.
And I don't know the degree to which this...
It kind of had shockwaves outside of the movement.
Sebastian Gorka was freaking out, basically.
And obviously, when you put me in a position where I want to defend Nick Fuentes, you've really accomplished something.
And Count Chocula has done this.
So yes, I am on Team Nick vis-a-vis Count Chocula.
And there have been a few other kind of...
You know, Jim Holtz or Hoff or whoever his name is.
Hoff, Holft, whatever his name is.
This kind of gay, drudge-level blogger.
And a couple others have freaked out.
But I don't know the degree to which this is reverberated outside of our own echo chamber.
So it is what it is.
Yeah, but it's worth talking about it.
I think it's...
In terms of the immediate spectacle of it, that...
I actually have some deeper thoughts on basically the construction of a neo-alt-right and the degree to which the Republican Party and the conservative movement actually kind of need something like this.
that they're not as opposed to an alt-right, you know, writ large or radicals as you might think they are.
And that should make us a little bit skeptical of them.
But And of course, by the way, PJW, imagine our shock.
PJW is defending this and trying to jump on yet another bandwagon, much like he jumped on the alt-right bandwagon in 2016, just so that he can denounce them all in 9 to 12 months and declare how he never...
actually knew what was going on and was totally innocent and is a colorblind pro-gay conservative.
So basically I have seen this VHS tape before Yeah, I suspect PJW will probably check out the vibrant gay scene in Groyperville, and then, you know, we'll get some very queer, in the traditional sense, selfies, and yeah.
But for Mark, I mean, this was my sense, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this as well.
The fact that so much of this type of political energy is confined to the internet, I think also creates some unique, like almost psycho-digital...
problems in the sense that people are really, really excited about this.
But what are they really excited about?
But the immediate dopamine response of seeing their guys enter the arena, you know, metaphorically slay the dragon, or so they think.
I forget who said this, but it's an ancient, it's a very famous old quote, you know, what do you think about the revolution, the French Revolution?
Well, you know, it's too early to tell.
So what do we think about the...
Turning Point Culture War, Groyperfest.
Well, we're literally not even 24 hours out of the event, and I've made a lot of tweets about this and have generated probably too much attention on my own account, but there's a lot of people like, this was a huge win.
Why wouldn't you let us have our fun?
This was a huge win.
We're killing conservatism.
To the specific point about this being a big win, I mean, how much of this really just is, the enthusiasm is that...
Like neurochemical dump of watching something really, really cool on your monitor, but not having a physical metric or any temporal distance from the event to really judge whether or not this was meaningful.
Do you have any thoughts on that, Mark?
A question, please, and not a statement with an upward inflection.
No, I mean...
Yeah, no, I think what you're saying is pretty brilliant.
I actually, you know, I enjoyed watching it as well.
I mean, I thought it was pretty funny, and I actually can see why they got excited about it.
It is kind of, you know, this is nothing really, it's basically 2016 on a kind of...
Much smaller scale on some level, right?
And a lot of that has to do with it's not really the fault of the people that are trying to push these things.
It's just the fault of where we are right now, which is we're being deplatformed and we're being sort of we're kind of imploding in a way in terms of influence.
And I mean, they are I mean, I think that, you know, there are kind of two effects.
One is, we hope, a kind of longer term and deeper effect of people just becoming aware of the idea that we don't live in a country.
I think that...
Yeah, of course they're getting overexcited, right?
And I agree that I think it was a good thing that they did, that they were trolling that event, because they were using one of the few avenues that are still available to them.
In 2016, 2017, Richard was doing a college tour himself, and he was the guy on the stage.
And there's something psychologically about that that's much more powerful than being the heckler, as it were.
You know, even if you can kind of get these sort of brief moments of BTFO on a guy like Kirk.
And to Richard's point on JF, I think the guy was actually handling it in a very kind of like effective way on some level.
I mean, because ultimately the truth doesn't matter.
What matters is who holds the reins of power.
The guy can be on the stage and be morally dismissive of the people that are heckling him.
There is something effective about that.
It's not ineffective.
He's demonstrating that he has power over this group.
The other thing, too, is that they may move quickly to deplatform this avenue.
I don't know what's going to happen with it, but I think that they probably will try to limit it.
To Richard's earlier point, maybe they don't feel I think at one level, they actually like it.
And again, I'm not just trying to needlessly counter-signal them, but on one level, this offered Charlie Kirk an opportunity to...
I mean, I mentioned this before.
I mean, when I was in high school or college, I had never heard of the USS Liberty incident.
I had maybe read other things that these young kids should be reading, but I had never heard of some of these, you know, interesting kind of revisionist takes on history.
But Charlie Kirk had.
He had a pat-set answer for it.
He has a pat-set answer for criticism of Israel.
He has actually cogitated on America as an idea and Israel as an idea and a place.
He has thought through these things.
He has answers for them.
And he was able to demonstrate to his donors that he is on their side.
And so, again, on a bigger level, I don't think they want this kind of thing, because they don't want to perpetuate the notion that all conservatives are all secretly racist.
Charlie Kirk's on stage, but the crowd really expresses what conservatism is.
But on another level, it offered them the chance to differentiate themselves.
But I do think, generally speaking, that this—I don't think they're going to allow this to happen again, by whatever means necessary, maybe even cutting out all Q&As.
Yeah, yeah.
That or just, you know, like basically bringing in ringers to speak or to ask questions, right?
Just getting a group of people to ask questions, effectively.
I mean, there's a lot of ways that they can shut it down.
Gay, black, libertarian activists, too.
Yeah.
But, yeah, so, I mean, so, but, look, I think it was a worthy effort, and, you know, part of the problem, too, is I think a lot of the people that are the Nickers, effectively, are part of this, I think it's effectively, we can say it's a kind of Nick Fuentes-led movement, right?
So the Nickers, and just using that term more generally, too.
Yeah, to include others who are excited about it.
So I think they're getting overexcited, and I think that things in some ways are resembling 2016, except the problem is that the wiser people in the movement, as it were, I'm not trying to be like, again, I'm not trying to shit on those guys or whatever.
Certainly, I would love for them to have political success, honestly.
You know what I mean?
If it were possible, I would love for that to happen because despite our differences, they're much closer to me politically than anyone else out there, aside from kind of people on my side of the fence.
which is a very important thing I don't love that term.
I think it's a reference to Wiggers or something.
Yeah, so that's the only thing I was going to say.
You were interjecting, though, and I kind of lost my train of thought.
Sorry.
No, no, please.
You had something to say.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it should be mentioned, one thing, because we're actually going to talk about paleoconservatives a little bit later on in the broadcast.
But this bringing up of the culture war that Charlie Kirk has evoked, which is interesting in itself, you know, culture war, kulturkampf.
From the 19th century, there was actually a German nationalist antagonism against Catholics in education.
But anyway, it is most famous, certainly for Pat Buchanan's speech in 1992, where he boldly said that we will take back this country, but we will take it back block by block.
And that the police, who are girded by moral righteousness, will take back the streets.
I mean, it was tough stuff.
But that was the culture war as Pat defined it.
The culture war as Kirk defines it is really tough on, say, Israel, but is remarkable in the sense that it is...
The almost complete opposite of what Pat Buchanan was promoting.
The fact that you have a gay, married, black man talking with Charlie Kirk before a banner that says culture war, it just seems to raise the question, what culture war are you fighting?
What are you defending?
What are you taking back?
Who are you even in opposition to?
And so, again, in that sense, I am glad that we had some guys come out there who were with rosary beads and crucifixes and whatever, because they're certainly closer to Pat in their mentality.
But I think even a lot of that kind of stuff is naive.
They were trying to defend the Republican Party.
We need to bring this back to the conservative movement.
And it's like, listen, guys.
This is the conservative movement.
I mean, Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act.
They voted for the Hart-Celler Act.
Republicans did amnesty.
Republicans have never really been behind immigration restriction.
Republicans talk about abortion because they want to get religious right votes.
But Charlie Kirk has a better claim to the conservative movement than you do.
He has a better claim to Trump.
Trump retweets him.
Trump.
You know, Trump's sons hang out with Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk is conservatism, and he has a better claim to that MAGA hat than you do.
And so I do think that there was a certain naivete among these kind of Zoomer, trad-cath corpers.
To think that they're taking it back or something like that.
I mean, the whole idea is that we are going to present something that is a real alternative to the right.
The right is the problem.
And I don't really think that most of those people...
I question the degree to which they want to do that.
But again, these are my...
I don't want to stand in their way.
Go at them.
Go after Charlie Kirk.
I'm behind you.
Before we get kind of to the deeper question of why there has to be something like the alt-right, I do want to kind of get back to Mark's rejection of the Wignette term.
One thing, I don't know if you've ever said this on a live stream.
I know you've tweeted about this quite a bit.
But the interesting thing, and without putting a specific name on this group of people, those, maybe they're younger, maybe they're Catholics, maybe they're not, maybe they're Zoomers, maybe they're not, maybe they're Nickers, CK, just to be clear, or not.
But they all, whoever these people are, they all seem to agree that there are Wignettes, that either we are them or some people like us are them, and therefore we are bad.
Wignettes are bad.
Now, these guys, these folks are not going to, They're not going to be welcomed into the Republican Party.
They've seemed to have created this division between the Wignats and themselves.
So there's almost like they've partitioned themselves in this corner of the Internet or the political sphere in the real world.
I don't know how they're going to have any influence beyond that.
But this kind of concept of the Wignat.
Richard, you want to jump in quick?
Yeah.
I've never really liked identifying with Wignats.
I don't think I ever have.
And if I did, it was...
I don't actually think I ever have.
But yeah, it's this false dynamic created by neo-Nazis.
I mean, it's this weird thing.
I mean, I hate to revisit the whole optics debate because I'm sick of it.
And this is one of the reasons why I don't think I could ever really wholeheartedly get behind a kind of Nicker Nation thing, which is that Nick Fuentes was a...
You know, Ted Cruz anti-Trump guy and, like, young Republican Vunderkent in 2015.
And then he got red-pilled or something and then was pro-Trump when Trump got the nomination in 2016.
And then he was brought into the movement in 2017.
And his vibe...
From the very beginning, the alt-right is terrible.
White nationalism is evil.
We can criticize white nationalism another day.
And basically, I am the only one to be able to infiltrate the Republican Party or red pill the boomers or get the people behind me or something like that.
The alt-right only has 6-9% support, which I think is...
It was actually an amazing percentage as opposed to 50% or something who vote Republican.
It was these kinds of things.
It was basically quite toxic from the very beginning and also not self-aware.
I mean, the, the people who promote, continue to promote this stuff, um, are people like weave and Andrew Anglin who are neo-Nazis and have the worst conceivable optics.
I agree that most of the questioners kind of were pretty cool looking.
I mean, you know, some more than others, but, you know, there was certainly nothing bad going on.
But just this endless refrain of these, like...
Guys with swastikas or whatever who are out there doing something.
We don't really know where they are or who they are.
Just this endless Matt Heimbach avatar is in their head.
Who actually wasn't even that bad.
Wasn't exactly the cartoonish neo-Nazi buffoon that he was made out to be, but whatever.
Yeah, it's very toxic, and they've always presented themselves as we are the mainstream version of you.
So it's this intramural status signaling, as I've called it, where you're basically advertising to the alt-right that the alt-right is bad and that I'm pragmatic.
And so in 2018, there was this great promise of mainstreaming and infiltration in the GOP.
They'll just become the wallpaper and just enter the GOP.
The donor base is just going to give them the keys to the Lamborghini, and they're going to just drive it down Rodeo Drive, and the chicks are going to be hopping in the car, and boom.
It's as easy as that.
And the fact is, these American nationalists have, what they have really accomplished is that none of them will ever be allowed into a Republican or conservative movement gathering, ever.
They pre-announced that they were going to infiltrate the Republican Party and the Republican Party's immune system went into overdrive.
And in terms of just, like, you know, bad optics, I mean, you can talk about hail gate or whatever until the cows come home.
In terms of clips that are easily reproducible of them just saying stuff that is quite nasty or radically politically incorrect or vulgar or scatical.
I mean these are a legion and I don't if that doesn't really bother me I'm not gonna attack them for that they're younger whatever I don't care but other people do care and You're not gonna take over the GOP with this baggage.
You're just not and again the really good like a Like, American nationalist or paleo would be in the model of Pat Buchanan.
I think maybe it was Mark or Thamster mentioned this last week, in the sense of you have a right-wing guy who can't really be tarnished with, oh, he's a radical.
But he never countersignals.
The people to his right.
And he kind of draws energy and ideas from them and genuinely mainstreams them.
That is a successful model.
But a model of we have these guys who come into the alt-right and then say the alt-right is absolutely terrible.
Richard Spencer destroyed everything.
And I am pragmatic.
I mean, this is just intramural status signaling.
It is inherently toxic.
And the alt-right is at a much lower level than we used to be, and much more demoralized than we used to be.
It's not all their fault, by any stretch of the imagination, but they didn't help, let's just put it mildly.
And so, I just don't know.
I remember all this stuff, and so, you know, you do something that's pretty good, great.
You'll kind of get my...
A pat on the back for me, but do I think that these people are good men, or that they can lead us anywhere outside of trolling IRL, or that they have the ability to do something that people would really respect, that would really make an impact?
Absolutely not.
And I don't think that.
And I'm not going to pretend like I do.
And I'm not going to just decide that, oh, now we're all this happy movement.
We'll all be nice to each other.
You know?
I mean, like, the bridges were burned.
I have no desire to rebuild them.
I seriously doubt they do, either.
Maybe even less than I do.
So, it's just...
It's kind of over.
I think that...
An alt-right in the broadest sense does have to take place.
That is an independent movement that is forward-looking and that is radical in the best sense of the word and that's going to attract the best people.
That absolutely needs to take place.
Um, but I don't think it's going to ever arise with these types of people, um, in it.
And I certainly don't mean that to all the people who took part in the Q and a, but just in terms of the leadership, I know how they're going to act and it's not just personal.
Mark, can we get your objection to the Wignat label?
Yeah, happily.
Yeah, so I was never part of that.
That sort of predated Brahmin.
But I was never part of that discussion of this sort of division between the M-Nats and the Wig-Nats.
I kind of know, and Richard can correct me after I make this remark, but it seems like it sort of has an origin in...
I don't remember what college tour it was, but it was when...
Heimbach essentially showed up with his guys as kind of your de facto bodyguards.
They weren't my bodyguards, but yeah, in Michigan in 2018.
They showed up.
And much like Charlottesville, effectively a riot was allowed to take place.
And for about 15 minutes, there was chaos.
People were getting punched in the face.
It was utterly awful.
Antifa was acting in an unbelievably nasty way.
And, you know, look, I actually did a very good broadcast with Greg Conti and Don Camillo.
Maybe someone else was there right after that event, and right after the debacle with Matt Parrott and Heimbach, which I certainly don't want to revisit.
But look, you know...
Well, was that the origin of the optics war, was my question.
The optics war started nine months before that.
The optics war happened...
After Charlottesville, there was immediately a kind of in-gathering, and people were saying, like, we got screwed, our rights were denied, this was a shit show, and so on.
And then it went into this thought war where all women...
Women were being attacked.
Some somewhat accurate points were being made, but just this...
The intense level of female hatred was totally out of bounds.
And Nick was, of course, right on that bandwagon.
You know, great optics there.
And then that molded into the optics war, and it was this, we're going to infiltrate.
And then that eventuated into, we're going to infiltrate the Republican Party.
But by the time I spoke at Michigan, I would say that...
Most of all, I mean, again, I don't know who these people are now, because these people might have been red-pilled like a year ago or something, so this is irrelevant.
But yeah, the kind of Nicker Nation types and certainly Identity Europa types were like, oh, that's so cringe.
You shouldn't ever go and attack Trump.
You shouldn't ever go and go to a Richard Spencer cult meeting or all this just kind of language.
And basically, they don't want to support anything that's movement-based and that's independent.
Yeah.
We're going to wear trump hats, and we have great optics, and therefore we're so much more pragmatic.
And again, I found it totally tedious.
After Michigan, I noticed I had this barrage of tweets coming at me, of negative tweets, and about 5% of them were liberals who were like, you're terrible, you know, and whatever.
I've heard a lot of that from New York Times readers over the years.
But 95% of them were coming from the alt-right.
And that's when I kind of recognized that we had passed over Rubicon.
The degree of scapegoating, just hatred, some legitimate criticism thrown here and there, but general just hysteria was off the charts.
And, yeah, I mean, it was a weird thing.
And again, this is why I say I've seen all of these movies before.
I've seen PJW jump on the alt-right bandwagon, and now he's jumping on the dissident right or knicker nation bandwagon or griper bandwagon.
Like, I believe in free speech, and these guys are true conservatives against the globalists.
And then, you know, three months later, like, I never knew that they were racist and anti-Semitic.
That's terrible.
You know, I've seen that movie before.
And I've seen the, you know, the movement kind of rally around people and then scapegoat them and disintegrate.
I've seen all this before, and I just am not eager to relive it.
Right.
I don't think any of us are.
But having that optics kind of origin story, take it from there, Mark.
Yeah, alright, so it sounds like it may have originated as early as Charlottesville, because people had appeared in helmets, and they had...
Andrew Anglin and company, and Identity Europa, and then...
Wignats were everyone else.
And I was the worst of all.
I mean, Heimbach was like the poster boy of like, oh, it's so terrible.
But he kind of, I guess, lived up to the billing to a degree.
But I was also considered totally an outrageous wignat.
Yes.
Yeah, no, I mean, I just, etymologically, it's interesting to me, because it seems like, and I guess this wouldn't apply necessarily to Heimbaugh, though it probably would, it seems like, but it seems like the AMNAD is, so there's obviously in the name AMNAD, it's an emphasis on American sort of petty nationalism, as it were, whereas WIGNAT, so in other words, you have AMNAD, you have American petty nationalists, contrasted with...
Which is sort of how they've kind of broken it down psychologically in their mind.
But I typically have an almost kind of opposite association with the idea that if we were to become more of an international and indeed European movement...
That would be kind of showing more classes or would be showing a kind of higher status as it were.
So I just found it curious how this sort of this kind of etymological sort of construction appeared.
And I wonder if that like there is a kind of like at least subconscious reason for that from their perspective, because it seems like they're the inventors of these terms.
But the idea that American nationalists are more high class than people that.
Exactly, because they'll counter-signal the ethno-state and all these kinds of things all the time.
I think even Patrick Casey is questioning race.
It's a weird thing.
I saw something where he was doing something on Twitter, but I don't care about him, whatever.
But yeah, it's a kind of aspirational bourgeois thing where it's like we want to be these middle-class Americans who wave flags.
And it's a weird thing to aspire to, to be honest.
But we could talk about the etymology of the word, but at the end of the day, it just seems kind of like, again, they're just liberals.
These are just liberal kind of middle-of-the-road Americans, not distinguished politically or philosophically or culturally in any way from the people they claim to oppose.
And even the term Wignet, I can literally think of maybe one person.
Who's publicly facing that could reasonably be described that way, but it's just a slur.
It's just a slur as a way to kind of create an artificial division to ascribe moral kind of, I don't know, turpitude or something to ideas and people that near as far as I can tell who have been more successful, whether it's in this particular endeavor or...
Beyond the political or kind of cultural realm, and just to create this distinction to their own benefit.
And I think that's been disastrous.
And no one outside makes these distinctions.
I mean, we've said these before.
I mean, the reporting on this...
I think there have been some reports of like, oh, the white nationalists are trying to rebrand through the optics or whatever.
Basically, liberals are smart and they see through this.
You're not going to trick them.
They know it's the same people who were alt-right, shitlord, Hitler, Pepes in the summer of 2016, and now they're American flag-waving conservatives.
No, they literally study this movement.
I mean, they have academics that study it.
It's the subject of PhD thesis programs.
They make television programs, documentaries.
We are like a weird amoeba in a Petri dish, and they're just constantly, okay, another slide, okay, we've got another slide.
They have this huge catalog.
You can't fool these people.
The American left, no matter what version we're talking about, are infinitely smarter than practically every individual or group within the American right.
They're many times smarter, more sophisticated.
They've been doing this for decades.
Twice as long as I've been on this planet, they've been at this.
Not to regurgitate what you're saying, Richard, but you can't fool these people.
Right.
And so they don't make these distinctions.
So the Gripers are the alt-right.
They are white nationalists.
They are white supremacists.
They are etc.
You're going to get it no matter what you do.
And I don't know if you're going to trick a boomer here and there to send you $100 or something.
I mean, maybe, but I don't know.
The boomer is probably giving that $100 to his church or to Charlie Kirk.
He's not giving it, like, you're going into this weird lane.
So, again, I never took part in the optics debate.
I was kind of baffled by it, and then I recognized later on how powerful it actually was.
But, no, I mean, obviously, I think we should be...
I think we should always look good.
I mean, this is, again, one of the knocks against me, actually, was I'm, you know, Bateman-like level of narcissism, you know, whatever, which is probably accurate.
Yeah, I obviously think we should look good and we should have the best people.
I mean, you know, on a superficial level, it's like, yeah, I agree, obviously.
But I think what it was on a deeper level and also on a psychological level and maybe even on a class level, to be frank, it was this attempt by the Groypers to have their movement.
And their movement is going to be about them.
And it's going to reflect them.
And Nick really does reflect them in a much better way, certainly than I or anyone else.
So here we are.
This is the kind of decentralized, democratized alt-right.
Joining the conversation as well, we haven't heard from you yet, Tyler Hamilton returning again.
We haven't heard from you yet.
I guess...
I still want to hear Richard's argument about this.
Why there needs to be a distance thing.
Completely ridiculous.
I mean, for God's sake, man.
Optics are really bad.
The pipe is back.
We've got a vintage-inspired blazer going on.
I mean, this is just...
Yeah.
I mean...
We're not hearing you, Tyler.
Okay, we're not hearing you.
I think it's stranger when people see me not smoking something.
That's generally what people that know me say.
If I don't have a cigar or a pipe, then there's something wrong.
I actually own an Ascot.
I will wear that for next week's episode.
Just one-up you.
Is it going to be a war now?
Yes, this means war.
And I will win.
This is the new split.
Don't go to war with Ascot.
Don't go to war with me on being pretentious.
You will lose.
This is just going to escalate.
Every episode is going to be more ostentatious than the last.
What were your impressions on the Groyp Fest?
I guess I could tie this into the talk you guys were about with the whole optics wars because during that time I earned the title Wignette 2. Because at the time, the criticism I was making of the Amnets was basically that they kind of reminded me of Arthur Mohler when he talks about the reactionaries in Germany's Third Empire.
He describes them basically as these people that were trying to freeze a moment in the past as saying, you know, this is who we are, this exact structure is what we need to return to.
And that, you know, the kind of revolution going on in Germany was an aberration, right?
And so they reminded me largely of this, in the sense that they were looking back at a kind of mythical depiction of America, where it's this, you know, the American flag and conservative family values that, you know, it was somehow corrupted by something external to it.
My argument against that was always that, you know, the primal sense of Americanism was always founded on this kind of classical liberal notion of liberty and freedom, and that at some point...
That led to where we are now, and that you can't redeem that in the sense that we need to be thinking post-American.
And so that was the critique I was making of them.
And then, you know, I earned the title Wignett.
That's what I've been telling them for a long time as well.
They don't want to hear that.
Yeah, and then this Q&A brought it out perfectly.
And, you know, if I was, if, you know, Kirk was here, I probably would have went to the Q&A and had some fun too.
But what striked me is that they were framing it in this way, like, Hey, Charlie, how is what you're talking about going to help us in the culture war?
As if Charlie is in the same culture war, right?
They're just insufficiently engaged in it.
They're not conservative enough, but rather they're perfectly American conservative.
They're embodying its values.
That's what it is.
It's all about liberty and individual choice, and that's what they're trying to push.
It's completely concomitant with their message.
And so I was watching this, and then so you have this kind of mythical view of America in a way that's almost worse than Buchanan and the original paleocons had, because there's this added element of Catholicism to it.
So while Buchanan and them, you read them now, they're very much just lamenting over the end of America.
They don't have that much to say to us.
While these guys, they're adding Catholicism and all this, and culture war, this kind of stuff that seems rather anachronistic.
When you look at American history, it's not something that was ever really big in America.
It's a Protestant country.
So that was my critique of that.
And the other side about this optics thing I want to bring up is that during the so-called optics war, the other thing happening at the time was the James Field trial.
You know, tweeting at Casey and them saying, you know, why haven't you said anything about this?
You know, you run this big organization and you're not saying anything about it.
And we want them to acknowledge the fact that someone, you know, in the alt-right, the state cracked down on them.
They're getting all these charges on them.
And so you run this organization and you have all these voices at your disposal.
You should be able to say at least something.
And the response I got, including from some other...
You know, big name people, quote unquote, was accusing me of being a Fed.
And the kind of way they're presenting it to me anyways was that, you know, if we just blend in, if we fit in with respectable American conservatism, then people will go along with us.
The state won't target us.
You know, we'll represent the average GOP voter.
And there was this kind of attempt at doing politics risk-free.
And so the kind of working-class representatives, there's a strong classist element in their rhetoric as well.
That was like, we need to ignore these guys.
We can't focus on them.
They're bad for us.
They're bad for the movement.
And to me, that was thoroughly disgusting.
In the optics debate, that earned me the title Wignat, which now you look at what Wignat means now, that's certainly not what I am either.
That was what the Updix debate was about.
It was about this kind of attempt at, you know, being respectable American conservatives and taking over the GOP, whether or not that be the party itself, or at least, you know, the kind of representational content for it, for the average GOP.
I mean, two things.
You're not, I mean, taking over the GOP, I mean, for God's sake.
That is a 30-year endeavor, and I doubt it would ever work.
If the donors ever learned of this, they would simply pull their money and do something else.
I mean, it's basically a kind of another term, I don't know if I invented it, lumpenbourgeoisie, which I think kind of describes a lot of those people, kind of aspiration to work in Conservatism, Inc.
Or, you know, be a cog in the system or something.
But, yeah, you're not going to take that over.
Again, you can't just assume that it's either a neutral platform or everyone there is a complete idiot.
That is absolutely wrong.
And then the other irony was that they made it virtually impossible to infiltrate the GOP by announcing that they were going to do it.
And that will happen again after this griper fest at the culture war activity, is that anyone who is mildly associated with these groups, and again, they've been infiltrated in docks by the other side, is going to be expelled from the GOP almost immediately.
It has an immune system.
They will locate, target, and purge.
One of the telling moments in the Culture War Q&A, it made it to a clip.
I believe the gentleman's name is Rob Smith.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The black conservative is.
And that was the most telling moment about the whole exchange, was basically the gentleman representing the power structure saying, what you think conservatism is...
It is not conservatism, and we determine what conservatism is.
So you said it, but I think both people here have said it.
It's a tremendous naivete, a misunderstanding of how power works in this dynamic, that you as the lowly peasant, the peon, you can wave your rosary beads, and I don't mean that in a kind of demeaning way, as much as you want, But it's kind of an impotent display that is not going to have any significant political power.
Conservatism is a homosexual man doing a split next to Donald Trump Jr.
It is a man in a blonde wig pretending to be Lady Gaga.
It is eventually going to be post-birth abortions.
This is – and in two years it will be – That's your satanic LGBT girlfriend talking.
We know that's where it's from, Richard.
But in two years, it will be 18-month-old trans babies.
I mean, that's what conservatism is.
It doesn't matter what the audience says.
Right.
But here's what I find interesting.
So I want to take even a further step back and kind of maybe try to get us to rethink some of our assumptions as well.
There's always been a kind of alt-right with the conservative movement and the GOP, even if it never went under that name until very recently.
So when the conservatism began in the 1950s, and this will bleed into our paleo discussion when it comes next, they were attempting to kind of wrestle in And
it was an attempt to kind of wrestle them in.
And get everyone on the same plantation.
And in that plantation was a Cold War America that was going to globally confront the Soviet Union.
And the conservatives did it in a kind of more outlandish way than most liberals who almost seem sensible by comparison.
It was rolling back the Soviet Union better dead than red and all sorts of overheated rhetoric like that.
But forever with the conservative movement, there's been a kind of alt-right in the sense of from the 50s on, there was a John Birch alt-right, which was super hardcore on gun rights, super hardcore on kind of sovereign individualism and decentralization, anti-government kind of stuff.
And then, by the 1980s, you had this other kind of new alt-right, which was integrated into the GOP, which was the religious right.
And so this was post-segregationist South, who decided one day they woke up one morning and that they opposed abortion, despite the fact that their churches actually supported the Roe v.
Wade decision when the rubber hit the road.
And when was it?
1973.
And so they were able to integrate those energies.
So you had all these people who wanted a Christian America, school prayer, anti-abortion crusade, etc.
They were able to integrate them, and they kind of needed some of that energy.
They needed the kind of Randian energy, even though Rand was attacked in National Review.
And in 2016, there was a new alt-right that came on the scene, and that was the alt-right.
And so it was younger.
It was Internet-based.
It was edgy.
It had dispensed, actually, with a lot of the earlier culture war ideas and was pro-Trump.
We don't really care about anything else.
It's about immigration, nationalism, crushing the SJWs, etc.
And the GOP needed that, and they benefited from it.
determined by demographics or get out the vote.
They are also determined by intensity.
And whether you think that you are going out and changing the world or whether you intensely hate the other party, that is what really wins.
Donald Trump's election was miraculous.
I don't think it would have happened if there wasn't this upsurge in intensity that the alt-right brought.
And the fact that we were, quote, racist just added to it.
This made it edgy and taboo and powerful.
And so they needed that.
Bannon recognized this.
Bannon, as we learned today in an interesting article, was explicitly targeting incels in Michigan and Pennsylvania in order to get them to vote for Donald Trump.
Bannon identified with the alt-right, as he clearly stated in emails that were leaked in the Milo leak back in 2017.
They wanted that thing.
But after the deed was done, Donald Trump was elected, they wanted to dispense with it because it was too hot.
And the alt-right was gaining independence.
And I was the icon and I'm not going to buy into their shit.
And I'm not going to be controlled by them.
I think they need another alt-right.
And I think that the smarter ones will try to create one.
Now, there's a civil war going on because you have lots of people who are coming out super hard against Nick Fuentes and Groypers and whatever, like Sebastian Gorka and etc.
But I think that social media summit that we saw a few months ago...
Probably six months ago now, in which a lot of people who had not been banned from social media, but were kind of reliably MAGA, but also retarded.
Maybe those two things aren't too unusual to be placed side by side.
But a kind of retarded yet edgy MAGA, reliably Republican.
That is the indispensable fact.
Reliably MAGA.
So you had all these, you know, Diamond and Silk, you know, all these characters, Ali, Akbar, whatever, who's defending Nick Fuentes, by the way.
And I think they want to construct a neo-alt-right, or at the very least, allow it to arise and not bash it or try to destroy it until after the 2020 election.
And Nick Fuentes works as the icon of that, of such a movement.
He is taboo and, you know, too edgy, but then very much unlike me, very much unlike other people, certainly on this podcast and others we can name is a look, he's reliably Republican.
The guy is going to be in the tank for Trump.
All those people, all I mean, prove me wrong, guys.
I don't think you will.
I do think that there will be a kind of alt-right in 2020.
I think Nick, unless something strange happens with him, I think he will be a kind of icon for it.
And it will be an edgy, racist, alt-right movement that is going to vote for Trump no matter what and will tell us all these horror stories about what's going to happen if Bernie or Biden or Elizabeth Warren is elected.
And the Republican Party at some point needs that energy.
They need that dark power to call upon, much like, I don't know, the empire needed to call upon the dark side of the force and so on.
They kind of need that in order to be intense, and I think they actually might lose without it.
But needless to say, as you can tell by the way I'm describing this, I really don't want to have to be a part of that.
2016 was an amazing time.
There's so much potentiality with Trump.
But we've seen it.
And I don't want to waste our serious ideas and also the desperate need for us to gain funding and build real institutions on yet another Republican campaign where the real winners will be Charlie Kirk if Trump wins.
And I think he could win, by the way, but the real winner is going to be Kirk and those guys.
Those guys holding rosary beads and talking about the dangers.
They're not going to triumph if Trump wins.
They're going to be doing that again in another four years, you know, hectoring Nikki Haley or whomever's next, or Ivanka or whatever.
You know, one thing that I wanted to remark on sort of the Groeper movement in general is a kind of...
What is it?
Groeper?
Sorry, that was a boomer move.
You're slandering these people.
Groeper, right?
Yes.
I have no idea what that word means.
Yeah, what is the etymology of that word?
It'd be interesting to find out.
It's some sort of frog.
I don't know the etymology, but I've seen a lot of great birds in my time.
Yeah, I've seen the frog.
And I know it's kind of a continuation of the Pepe, like a non-trademark version of Pepe, effectively, right?
In any case, this movement, what is noticeable about it?
And again, I mean, I think all of this has to be qualified by, I don't know that our perception is 100% accurate, because the people that are making the most comments, that are kind of the most active on social media, you know, how much of that are the people that share our ideas or that might tune into this podcast and listen to this podcast?
I don't know.
I think that there's probably a large number of lurkers or people who are just kind of engaged in different ways through different forms of activism or not engaged in activism that are just not loud voices on social media.
So there's a kind of, like, funhouse mirror effect that happens, and we don't really exactly know what the alt-right is.
But, I mean, our perception is reality to some extent or another, so we'll go with that, right?
What happens with the alt-right is there's a kind of group psychology, right?
So if the alt-right's depressed, everyone in the alt-right is depressed, right?
There's a kind of group psychology.
And I think that there is something that people that want to be serious in this movement have to consider.
And this is, I think that there's a kind of a sort of cyclical emotionality in the alt-right that's almost sort of bipolar, as it were, right?
Where these kids get really fucking excited about this kind of small victory, as it were.
Honestly, again, I'm not criticizing what people were doing.
I think it was great that they were doing that, and hopefully they'll have more success.
I don't hope that they're used, which I fear that they will be used, to basically elect Trump again, or try to elect Trump again.
But there is a kind of bipolar nature.
I think that what this movement will ultimately require is people who are kind of unchanging, effectively, in their mentality, that are not people prone to getting depressed and not people prone to getting overexcited about things that are not necessarily important victories.
So I think that those are sort of going to be the people that carry this movement forward.
Whereas everyone else is kind of on this sort of bipolar cycle.
And again, who knows what percentage of the people kind of fit that description.
But that is sort of the kind of tenor tone that you take from the alt-right, as it were.
That people get very despondent when things don't go their way.
And they get very excited when these kind of little miracles or these little victories occur.
And I think both tendencies are bad.
I think that we more or less have to kind of be steadfast and have essentially the same kind of like Terminator mentality through it all, right?
A kind of stoicism, as it were.
And just things should not get us down.
They shouldn't.
So in other words...
It's the false community of these forums or wherever they are, Telegram or...
Slack or whatever they're on, or Discord, where we don't have IRL community with people.
We have community that's not based on location, but that's based on interest.
And so they create these families, as it were, that they take deadly seriously on these forums.
And they do transfer their emotions back and forth.
And they do get all on the same page about things.
And they get very mad when you're not on their page.
That's what I've also noticed.
Yeah, no, I think we've all noticed that as well.
But I guess the final point that I would make is that, so before the red pill, I think that we all, to some extent, before the red pill, and I think everyone listening to this broadcast knows what I'm talking about.
So before we all became red-pilled, as it were, we had all become sort of accustomed to a mainstream culture, watching the films and not really being...
You know, made depressed by seeing like these really degenerate films or whatever, which after the red pill, we would become later sort of depressed by the culture, right?
After the red pill, we'd be like, what the fuck?
This whole thing is degenerate.
Once the kind of scales fell from our eyes, as it were.
But I think now we have to sort of become accustomed to this new reality.
And I think that that's something that hasn't happened yet.
So in other words, we have to kind of find our happiness with all the knowledge that we have now.
Right?
Or happiness, or sadness, but not to be in this kind of bipolar, emotionalized state, but to be in a kind of effective, stoic state that's kind of logically figuring out problems and figuring out a path forward.
I guess that's the only thing I would say.
Well, I mean, I think that joy comes from, again, at the risk of sounding like, you know, Richard's, like, sock puppet or something, that joy is going to come from viewing your life.
and the larger goals of your life in a post-American context.
If you're looking at the day-to-day or even five-year, 10-year plan of your life, I think we're good to go.
In that other world and make plans to realize that other world.
Otherwise, yeah, the new Terminator movie is going to make you want to put one to your head.
Jesus' kingdom is going to make you want to do a big splat on the hideaway.
I don't know how you can get out of the bipolar cycle, as Mark is calling it, without getting completely out of the frame that we are in now.
I listened to Jesus is King today, by the way.
Did you really?
Yes.
We might want to do a whole segment on this.
Maybe not.
It's fascinating.
You can't pay me.
You can't pay me to do it.
If this show made money, you couldn't pay me to do it.
Well, if I heard Richard right before, and then maybe we can kind of move things along.
The idea that there always was some kind of alt-right within the...
American right-wing political sphere.
If they're trying to architect an alt-right that they can control, I mean, if they're trying to create the Jungian shadow of Leslie Graham, it's not going to work.
It's going to be a complete failure.
It's going to be totally ineffectual.
It's not going to be able to engender the kind of enthusiasm.
It's not going to have the creativity.
It's not going to be able to create any of the things that spontaneously emerge from genuine darkness, for lack of a better way of putting it.
I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, Tyler?
Yeah, there's something I want to add.
You know, I think a lot of this is very much as what you guys were saying, a reflection of the kind of pop culture mentality where, you know, the young, they kind of see the state that we're in as an eternal present.
There's a lack of history and a lack of imagination.
So when I mean history, like we look at the history of the dissonant movement.
All the way back to the 70s, 80s, 90s, is you see a lot of these same things that are being heralded by this kind of new generation as new, exciting things, like this kind of new revival of paleoconservatism.
This has all already been played out.
You look at, say, Buchanan's culture war speech, and I'm not American, so I might be wrong, but I think it was in support of George Bush Sr. after Buchanan lost, right?
And so you see these kind of things repeating themselves over and over again.
It's the same thing with the other side, is the Wignett contemporary mentality, where it's very much a revival of the'80s cell structures and things like that.
And so there's a lack of understanding that these ideas are not new.
They're very much a repeat of what we've already been through before.
I think the other side of that, too, is that these things move.
Like, pop culture trends, and so they jump on to every new hope that comes, not knowing that it's already been there many times.
And that's because there's a strong lack of imagination.
There's no sense of what Zizek would call learning to dream a bit dangerously, in the sense that we can't be tied to all these hopes that have already existed before, and we have to learn to kind of imagine a post-America, and imagine what we would like to build.
And in a sense, people might say that sounds wishy-washy, but the fact is we don't know where we are moving or how these kind of networks of power are going to change.
And so we have to start learning to take the reins because as these situations start to change, it's going to demand new responses.
We can't be backwards looking, nor can we be deterministic.
and we need to be imaginative about where we're going in the future.
You know, Curtis Yarvin, I don't remember what publication he wrote this essay for, but a quote that's made as Mencius Moldbug, for anyone who doesn't know his real name, his birth name.
There's an excerpt from the essay that he wrote, I'm paraphrasing quite a bit.
Every political break was preceded by an aesthetic break.
Paleoconservatism is not going to produce – I'm teeing you up here for the next big topic here, Richard.
conservatism is not going to produce a new aesthetic break.
There's no revisionism of the American conservative mind that will produce a new aesthetic and therefore a new political break.
And I think even hesitate to bring his name up.
Fuentes was on Infowars Saints earlier today.
I'm a paleoconservative, and if that's what we're trying to return to, there's not going to be a future.
But yeah, go ahead, Richard.
Yeah, no.
Okay, so let's move on to the Paleos.
And do you want me to just set the lay of the land?
Yeah, I am actually...
I was a little bit shocked that people would revive the paleo term.
It was a term that had much more resonance in the 90s and early 2000s.
And even groups that I was involved with, like the Mencken Club, which I helped found in 2007, I believe.
We were already trying to move beyond the paleos.
I actually published an article when I was editing Taki's magazine called An Epitaph for the Paleo, or Epigraph, I guess, for the Paleos, written by Paul Gottfried, who more or less coined the term, or at the very least owned the term.
And yeah, I find it rather shocking that people would adopt this term.
And I wonder how much of the history they know, if any, really, or whether that term is just simply floating around and they want to jump on it, but that it.
It does have a history.
It's a rather recent one.
During the Reagan era, there was an episode that I guess everyone can Google and read up on, the Mel Bradford episode, where this Southern historian, who was really a kind of...
patronizing Christian conservative towards African Americans, whom he considered his Christian brothers and so on.
I think he was going to be part of the Department of Education or something like this.
He was going to be in a major department.
He might have been a figurehead, wouldn't have changed anything, but it was symbolic nevertheless.
And he was viciously attacked by the then-rising neoconservatives.
And that became a kind of...
I don't know.
What's the best way of thinking?
He became the...
What is that song from the National Socialist, their famous fight song that was named after someone who died in one of their rallies?
Yeah, okay.
Come on, guys.
Help me out here.
I'm getting old, so I forget these things.
But anyway, he became a kind of martyr for the movement.
And then after the Cold War, there were some major shifts.
The neoconservatives were rising.
And there was this major question after the fall of the Soviet Union of what now?
And Pat Buchanan wrote an article in The National Interest that was a response to Fukuyama.
That was basically come home America, that we won the Cold War.
Buchanan was at the time a free trade advocate and Cold War interventionist, maybe of a more sensible variety than others, but certainly won nevertheless.
He was a rising star as a columnist, worked in the Nixon administration.
Nixon, of course, was the moderate.
He's from California.
But he was almost like the Rockefeller Northeast seaboard wing of the GOP.
And Buchanan worked for him.
And Buchanan made a major turn.
And some of the implications of that were the culture war speech in 1992, after he had run an ultimately unsuccessful, but pretty amazing when you think about it, insurgent campaign.
This writer, this man known mostly for being the right-wing commentator of the McLaughlin group, who ran for president.
So, much like Trump, some of these dissident intellectuals...
Felt like they had a horse in the race with Buchanan, even though Buchanan obviously was not successful to the degree that Trump was.
And there was this interesting alignment in the 90s that was taking place at these Rockford Institute.
They're called the John Randolph Club meetings, and presumably they're still taking place.
I don't pay attention to Chronicles.
I'm not sure if anyone does.
But there's a monthly journal called Chronicles that used to be edited by Thomas Fleming, who's a curmudgeon's curmudgeon, one of the most...
Unbearable human beings alive, but certainly someone who was extremely literate.
And I believe studied classics and did other things.
And there was these John Randolph Club meetings where you would have the meetings of some really great minds.
Murray Rothbard, very famous, a man I certainly admire, radical Jewish intellectual, radical libertarian, someone who wrote very kind things about David Duke and so on, Sam Francis, monumental intellectual, etc.
They were giving these big speeches at Randolph Club meetings.
Murray Rothbard talked about, we're not going to turn back the clock, we're going to break it.
And those speeches are actually still fun reads, and I'm sure the audio is out there as well.
And they all came together, and they were much like the alt-right.
They were united around Buchanan as their guy, who was at that point anti-free trade that appealed to Sam Francis, who was becoming a kind of national socialist, lowercase n, lowercase s.
But the anti-interventionism and just...
Wrecking ball to the state that he represented appealed to the libertarians.
Lou Rockwell, Murray Rothbard, and company were all joining together.
And they had their moment.
By the 2000s, and there were also some other elements in there.
Sam Francis was, you know, he spoke at American Renaissance conferences.
He was clearly willing to go there in terms of the racial question and in terms of the Jewish question.
So was Murray Rothbard, by the way.
And Tom Fleming was to a degree.
But post Buchanan and into the 2000s, they became a kind of Roman Catholic outfit.
And they became older and more curmudgeonly and, you know, I would say pretty unbearable, to be honest.
I remember when I was, because I'm older than, you know, everyone else here, except for Mark, who's much older than I am.
But I remember in those days when I...
I hated the Bush administration.
This is the 2000s, the W. Bush administration.
I hated the Bush administration.
I hated the Iraq War.
I hated the religious right.
All of it.
I just thought it was all nuts and damaging and so on.
And I would read Chronicles as a kind of, wow, this is a sane voice.
These people are anti-war.
Yet, they're clearly not shrill leftists.
And that was the first time I discovered, I read Sam Francis' columns.
And so on the American Conservative magazine, which, again, kind of used to be more relevant than it is now, was also part of that.
So there was an interesting moment in time.
But that moment is over.
And it was a kind of, I think Paul Godfrey described it as a hastily assembled...
You know, reaction to neoconservative ascendancy.
I believe he used those exact words and that is a concise description of what it was.
There were a few too many moving parts going in different directions for it to ever cohere as a movement.
I think you could say much the same thing about the alt-right.
But, you know, there it is.
And it doesn't really seem relevant.
I think if it's remembered...
At all now, it is that kind of mere reaction that we were talking about and that Molbug was getting at with the statement you mentioned.
But it was a sense of the—there was, you know, Pat Buchanan's Catholic neighborhood in D.C. in the 50s, that Thomas Flemings, you know, imagined childhood or so on.
there was this attempt to go back and freeze time at some moment when a America was white.
America was at war at that time.
And all of that neoconservative stuff was absolutely at play.
You should remember that.
But it was a better time.
People were upright and decent.
And everyone was Christian.
The family had not been broken down.
And they wanted to go back to that point and freeze it.
As laudable as that was, Sam Francis was correct to recognize them as beautiful losers.
They offer a dream vision, a half-remembered dream of what might have been and maybe could be once again.
But they're ultimately losers at some level.
It's a kind of nostalgia as politics.
As you can tell by the way I'm describing them, I feel like it's a moment that's passed, and therefore I'm not really hostile towards them.
I brought up the better parts of that movement, and I look back upon them as, look, putting together Gottfried, Sam Francis, Thomas Fleming, I mean, the guy, if you think Nick Fuentes hates me or is toxic, wait until you meet Thomas Fleming.
But anyway, you know, Thomas Fleming, Rothbard, all these people in the same room.
I mean, it was impressive.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe was involved.
I mean, who's a major thinker, deep guy.
So it was an impressive assembly of people, and it should be admired.
Do any of these people who call themselves paleos...
I don't know.
Are they reaching for a term so that they won't be called racist?
Yes.
Despite their lack of literacy, do they still fall into the same fundamental problem of Chronicles magazine, which is a Politics as nostalgia or nostalgia as politics.
An attempt to have an almost snow globe of America that you could put up near your bed and look at at night and look at the beauty of it all, the quaintness of it all.
Yes, they fall into the same trap.
We're not going to bring back these things.
The 1950s was, in many ways, a very bad time for us.
It was a stultifying, suffocating time of network television domination and a big four or five newspaper domination of our thought process.
We are better off in many ways than we were that time.
Some amazing, redeemable qualities to it that we could look back upon with nostalgia, absolutely as well.
But it was a passing moment in American post-war history, and it simply cannot be revived.
And to make that one's politics, I think, is a kind of bad type of utopianism.
It's not a utopism that's ever questing and ever forward looking.
It's an attempt to return to a half-forgotten dream.
So anyway, that's my little mini history of the paleos.
But it is rather crazy that we have these people.
I don't know what the actual paleos, most of whom are still alive, actually think about.
You know, Nick Fuentes or Faith Goldie of all people saying they're paleo conservatives.
It's a rather odd thing, but there it is.
I'll turn it over to Tyler, because he's looking very ponderously into the camera.
But before we do...
I think of kind of the 1950s as the prototype of America moving forward.
You know, the Korean War was the first Vietnam War.
It was the first Iraq War.
It was the first unwinnable war.
Everything that's bad about America...
Right, yeah.
Everything is wrong with America today.
I mean, obviously the roots are deeper than the 1950s, but to me, that's like the crystal moment.
It's all rolled out one.
You have kind of like fake and gay Christianity, media saturation, narcissism culture moving in, the military-industrial complex establishing itself.
People want to go back to...
The very first fuck-up that we made, it's just like, sorry for the language.
We got overwhelmed by the counter-cultural revolution in the 1960s, which you could not resist that at all.
Not even close.
And yeah, so I mean, it's beautiful losing.
Tyler, I mean, what do you think on the paleocon question?
I mean, are these people as Richard describes them?
Well, actually, I guess I think it was Thomas Fleming that said this, just because he was brought up.
But he said when he was talking about the 60s that it was largely, in its own form, kind of a reactionary conservative return in the sense that they wanted the kind of frontier life that, you know, they're represented in their style of clothing, this very old style, the return of folk music, Appalachian folk music.
And the Conservatives failed to seize on that because they were wrapped up in this military-industrial complex and all the wealth that they garnered from the war.
And that's what kind of conditioned them to have this kind of, you know...
That's a very dialectical point.
And as much as I hate Thomas Fleming as a human being, I can only tip my cap at that level of thinking.
That's the right way to think about these things, as opposed to like, oh, fuck the liberals!
You know, to understand, what were they actually getting at?
There was a kind of primitive Christianity to the hippie movement as well, which Thomas Fleming should like.
And there was that kind of rural primitivism.
Yeah, I mean, in many ways, the 50s, I guess, you know, Josh was mentioning Christianity in the 50s.
There's this kind of identification in American Christianity with the state and the principalities and powers.
Because when you read the New Testament, when they're talking about the principalities and powers, they're talking about state power, right?
So when you read, for example, like, the idea there is that Christ declares his lordship over the principalities and powers.
Like, you read...
Passages like, you know, yield unto Caesar what is Caesar's, yield unto gods what is God's.
It's often taken the wrong way, as in Christians are supposed to be subservient to the state.
In actuality, because Caesar demanded your obedience and your body and your worship, the point was, if you give to God what's God's, then you have nothing left for Caesar.
Like, early Christianity, before becoming the state religion, was largely a pacifistic cult that was opposed to the Roman Empire, right?
And so they kind of adopted Christianity in this very idolistic sense.
Idols.
And so, yeah.
But the other thing I would say, because you guys summarized my feelings on it already, but I will say, at least in Faith Goldie's case, I read this Canadian paleo-con thing, and I really chuckled at that, because it's...
The strangest thing to put in a Canadian context, I mean, Canada's not a republic.
It's a constitutional monarchy.
If you wanted to go back to an older conservatism in Canada, you would be a Tory, like a high Tory or like a George Grant-style red Tory, right?
you wouldn't be a paleocon.
So it seems to me very much this kind of way of rebranding yourself to avoid the term racist.
Or you could say, OK, well, I'm not all right.
You know, these mean guys are we're just paleocons.
But in a Canadian context, that makes absolutely no sense at all.
So it's just like taking this term as a way to avoid being lumped in with people that you think are, I guess we could say, bad optics.
That is a good articulation or expression of just how If you want to say right-wing politics has been so thoroughly demoralized that there's just this constant attempt to rebrand, reconceptualize, find some magic word, some magic symbol that will allow you to act willfully in the world when really it should just be this, not to be crude, but just kind of balls out, very brash.
very courageous attitude and forget the semantics, forget the language game, forget the symbol game.
I mean, there are ideas here, there is energy here, and there's a lot of pussyfooting around.
At least that's how I see it.
But I would say...
I obviously agree with that.
I would add that this needs to be a forward-looking, dynamic movement.
And a lot of this kind of nostalgia stuff, we've just got to get over it.
And I don't think it's helpful.
And I think the kind of, you know, this is America, you know, the land of Tight-knit communities and Christianity and all this kind of stuff.
This is just kind of the wrong conception.
America is the font of Globo Homo.
I mean, Globo Homo probably would not exist if it weren't for this country.
And you can blame all that on Washington or Hollywood if you want, but that's not even really being...
True to ourselves, and it's not based on a proper understanding of what this country is.
So it's just that whole nostalgia stuff, it's got to go.
I do think it's a veil over our eyes that doesn't allow us to see the world and doesn't allow us to imagine a future.
Very well said.
That will do it for this week's edition of the McSpenser Group.
Enjoy your Halloween!
Have a wonderful week.
And once again, from the panel to you, Tyler, Mark, Richard, thank you.
