The eyes of the nation are once again on Virginia. The Old Dominion recently elected a Democratic legislature, and it swiftly enacted gun-control measures. Conservatives are up-in-arms and taking to the streets for a major rally. A state of emergency has been already called. Suspected Neo-Nazi have been pre-arrested. And Antifa will be out in force—but this time on our side!? Some fear another Charlottesville. Some suspect dirty tricks. Some say it’s the day the Boomers have always warned about. The panel looks back at what really happened in Charlottesville in 2017, and examines the place of the Gun in American identity, as well as the problems of Constitutional Conservatism. 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
It's Sunday, January 19th, and welcome back to the McSpencer Group.
Joining me today are Edward Dutton and Tyler Hamilton.
Issue 1, Gun Nuts.
The eyes of the nation are once again on Virginia.
The Old Dominion recently elected a democratic legislature, and it swiftly enacted gun control measures.
Conservatives are up in arms and taking to the streets for a major rally.
A state of emergency has already been called.
Suspected neo-Nazis have been pre-arrested, and Antifa will be out in force.
But this time on our side?
Some fear another Charlottesville.
Some suspect dirty tricks.
Some say it's the day the boomers have always warned about.
The panel looks back at what really happened in Charlottesville in 2017, and examines the place of the gun in American identity, as well as the problems of constitutional conservatism.
All right, everyone.
Welcome back.
Ed and Tyler for another edition of the McSpencer Group.
A major happening is happening in Richmond, Virginia tomorrow, and I think it's important for us to get our thoughts out there beforehand.
After the Democrats have taken over the legislature in Richmond, their first priority was gun control legislation.
It is not quite a gun grab or a gun buyback, but there are some important measures that are being put forth, limiting gun purchases to one per month, which I guess is intolerable for many Americans.
And background checks, there was actually one move to ban indoor gun ranges, which seemed...
Targeted at this major indoor gun range owned by the NRA in Northern Virginia.
I've actually been to that gun range.
It's interesting.
It's in an office building.
It's in the basement of an office building.
And it's quite popular and has become famous.
But the gun activist movement is responding with a major rally on Monday.
And this is, you know, there are plenty of conservative rallies that occur every weekend, but this one is really capturing the nation's attention, even the world's attention.
People are on edge.
The governor, Northam, has declared a state of emergency.
He is preventing the carrying of weapons during the rally.
He is boasting about pre-arresting apparent neo-Nazis, one of whom was an illegal immigrant, from attending the rally.
People are on edge.
There are clear examples of the militarization of police before the rally.
I don't know what's going to happen, but I think this is clearly going to be something.
Tyler, I'll go to you first.
Are we about to see another Charlottesville?
I don't actually think so, although I might eat my words on that because it's happening tomorrow, so we'll see.
But what seems to be the case, I think, is the ability of the Virginia governor with the aid of the SPLC and the Republicans.
As we can see from the recent statement from the Virginia GOP leader Todd Gilbert today calling for quoting white supremacist garbage to not show up.
I think that this is a way of controlling the narrative and removing in advance any sort of radicality that would give an event like this a deeper meaning or challenge to the interests of the state.
So with the state of emergency that happened in Charlottesville declared during the Unite the Right rally as a way to halt the event from going forth and...
Turning it into a clash, in this case, I think it was declared days in advance to round up participants that won't fit the narrative of a Second Amendment bulwark.
And more importantly, to arrest and advance the so-called boogaloo types, whether or not you think groups like the base or boogaloo types are a honeypot operation or not, that's besides the point entirely.
But they're propping up state narrative-friendly actors, and that includes conservative absolutists and Antifa as well.
And so I think the purpose of this is to control the narrative and say, see, you know, unite the right.
These vile racists cause a huge problem that escalate into violence.
Without this nasty element, this rally went on successfully.
In fact, the governor said, you know, without these white supremacists showing up, none of that would have ever happened.
So I think the only beneficiary...
of this rally is going to be the leadership in Virginia.
It's going to be the GOP base in regard and saying that it took a stand for the Second Amendment against the Democrats.
I think the alt-light is going to benefit from it.
And I think Antifa itself marching with the rally attenders are going to be the ones that benefit from this.
And all of this is going to be used as a means to control the narrative against their own culpability and how Unite the Right actually went down.
And I don't think any of this is going to benefit us.
I think this is going to be Boomers, Antifa, Virginia, and SPLC all propping themselves up from this narrative that, look, we did it successfully.
They controlled the narrative.
Unite the right.
3.0 didn't happen.
It all went according to plan.
And I think it's going to benefit them and the state, ultimately.
I think you are most likely right.
And I, of course, might eat my words as well.
But let me back up just a little bit before we discuss this and talk about what really happened at Unite the Right.
And I guess I might be the best possible person to talk about that since I was in the thick of things.
Basically, in 2017, there was the rise of the alt-right, and everyone was meeting each other and networking, getting together, and there was this new push towards activism.
And one of the most successful and...
World-renowned events, some of which were my college tour, but another one was this Charlottesville event in May, which was early to mid-May.
And it was effectively a kind of flash mob in the sense of it was planned in secret.
Antifa never heard a word about it.
There was effectively no Antifa presence.
And we just popped up.
And during the day, we gave some speeches around the Robert E. Lee Memorial, which, you know, there's a controversy in Charlottesville about tearing it down.
That lasted maybe even a half hour, maybe an hour.
That was over.
And then there was the Torchlight event that night.
There was effectively no violence.
There was some pushing and shoving, perhaps.
You know, no violence, and that was it.
That made international headlines.
It excited a lot of people.
And Jason Kessler wanted to organize a second event that would give all the people who had, I guess, fear of missing out on the first one this chance to come.
And it was about the statue, but it was also kind of about the alt-right, you know, asserting itself as we are a major movement, we're a force.
And there were tons of headliners, myself included.
I was somewhat involved in the organization of the first Charlottesville rally.
I was not the chief organizer, but I had some knowledge about what was going on.
I was in the loop.
I was basically out of the loop of Kessler's event.
That was his thing.
I was a speaker.
But again, the difference was it was a publicly announced public rally, which brought in tons of people, but then also clearly raised the stakes.
And I can remember that day quite vividly.
We all assembled in Lee Park, which had been renamed Emancipation Park or something like that.
Social Justice Park or something, maybe that's next.
Transgender Park, maybe that will be in 10 years.
But we all assembled there, and tensions were high.
I mean, I actually was maced by an Antifa member while I was entering the park, so I mean, there was already assaults and violence going on, but there was nothing, certainly nothing chaotic, but tensions were very high.
We never got a chance to speak.
Basically, a state of emergency was declared, and militarized police entered the field and pushed us off the field into...
Market Street, where chaos ensued, and that continued for much of the day.
I was manhandled by police and maced by police, and then I had to make a run for it.
Down Market Street, where I was pelted with various things.
It was absolutely insane.
I certainly much, much more than I expected.
You know, it was very different than what I expected.
And then I went and, you know, got away from things.
And chaos was allowed to ensue in downtown Charlottesville.
Pre-warning about a rally, you had state and local police converging, and including militarized police, and yet chaos ensued.
And that was what really happened.
I think there are all these...
You know, kind of conspiracy-type narratives that come in.
But I think most of us who participated felt that it was a kind of setup, that we were there to give speeches, to rally, to hold signs, to meet each other, etc.
And the largest police presence that I've ever seen allowed...
Downtown Charlottesville to descend into chaos, and we all know the rest of the story.
By mid to late afternoon, there had been a very unfortunate death of Heather Heyer, and so on.
So, I mean, I agree with your take on what's happening with this gun rally, but I wouldn't discount the...
potential for a very similar thing to happen because all of the signs are there.
Ed wants to speak.
I was just going to say, are you saying, Richard, that you think that the people in charge of Virginia are sufficiently cynical?
They were negligent, or not even negligent, kind of planfully negligent, that they kind of wanted somebody on the left to be seriously injured or killed?
Is that what you mean?
I wouldn't maybe go that far in the sense that that's what they wanted.
What I would say definitively is that they used militarized police against people who were there peacefully.
So I was being manhandled and other people around me on the field.
We're, you know, did their job when it came to pushing out people who were peacefully assembled there, and then did, were totally negligent in their duties when it came to maintaining order in downtown.
So whether, I can't see what's in someone's hearts and minds, whether they wanted chaos to occur.
I can't answer that question.
But there was a very quick narrative jump to, I remember the police officer, excuse me, the police, chief of police of Charlottesville at the time, who's since fired after the Heathie report.
But he came out and saying, you know, declaring the death of Heather Heyer was a...
You know, at the very least, they certainly use that narrative that it was people like me creating chaos when it was the exact opposite.
The police were basically pushing lawfully, peacefully assembled people into Market Street.
And then, again, either negligent or perhaps intentionally negligent in allowing chaos to ensue in downtown Charlottesville.
And it was a catastrophe.
Or they lost control of the level of chaos, because I suppose you could argue that you have a politicized police.
There's a degree to which the police are acting on the...
are politicised.
That's why they treated you and your side far more...
far less leniently than they treated Antifa or whatever.
And so there's a degree to which they want...
chaos because the chaos is good for them because then the chaos can precipitate bad headlines for their enemies and whatever and it can be blamed on their enemies.
I mean, it reminds me of when I was at this thing in Oslo in November, this Scanza Forum, and somehow out of nowhere – A couple of hours before it was due to start, 25, eventually it got up to about 50, Antifa, turn up, and the violent are trying to get in.
And then the police are stopping them, and there's 28 arrests over the rest of the day.
But how could they have known where it was?
Either there was a mole that told them that came to the conference, which I don't think is the case, or there was someone in the police that was monitoring people that knew this and told them.
So they wanted a degree of chaos, and they wanted to control the chaos, and they could have lost control.
On that occasion, they did.
And there is the self-fulfilling prophecy effect of you allow chaos and then you say, oh, clearly this is why we need to crack down on everything.
So, again, you know, we can relitigate Charlottesville, you know.
Until the cows come home.
But I think the main thing is this question of whether the authorities are going to play the gambit that Tyler just mentioned, which I do think is most likely.
Most likely, this will be mostly peaceful.
Maybe some pushing and shoving or minor injuries.
Because Antifa is there, although they're weirdly on the pro-gun side.
Which is interesting in itself.
We can spin that out a little bit.
But I think there is this question of how far they want to go.
Do they want to, due to the kind of boomer, constitutionalist, conservative right, what they did to the alt-right in 2017?
And whether they want to do that, I mean, I...
I would say maybe.
I think the potential is there.
And that's one reason, not the primary reason, that I'm not going to attend it.
Gun rights is not really my big issue.
I do certainly support lawful gun ownership and so on.
And this is not really my thing.
And also, I have...
Also, I have some familial duties to take care of this week.
But also, I think that fear of violence is real, and it is worrisome.
Well, I agree.
The potential's there.
I mean, I don't see how groups like the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers and the various militias that are attending are going to get along with the Antifa that's planning to march with them.
But the difference I see, like, with the state of emergency at the Unite the Right versus the one now, is that this was declared days in advance, and that they're already rounding people up and putting out statements with the SPLC and the like, saying, okay, we've got rid of these nasty elements, and you have the GOP leader saying, okay, well, they're not welcome, so nothing bad is going to happen.
And I think the potential is certainly there, but what seems to me is the bigger issue is that they're using this as a means to control the narrative, not only against Charlottesville, but against any sort of truly state-challenging, We did our job.
We resisted the gun laws.
It's going to pass anyways.
And the real problem here was these white supremacists.
Charlottesville, and we've gotten past that.
And I think that's how they're going to use that to control the narrative.
I could be wrong, but certainly the potential's there, but that's how I see it going down.
I don't know how much Antifa care about how they appear, but presumably beating up old people, middle Oath Keepers, whatever.
I met someone, I was in Washington many years ago, basically chaps in their 60s and 70s, may well look a lot worse than beating up young, alt-right Charlottesville-type people.
So if there is any chaos, it could reflect very badly on them.
A load of old chaps with their noses bleeding and cracks and their bald spots and whatever.
So that wouldn't be very good.
Although I think in Antifa's case, what they actually said in regards to this is I think that what's particular about the South is we have to be a bit more creative and sensitive to the people around us instead of fulfilling some sort of meme of what Antifa is.
That's what we're really trying to work against right now, especially by talking to conservatives and showing we aren't just a black-clad group of rabble-rousers who are out for attention and have jobs funded by George Soros.
This is from, I think it's called Seven Hills, is the far-left group in question here, although it could be Redneck Reboot or Socialist Rifle Association.
But they're saying they're trying to appeal to working-class white Virginians, is what they're going for with this.
That's interesting.
And they're playing the optics game, I guess.
And they're...
There is an interesting aspect to this.
Obviously, you know, the Black Panthers were big on open carry, you know, having a machine gun strapped to your back and being a badass.
So the notion that the far left is inherently about gun control is simply not correct.
You know, it's not monolithic.
It's different.
You know, there's some shades of gray in there.
I think it's worth talking about two more things.
First off, why this is happening.
And then thirdly, the kind of problems with the gun control movement itself.
I think it's worthwhile criticizing the right a bit.
First off, you know, this is not a gun grab.
you read about in, you know, fiction produced by the Oath Keeper types or the Turner Diaries or some of these, you know, outrageous.
Outrageous right-wing texts.
Again, it's not going that far.
They're not going door-to-door and taking your guns.
But it is a major measure.
It's a measure that would have been impossible just a few months ago before the Democrats took over the legislature.
And I wrote an article on this idea of WEGZIT.
And I think Virginia is paradigmatic here in the sense that We talk a lot about the illegals and the poor immigrants coming to the country and voting for the Democrats, and obviously I don't disagree with that notion.
That's clearly happening, although it is happening at a gradual pace.
But this bigger trend that affects 70% of the...
is suburban whites leaving the GOP.
And also people who might very well not be white, they might be Asian or Arab or Jewish or foreign born or so on.
But basically being high IQ, living in the suburbs, and effectively being like whites, having the same kind of viewpoint, being a kind of managerial class that sees white working class Republicans.
As not just de classe, but as evil and awful and gross and so on.
And this does seem to be, this Virginia law just seems to be an attempt to rub the noses of rural white Virginians in the shit.
And just saying, we don't like you.
We want to mess with you.
We want to annoy you.
We want to show that we're more powerful than you.
This is not going to prevent school shootings.
I mean, it's just simply not.
But it's a way of asserting power over the kind of heartland Virginia, which still is very red.
It's a way of asserting power over the rural white Virginia areas who are...
Just have a different concept of what the gun is.
For them, the gun is about hunting.
It's about self-protection.
It's about the whole culture that surrounds it, that ancestral Virginian culture.
For your average...
Middle and upper middle class white or white-ish person living in Nova, working at the new Amazon headquarters, or living in Nova and having a bureaucratic job in Washington, they have no connection to that traditionalist gun ownership culture.
Guns are just about violent gang members whom they want to disarm.
And so it just becomes this, it's kind of like a class power play that's going on, where The suburban white Virginians are asserting dominance over the rural red Virginians.
Should we?
One thing that occurs to me, I was in Virginia some years ago, I quite liked it, and I got to chatting in some ergo joint or whatever it was to some various Virginians.
And one of the things they stressed is that first and foremost, they are Virginians.
They're Virginians before they're Americans.
And they have been in Virginia for generations, many, many generations.
And a lot of these new Virginians that are coming in and voting for the Democrat Party are presumably spillover from Washington, D.C. And they're not Virginians.
They probably haven't even been born in Virginia.
And if they have been, maybe they're first generation, but they're certainly not being rural.
They don't go back many generations.
They're not Virginians.
And so, in a sense, they're incomers.
They're carpetbaggers in pursuit of certain professions or whatever to this Virginia, because it's close to Washington, D.C. and so on.
And they're not Virginians, so perhaps you shouldn't even talk about them as Virginians.
They're not Virginians in the same sense.
They're immigrants, basically, from other parts of America, but they're immigrants.
And they don't have that same Virginian culture, which has been built up over many generations since the 1700s, really.
They don't have that.
That's not theirs.
It's nothing to do with them.
They're probably genetically different from them.
They have different white ancestries, less likely to be English or Scottish, more likely to be German or Polish or Irish or Italian or anything other than English.
They'd be very different people, and they want to take control and take power.
How do you do that?
You undermine the religion, if you like, of those you're invading.
You undermine the symbols, and one of their symbols is guns.
So, take that by the balls and rip it off.
That's what they want to do, and that's what they're doing.
Exactly.
But it's a kind of inter-white civil war, I think, more than the illegals are doing this to us.
But yeah, there's no question there are...
I don't know if you've ever been in Nova, but I mean, this is the sprawling suburbs surrounding Washington, D.C. It's a kind of new environment.
It's not quite urban, not quite suburban.
It's, you know, Lululemon and Panera Bread and big high-rise luxury apartments and Crate and Barrel, all these kinds of things sprawling.
It's wealthy, quasi-suburban, quasi-urban, white and white-ish.
A lot of high...
High IQ non-whites who act like whites, effectively.
And then, you know, there are places in Virginia that are, you know, traditionalists and rural and feel like, you know, you could be living in 2020 or 1980 or 1940.
And it's not too different.
I mean, Arlington and around Arlington, that's the first part of Virginia.
I mean, that's clearly very wealthy, it seemed to me.
And then it just seems to get poorer as you go south, as you go towards Carolina.
And they were clearly very different.
And the accent suddenly changed as well.
The accent becomes so strong very suddenly, which is a sign of people that are, I don't want to say insular, but who have stayed there a long time, who tend to socialise with people like them, and who therefore preserve their own culture, including their own accent.
And I can imagine that these people that are incomers are going to talk.
Richard, educated American sounding actor.
And so it's a clash of cultures and that's what I think is reducible to.
Yeah, that same dynamic is happening here in Alberta actually.
So, for example, the city I live in is the one major cosmopolitan city in Alberta, while the rest of it is very traditional, it's very conservative, very rural.
And there's a huge amount in the rhetoric that goes into the politics here about getting over Alberta's racist, conservative past.
And we're kind of, at the same time this is happening, so you have this voting bloc in Edmonton, that's this cosmopolitan, educated class, liberal class coming from abroad, as well as high rates of immigration from places like India.
And then the same dynamic plays out nationwide.
So you have Alberta as the rural province versus this grand Ontario post-national cosmopolitan headquarter of sorts, and that you see this antagonism grow between the two, and it's an inter-ethnic conflict.
It's not a conflict between some foreign group, it's a conflict between whites and whites.
in Canada.
And I think a lot of these conversations we tend to, in the distant right, think of whites as like a unified block against outsiders, where in actuality there's a lot of tension between interests and the educated class and where they're getting that education from and what kind of incentives.
They have.
So we're told, for example, there's always pathological altruism as the cause, which I don't think is true.
I mean, you have these educated classes that promote these kinds of policies and agendas and speak against their rural brethren, so to speak, for the purpose of the fact that it gets them a high position.
It gets them where they need to be.
I was going to say, if you think about the difference between Spanish people, who are European, And Finnish people who are European.
Finnish people have hunter-gatherer ancestry, 40%.
40% of their ancestry is hunter-gatherers, Western hunter-gatherers.
Spanish people, nil.
0%.
So they're whites, but they're genetically extremely different.
And therefore, they have different genetic interests.
And therefore, in certain situations, you would expect them to be different in terms of personality, in terms of intelligence, in terms of physical appearance, and you'd expect them to act in their own interests when in a situation of conflict.
And I think that's what you're going to get in somewhere like Virginia.
There are genetic differences between social classes, and there are genetic differences between these different subgroups among whites within the USA.
Even in Canada, I was in a place called Sointula.
Have you heard of that?
It's near Vancouver.
And it was founded by Finnish people about 100 years ago.
It was a Finnish utopian cult.
And what that island's composed of now is the descendants of the people that settled there 100 years ago, some of whom still speak Finnish, and then come hippies that have come there because they think it's cool and spaced out and draft dodgers from the Vietnam War and people like this.
And, of course, they're very different.
Genetically, they're very, very different, and it creates conflict.
It's quite interesting.
Let's talk briefly about the gun control issue.
I'll say this starting out, that I've been around guns for most of my life.
I don't think anyone in my family could be...
Properly termed a gun nut.
Maybe my maternal grandparents a little bit.
But my maternal grandfather is actually quite a good shot.
He took me dove hunting and duck hunting many times.
He actually collected fine shotguns.
He preferred the Beretta.
It's an Italian-made gun.
He actually told a story of a man from Purdy who's perhaps one of the most...
Famous gun manufacturers from England visiting him in Monroe, Louisiana.
Or Monroe, as they say there.
And he came out and he fitted the pretty shotgun for him.
And then the manufacturer took a year.
They shipped it to him later.
So, I mean, I like hunting.
I think it is a great culture, and it is a unique—I mean, it's not uniquely American, but there is a real Americana aspect to it.
But what I see from a lot of the Oathkeeper types or the Second Amendment absolutist types, and also from the kind of gun craze types, are some things that— I don't know.
It's just something I don't quite get, and it is something that I find a bit foreign.
Let me talk about just the notion of Second Amendment absolutism.
I'm just going to read the Second Amendment.
This is actually what was ratified.
Much of the controversy has to do with that first clause, which is the notion of a well-regulated militia.
The gun rights activists basically focus on the second clause, and they see this as an absolute, inalienable right.
That you can own weapons.
Whereas a lot of the controversy comes from saying, well, no, this was actually put into historical context of militias and states and so on.
But, I mean, I guess I would, again, I support...
The Second Amendment in the sense of people's ability to hunt, ability to protect themselves.
But the way that the extreme libertarian or anarchist position is put forward is basically that guns aren't for hunting, they're for fighting tyranny.
And I would just say that this is a bit ridiculous.
First off, you're not going to be able to really fight tyranny.
You can fight crime that is in a home invasion or something, but you're not really going to be able to fight tyranny with any kind of weapon that you're going to be able to own.
And at no point is the government going to allow you to own a weapon that could confront a state like a rocket launcher.
A nuke or things like that.
Like, there is always going to be some kind of weapon control.
The state is going to maintain a monopoly on violence, and it's going to confront other states.
And so all of this talk, you know, whether, you know, you hear it in the kind of three percenter types or the survivalist or or even in, you know, the Turner Diary white nationalist types, it just all seems to be this fantasy that, you know, there's going to one day there's going to be a gun grab.
And then everyone will rise up and use their guns against the police and the military or the federal government and will wait.
I find this...
I don't think any of these people are really serious.
I don't think they're willing to do anything like that.
But it's just a very strange fantasy that really is not connected to reality.
At the end of the day, if someone is going to confront the United States, it is going to be another state actor.
We just have to accept that.
And outside of a truly Mad Max scenario, you know, like...
Hyperinflation, you know, no gasoline so the war machine can't operate and everyone's, you know, living in these tribes.
And so, I mean, outside of that, exceedingly unlikely, but possible, of course, but exceedingly unlikely scenario, you're not going to fight tyranny with your guns.
And it just, I just, I don't, I think it's a very peculiar American-like way of thinking about this issue, which is just flatly wrong.
Yeah, there was a couple months ago, I don't remember the gentleman's name, but he was recording himself on Instagram saying the police are there to grab his guns and there's a standoff.
And then there's this turn into this whole big thing where the Boogaloo crowd and...
Three percenters and gun rights absolutists are saying, okay, we're going to come down.
We're going to do it.
This is the moment.
But, of course, none of that actually happened, right?
They didn't do anything.
What happens is you get this tough talk about this, and it's certainly a part of American identity, you know, the war against Britain and whatever.
It plays a strong role in American identity, but that's why it's uniquely American.
But it seems to me a way of powerless people...
To assert their rights when, you know, they don't actually make decisions.
And you see, for example, Trump, he made that comment today about the Democrats are taking away your gun laws.
But, you know, they propose red flag laws as a part of it, which is the same thing that Trump himself proposed.
And so they're taking this idea that, okay, we're...
We're asserting our power by asserting our rights, and we're going to stop the government from infringing on us.
We know what happens.
I mean, these are the same people that respect the military and the police to such a point that when they come to the door, they're either going to be scared and not know what to do when they have to give them their guns, or they're going to be like, okay, there you go, officer.
I support these people tend to be the most boot-kissing people out there.
And so, like, I support gun rights for reasons of self-defense and the like, and I understand it has a lot to do with identity, and I see these things more of an erosion of American identity over against, say, something as a bulwark against an infringing government.
Like, the fact of the matter is, the war on Americans and our people is happening institutionally.
It's happening through media.
It's happening through technology.
It's happening through information.
And so, I've had this debate many times with types saying we need to...
Buy guns and wait out some scenario in which we can fight back.
That's completely silly for a number of reasons, but partly it's just because of the fact that we're willingly giving up our power, and we're just trying to assert rights in the meantime as a way of saying, no, we have it.
Look, we held on to this, right?
We held on to this.
We're always on the retreat, and we're always trying to compensate with some sort of fantasy that's never going to play out.
Rights talk, at the end of the day, is just talk about I'm powerless, but I'm going to assert my rights because I like to think I have power, but the people over me are going to be the ones that set the tone.
They're going to be the ones that set the incentives.
They're going to be the ones that set the policies.
And we're not going to set how we want America to go.
It's going to go the way the elite want it.
And so I see these things as side issues for people that, at the end of the day, are completely powerless, but they want to indulge in the myth that they have some sort of power and that there's going to be a way that they can assert it against the government.
Like I said, for a number of reasons, I don't find that very realistic.
Right.
I would agree with Tyler that, yeah, I think a big part of it, well, two big components of it are, yeah, it's people that have not much power.
And so the one thing they can cling on to is this gun.
It's like walking around a council's aid in Britain with a big dog.
It's something that you have and you can cling on to and you can say, I'm a little bit important and people should kind of fear me.
And it's a way of sort of...
A cognitive dissonance, a way of dealing with the fact that you're right at the bottom of the pile, and you haven't achieved much, and you live in a shed with a dog tied up outside it, and at least you have guns, and they're not taking away the guns from me.
Secondly, yeah, I think it's true that the gun is greater than the sum of its parts, as it were.
It seems to be this cultural thing.
It's an old culture.
It's a culture that's dying, or supposedly dying.
It's their culture, and for you to take it away is a symbol of you taking away what...
What gives them certainty, what gives them a sense of importance, and what gives them a sense of that life has meaning and structure.
But thirdly, I would say, and this is where I would slightly take issue with what Richard said, if you disarm the population, it means that there's a strong extent to which you're trusting the government, and you're trusting that you're going to have a good government that's not going to do anything nasty and clamp down on its citizens and try and control them with...
I.e.
it's going to be competent and there's not going to be a complete breakdown in law and order and chaos.
If people do have guns, then it can be regarded as an insurance policy against...
Both of those things.
In the unlikely event that you're going to get some dictator that's going to want to clamp down on society and take control of people and so on, yeah, you might not win a battle against them, but at least he had to be slightly more cautious in the knowledge that the society was awash with guns.
And secondly...
The more likely one is that you have bad governance and there's breakdown in law and order and you can't rely on the police, you can't rely on the militia, then at least you're armed and if people are trying to ransack your house, you can do something about it.
And so for those two reasons, I would say it seems to me a good idea that your founding fathers...
The problem with it is, let's take it in its historical context, it was basically mandated when the United States was effectively a kind of ethnostate.
It was basically Great Britain over the seas.
It was Great Britain West.
And what we know about these ethnostates is they are very high in trust.
They trust each other, they are genetically similar to each other, and genetic similarity predicts pro-social behaviour, and it predicts trust, and it predicts caring about other people because it's ultimately your genetic interests as well.
These people that founded America would probably have been, on average, Right.
And then you compare that with the subsequent diversity that's occurred, even among whites.
And what happens when that occurs is, A, you get less trust between the original English population, let's say, and the others, the Irish, the Polish, the Germans, whoever else has come.
And then also you get, as Putnam, Robert Putnam found from Harvard, you get a reduction in trust.
Even between the natives, even among the natives, because they kind of blame each other for what's happened to them, and also they now perceive there to be others that the less trustworthy of their members could collaborate with.
So you get this complete collapse in trust.
That's the first thing.
Predicated for this to work upon people trusting each other and kind of loving each other, really.
And this falls apart increasingly in an increasingly genetically diverse and then multiracial society.
And then the second issue is the Industrial Revolution.
This occurred just before the Industrial Revolution, and therefore people were genetically normal.
They'd been under thousands of years of Darwinian selection, and what that selected for was people who had high intelligence.
The richer 50% of the population have doubled the surviving offspring of the poorer 50% every generation.
From the 1100s up to about the 1800s.
Therefore, they were becoming more intelligent.
Intelligence is associated with altruism.
Intelligence is associated with pro-social values.
It's associated with burger values, this kind of thing.
And also, for other things, pro-social, the general factor of personality is called predicted fertility, religiousness predicted fertility.
People were becoming more pro-social and more intelligent and just more sort of good, basically.
And you didn't have odd...
As much in the way of oddball weirdos, what my colleague calls spiteful mutants, who would just have these crazy ideas, oh, let's go and get some guns and shoot a load of people in a school.
You just wouldn't get people like that.
People genuinely believed in hell, they were highly religious, they were highly genetically similar to each other, they trusted each other, and that was the context in which this was brought about.
But to have gun laws like that in a genetically diverse, racially diverse society that is increasingly very low in trust and is increasingly going to have these people that would have died under Darwinian conditions because they would have had poor immune systems or whatever, having poor immune system correlates with having problems with the mind, having mutations
So, as we go from 50% child mortality, 1800 to 1% now...
You're going to have more and more of these weirdos who are going to have weird ideas, and this will include going and shooting people at random or whatever they want to do.
And so that context in which it all made sense is not the same context that you have now.
I agree.
We're not living in Switzerland where you can have a little farmhouse and a nice shotgun and you can even plausibly say, oh, this is to defend our independence from invasion or so on.
I agree with the plausibility of the argument that an armed citizenry is more likely to resist tyranny, but...
Let's just look at the facts.
We are living under a, again, weirdly tyrannical totalitarian And this is correlated with this massive rise in gun culture.
So we've kind of had a divergence of the population.
Gun control is more popular with the kind of...
You know, urban suburbanites type people.
But then we have this huge gun culture of I want to, you know, stock up on all these guns.
I want to have semi-automatic weapons and go fire them.
I want to have a Christmas card picture with my child holding a semi-automatic weapon and have a, you know, a shotgun that's pink, pink camo for my wife and all this kind of stuff.
And so all of this gun ownership has been totally ineffective in resisting the kind of You know, cultural tyranny that we're living under right now.
And it just is what it is.
The cultural tyranny could conceivably develop into a tyranny of a more Stalinist kind where they come for your land and come for your food if things got bad enough.
But that's so 20th century.
Yeah, it's so 20th century.
But we're becoming less intelligent, as I've argued in my research before.
Things are going to go backward.
Things are going to break down.
This guy, Peter Turkin, argues that 2020 is going to be a decade of incredible unrest, and there's high levels of distrust and polarization in the USA that there were at the time of the Civil War, not higher.
And so this idea that, yes, everything's...
We know they're violent, these leftists.
They have the potential for incredible violence.
And if given enough power, perhaps they could come for people personally.
If they find out where you live, for example, then you're against them.
And at least if that happens, then at least you've got a gun and you can defend yourself against people like that.
I don't fundamentally disagree with what you're saying.
I'm just adding that we're already living in the kind of hellscape that...
You know, you're describing and yet we have...
Americans have like five guns apiece on average, and some Americans have incredible gun collections, ridiculous kind of things.
And also, maybe you could accuse me of being a bit of a classist here, but I do own a weapon for self-protection.
I own some shotguns that actually kind of were passed down, and they're decent weapons.
When I looked at some of my grandfather's collection, These are some really nice things.
It wasn't just kind of a, I don't know, plastic Glock that's colored pink and, you know, has a laser scope on it.
I mean, there's this kind of creation of this gun culture where it's just like these weird toys.
I don't know.
I mean, maybe again, maybe this is my...
Snobbish personality speaking, but there's just something about the current gun culture that I find a little disconcerting.
And the other aspect, to go back to your discussion of spiteful mutants or things like that, I don't disagree.
And I would add that there is this kind of nihilistic quality to society, beginning in the mid to late 90s with Columbine.
Just, you know, it's something beyond mental illness.
I mean, even if you're mentally, you know, we've seen mentally ill people before, but we've never seen this trend of going to your own school, dressing in black, making a video perhaps beforehand, announcing your manifesto, and laying waste to your colleagues and students.
There is some level of alienation from just broader society and nihilism that is off the charts.
And just saying that we need more guns, which is the NRA example.
Oh, we need to arm teachers.
We need more security guards in schools.
I mean, okay, all that's saying is that we're living in a nihilistic okay corral.
There's actually someone on Twitter, I think Liquor and Christianity was making this point.
We're living in this hellscape where you might be brutally murdered by a psychopath, so you better have a gun.
We need to take a step back and recognize how awful our society has become.
There was an interesting paper that was accepted recently.
It hasn't been published yet, but it's been accepted in an academic journal.
And what it found was a good marker for mutational load, i.e.
for being the kind of person that would have died under Darwinian conditions but now hasn't because of low child mortality and is more likely to have these spiteful maladaptive ideas like atheism or multiculturalism that destroy your own genetic interests.
A good marker for that is autism.
Autism is something that is associated with higher mutational load.
And the evidence for that is that the older a father The more likely he is to have a child that's autistic.
And what this data set found was that if you take data from the 1950s, there is no association between paternal age and atheism, which is associated with autism.
But if you take more recent data from the 70s and 80s, there is an association between paternal age and atheism.
So what that's showing is that in the 50s, America was so religious that even though there were these people that had these maladaptive ideas or whatever, atheism, multiculturalism, whatever it happened to be, the social pressure to conform to religiousness was so strong that they were held back, that they were held in check.
And by the 70s, this had changed because religiousness had collapsed and consequently...
There was this tsunami of maladaptive ideas that was being held back by this religious culture.
And once the religious culture broke down, which can happen if you have a small minority and that minority gets larger and it questions things, and a tipping point at about 25%, it seems to be, is reached, and then people start to switch sides.
And once that happened, then you have this breakdown of everything, and it can happen very, very quickly, this breakdown into nihilism.
And there's every reason to think it would happen very, very quickly, because these...
Evolved ways of behaving which have made people adaptive for a long time.
Remember, humans are very plastic to the environment.
We're very reliant on the environment being just right.
The environment becomes decreasingly right, and so you get more and more people, some who might not even be particularly mutated, but just are being now raised in an ecology which we're not meant to be raised in.
They're being raised in an unnatural, weird ecology, and so they just go mad, basically.
And this is what seems to be happening.
And we know from another book that's been published by this colleague of mine, Woodley, which has shown that nihilism, having nihilistic views, is associated with mental illness, it's associated with childlessness, it's associated with physical abnormalities, it's a sign that you are a mutant, basically.
So this is what seems to be happening.
And in that context, almost like the march of the zombies, Really.
But that's what we're up against.
These people are brain-dead people with these maladaptive, destructive ideas.
And a smaller and smaller minority who would have survived under Darwinian conditions, who are the genetic norm, who are conservatives, by the way.
That's what correlates with fertility.
It's what correlates with good mental health, good physical health, being conservative, are fighting these zombies.
And in that context, I think I would like if I was you should be good to have guns.
I get it.
I get it.
But, you know, I agree as well.
And I do have, you know, I myself have a gun for protection.
And I, you know, I'm not a huge hunter, but I actually like it.
I like even skeet shooting.
I think it's a lot of fun.
But I mean, we need to.
Again, we need to take a step back and just understand where this culture is going, the nihilism of the culture, the maladaption of the culture.
And also, I mean, to be frank, the autistic community needs to come to terms with this rash of school shootings.
I mean, this is completely unacceptable and awful.
I get that.
But just the fact that it exists is absolutely heinous.
And I think the left at least kind of gets this, and they're fighting it in the wrong way.
They're not really looking at the reality of the situation, and they're thinking, oh, we need to reduce your gun purchases per month, and that will solve school shootings.
Obviously, that won't do anything.
But they're at least acknowledging it.
But just saying that, you know, oh, let's just throw more guns at the.
The problem, it seems like both sides aren't just really, again, this shouldn't be surprising, both sides, both left and right, are not willing to address the real issue and stare reality in the face and think about what we can do about it.
Yeah.
But that's why we have this broadcast.
Basically.
I mean, literally.
Yeah, I agree.
That's what I was saying.
What I was getting at is that liberal totalitarianism produces pleasure while it rapes.
And so when you, like, it's like, yeah, I mean, we were talking about conditions that people aren't fighting back against the government.
What I'm saying, and I know, like, you know, there was Ruby Ridge, there was Waco, I'm sorry, Waco, but there's not...
Not everyone's also Timothy McVeigh either, but there's not going to be some fight back in that sort of sense.
Most people fold when they come for your guns.
But the fact is, what's happening is it's not being carried out through the use of hard power.
It's being carried out, and all these situations are happening because of alienation and nihilism produced by the culture that we live in.
And you see mental illness is almost becoming something fetishized, right?
I know you guys talked about Billie Eilish, I think on the stream with Keith Woods, and that she plays to this kind of Authenticity of, you know, that this depression and this sadness and this failure in your relationships is something to be emulated, right?
And then so, a couple days ago, I saw this TikTok that was shared around on Twitter of this nurse saying, are you feeling depressed?
Try drinking more water.
Don't go out partying all night drinking alcohol.
And then she got a flurry of hate comments saying, you're trivializing mental illness.
And what this is, is like people responding to...
Someone taking a hit at their identity and all of a sudden they defend their mental illness like their mother's shielding their child, right?
This liberal nihilistic culture has become so ingrained as a part of our identity that it's such a difficulty in thinking about how exactly we're going to create something new in which these kinds of antagonisms...
We end up stuck in these debates which are completely meaningless.
I support gun rights, and I get it.
You need self-defense.
But the problem is, and same on the gun control argument, that it's not going to stop the conditions that all of a sudden appear in the last 20 years with all these flurry of school shootings and violence.
Obviously, there's something going on here, which we call alienation, that is giving rise to this sort of conflict.
So focusing on gun rights or asserting them or not asserting them is just, I think, completely missing the point.
Yeah, that's a good point.
It is.
It is missing the point.
I would argue it's the collapse of the traditional society which really flipped in the 60s.
That's when the real collapse took place.
In the 50s, it hadn't happened yet.
In the 60s, that was the turning point.
That was the bit into the collapse of traditional society, the collapse of religiousness, the collapse of religiousness being something adaptive that promotes adaptive values to itself being taken over by these vile, spiteful mutant types who then push it in a maladaptive direction.
And then you have all these ideologies which are reflecting an increasing wish on a growing proportion of Western people to destroy themselves.
Yeah.
Because they are carrying genes which are...
And then they are able to influence others who don't carry these genes to think in these maladaptive ways, to destroy their genetic interests, to not have children, to think you're a loser if you're a good wife and mother and all this.
And this is just getting worse and worse.
You're going to get a polarisation.
If you think that before the Industrial Revolution, 10% of people that were born in a given generation passed on their genes.
10%.
90% didn't.
And there's been computer models that have shown that for a population of any species to remain healthy, 90% must fail to breed in any given generation.
And that's the situation we were in.
It's now where we are now.
And now we're in a situation – no, exactly.
Well, there was a period of time where it was a massive percentage that passed on the genes.
Now, of course, you get – because of these bad adaptations and whatever, you're getting more and more people that don't want to have children.
They have a desire not to pass on their genes.
And then they make this into a virtue, and they say, oh, I've got more interesting things to do with my life.
And as Tyler pointed out, then when they identify themselves with their maladaptive ideas, which they see as a good, and when someone looks at the possibility that actually there's another way and there's a more positive way, then they react badly to that because it undermines their sense of importance and power.
But this girl was saying, hey, you couldn't be happy.
And they're like, how dare you try and make people happy?
I am programmed genetically to spread chaos and unhappiness.
How dare you undermine what I am programmed to do?
Yeah, I just wanted to, because what Ed's getting at there actually reminds me of, this might sound like an aside, but it's directly related.
Yesterday I got into this argument on Twitter because I started seeing this prevalence of rape jokes coming from within the dissident right, and this kind of idea of sharing memes of women, like, trad women getting beaten, and this constant flurry when you say, hey, maybe this is kind of screwed up.
You get all these simp, simp, simp, simp comments, and it turned into some whole thing yesterday.
And the reason I bring this up is because the same antagonism, the same fetishizing of the problems that are plaguing us is making its way into the distant right.
And I think what's happening is that We're becoming just a resentment field.
And I know resentment, you need a grievance if you want to change something, right?
But it's turning into this resentment field movement in which those same liberal antagonisms are making us a product of it rather than providing an alternative to it.
And so I think that there's a real danger in these sorts of antagonisms that are playing themselves out.
I think that's a huge cancer on any sort of alternative, right?
It becomes a—the movement is itself maladaptive, and it's just seething with resentment, and it becomes a kind of rape movement, where it flips between, on the one hand, saying, oh, we need traditional monogamy, and every man, a wife, and two kids, and a garage in the suburbs, or whatever.
And then it moves into, you know, women are evil, and we should— Destroy them all and so on.
It just flips between two unrealistic positions.
Either a fantasy of the 1950s or this Mad Max, women are evil.
One's naive but obviously has some good qualities to it.
One is just totally poisonous and heinous.
Make a joke here and there.
Who cares?
We've all made off-color jokes.
But this is the identity of the movement.
It's obviously extremely bad.
I was just going to quickly say the defense I heard from it was these people in this movement, they're used to losing their jobs to women or not being able to hold relationships or whatever.
So they can make these jokes because it's their freedom of speech to do so and they should have it.
But I mean, at the end of the day, this isn't a freedom of speech movement.
This is a movement because we're trying to find an alternative to these liberal antagonisms, not reproducing them.
But we're letting that reproduction and that freedom to bitch take precedence over actually coming up with an alternative and saying, no, we're here to solve those liberal antagonisms, not reproduce them.
Yeah.
But we have to look at, you know, in order to change the world, you first do have to understand it.
And I think what, you know, our major point is that left and right just do not understand what's happening to our culture.