The Pandemic and Political Chaos It’s Friday, April 3, and The McSpencer Group is back. Joining me today are Keith Woods and Mark Brahmin. Main topic: Anarcho-Tyranny It’s not just the flu, bro. It’s not a Democratic hoax. And it’s not magically going away in April. Coronavirus is here, and it’s created a “new normal” for over half the population of the planet, who are quarantined in their homes with only Netflix and OnlyFans there to carve out a semblance of community. The panel takes a step back and looks at what the Corona crisis reveals about us, the nature of government, and the future of geopolitics. Most pundits and politicians will be spared by Coronachan . . . only to be destroyed by their unbearably bad takes. Coronavirus has separated the wheat from the chaff; it’s revealed the weakness and incompetance of the “world’s only Superpower,” and clouded the future. The panel discusses Pan-Europeanism, Carl Schmitt and Sam Francis, the My Pillow guy’s political religion, and the decline of the American empire. No topic is too pretentious or arcane for this panel of pseudo-intellectual posers. 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 Friday, April 3rd, and the McSpencer Group is back.
Joining me today are Keith Woods and Mark Brahman.
Main topic, anarcho-tyranny.
It's not just the flu, bro.
It's not a democratic hoax, and it's not magically going away in April.
Coronavirus is here, and it's created a new normal for over half the population of the planet.
Who are quarantined in their homes with only Netflix and OnlyFans there to carve out a semblance of community.
The panel takes a step back and looks at what the Corona crisis reveals about us, the nature of government, and the future of geopolitics.
Most pundits and politicians will be spared by Corona Chan, only to be destroyed by their unbearably bad takes.
Coronavirus has separated the wheat from the chaff.
It's revealed the weakness and incompetence of the world's only superpower and clouded the future.
The panel discusses pan-Europeanism, Carl Schmitt and Sam Francis, the MyPillowGuys political religion, and the decline of the American empire.
No topic is too pretentious or arcane for this panel of pseudo-intellectual posers.
Hello gents, how are you doing?
You're both invisible today.
Mark Brahman is in an undisclosed underground lair.
And Keith, your laptop caught COVID-19 is what I hear.
So you just get to see my face today.
But how are you doing?
I'm doing well.
I'm in a bunker 600 feet underground.
I've got enough toilet paper, though.
And things are great otherwise.
And I'm looking forward to emerging after...
The virus has run its course, and myself as Superman can emerge.
Right.
Maybe the last man, like in a different sense of the word.
In a better sense, yeah.
Yes, literal last man.
Keith, how are things in Ireland?
Yeah, not too bad.
Having some technical difficulties, as you say.
I mean, who would have thought those anime porn websites would have had so many viruses?
I would have thought, but yes.
You were just doing research, after all.
As I could have all told us.
Okay, let's jump into this.
So I wanted to talk a little bit about the American response to COVID-19 and about the degree to which Americans are...
Unique on this issue and maybe uniquely clueless or uniquely incapable of dealing with something like this.
And I obviously was born here, born in Boston, Massachusetts, raised in Texas.
Can you get more American?
No.
And we also have Mark Brahman, who is an American from the New England area as well.
And then we have an Irishman, but I guess the Irish are kind of, you're kind of Americans and you're kind of, you're like the Irish, the Irish immigrants are kind of like the ultimate Americans in a way.
Yeah.
Well, we're being Americanized by today, so we're getting there.
So is the world, yeah.
I heard Keith was being accused of being an Americanized faggot on Twitter, so...
I've seen some...
We've gotten attacked a lot, and I think it's because we're putting out good content, and our content is...
Provocative in the best sense of the word.
And it's just kind of getting...
We're making people rethink things, and that gets under their skin.
And then we get all these denunciations, which I've seen.
I saw a recent one just about...
15 minutes ago.
Well, there is an idea.
That's what I'm here for, guys.
There is an idea that the idea of a European identity or a sort of cross-Europe cooperation is an American idea, you know, coming out of bastardized white groups in America, coming together with this idea of white nationalism.
But I mean, the first time...
Which is not entirely wrong.
Yes, partly, but I mean, the first time I encountered those ideas would have been reading people like Guillaume Fay, Benoit, Sean Theriot, who's a Belgian guy in the 60s that actually set up a pan-European political party that had Oswald Mosley and one of the Strasser brothers as members.
And it was a traditional idea that was defined very much as being anti-American.
And it was coming out of the idea that...
The States, after the Second World War, were just kind of pawns of American Zionist power.
So, I mean, there's something to it, you know, the idea that the growth of white nationalism is something that is kind of uniquely American in the last few years.
But it does bless the point on some level.
Yeah, I think it's both, because clearly pan-European identity and pan-Europeanism as a political...
The concept has European roots, no question.
Just the idea of a terrestrial empire, uniting nations, and so on.
You can go back to Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, etc.
But I actually wouldn't totally dismiss the idea that it's kind of American.
And in a way, that's taking like a silver lining from some aspects of America that would otherwise be bad.
In the sense that we've had ethnic strife in the United States, you know, the Anglo versus Irish.
We've put Germans in concentration camps during the World Wars.
We've done all sorts of things, but I think there's almost a silver lining to overcoming many of those ethnic strifes.
Now, ethnic strife is about, you know...
We're not at each other's throat.
And again, there's a way that something good can come from something that might be bad to many extents.
And I think Americans have become kind of, you know, what is the alt-right term, like Ameriburgers.
You know, you're just this hamburger-eating nationalist.
But maybe there's something there that can actually be good.
Maybe there's actually something that we can see that Europeans who are fixated on hating their neighbors can't.
And I don't think that should be totally dismissed or discounted.
Go ahead.
Well, the interesting irony is that if you read people like Theriot, what was motivating him more than anything to push for some kind of pan-Europeanism was the fear that he saw coming down the line that Europe would become Americanized.
Right.
So that's kind of an interesting irony there.
Yes.
Yeah, no question.
I mean, you can see this in Yaki, you can see this in...
You know, Powell never really embraced pan-Europeanism.
He was a bit hostile towards it.
But you can certainly see this in other people from the interwar period who were attracted to fascism, who immediately after the war went to Europeanism.
I mean, Oswald Mosley being the quintessential example.
That it is a kind of fear of America, but then, again, maybe there has to be a kind of understanding of Something that went right in America as well.
And I think we should have a dialectical understanding of it in that way.
And then secondly, I'm from America.
In many ways, you could probably say that I'm anti-American if you look at most of my opinions.
But I'm not so shrill and just kind of...
Hate-filled that I hate this country or that I'm going to just dismiss it or say there's no redeemable features to it.
That would be ridiculous and kind of dishonest.
Yeah, that was also Nietzsche's perspective as well, I mean, more or less.
I mean, I don't know that he talked about it explicitly in the American context, but the idea of the good European, or he was effectively a pan-Europeanist, or you might even say a proto-pan-Europeanist, or maybe the originator, or one of the early originators.
And I think that...
The question of homogenization, like the fear that the European countries are going to become homogenized, only becomes a kind of problem on the cultural level if it's a homogenization under McDonald's, as opposed to under...
You know, Jupiter, which is what I would argue for, right?
So I think the problem of homogenization is not an inherently bad problem from my perspective.
It's just what that is, right?
I mean, Nietzsche was talking about a common European type in the 19th century in the age of train travel and the telegram and so on.
So this was happening long before, you know, I don't know, the 1990s or something, that Europe was kind of coming together and that there's a European person who might be from somewhere, but he's...
I mean, this is just a phenomenological observation by Nietzsche.
And then I would also say there's another aspect to this, which is very important, is to confuse the nation state itself with cultural homogenization, in the sense that we need to have a parliament, we need to have borders and prevent travel or something like that, and that that's going to...
I mean, look, homogenization has been occurring for a long time, certainly throughout the age of the nation state.
The nation state seeks homogenization just on its own terms.
I mean, there were many different Frances that traditionalists have, whose death traditionalists have lamented at the hands of a centralization by the nation state.
And, you know, these nation states now that are, you know, living in the shadows of globalization and Americanization are pretty much incapable of preventing this kind of thing.
And so just to go back to some, you know, nationalism or pretend that that's any kind of real threat against globalization.
Globalization and kind of racial homogenization, I think, is a bit diluted.
You know, mass McDonald's-ization, which is what we really oppose, can occur with a hundred different nation-states on the European continent.
It can easily occur that way, particularly more easily because they're all weak.
But anyway.
Yeah, I mean, you know, Europeans, Justifiably, when they hear about ideas around United Europe, reject it because they have the idea of everyone kind of abandoning regional identities and becoming this kind of masked man, European man.
What's interesting is if you read most of the people that advocated for it, they're advocating for it for the opposite reason.
Like, if you read Fay's archiofuturism, he has this idea of this grand united Europe with, you know, rapid rail travel from Paris to Moscow, whatever.
But then he has this vision of there being, like, little pagan enclaves in Sweden or wherever.
So oftentimes people that advocated for it, they wanted a political superstructure so that, you know, the regional smaller cultures could be protected.
As you say, when you have this kind of balkanization, I mean, balkanization has been a tactic of neoconservatism and American imperialism everywhere, whether it was in Yugoslavia.
I mean, even now we're seeing it in Syria and in Iraq, they wanted to balkanize those into Shia and Sunni states.
Yes.
Woodrow Wilson and so on, his vision.
Yeah, his vision of Europe was all of this nation building, but it was basically to weaken major regional powers, Germany being the primary one, and basically to invent all these new nations, inventing the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, reinventing Poland, and so on.
You know, there are many good things about that.
I mean, I'm not...
I mean, I'm not one of these people who think something is all bad or all good, but the political motive was to create a patchwork of weak nation-states that can be under an American umbrella.
Well, it's this idea of the balance of power, but I mean, if you look at who Israel and the U.S. have been opposed to more than anyone in the Middle East, it's been the Ba 'athist movement, which was a pan-Arab movement.
And, you know, it plays out similarly everywhere.
I mean, they don't mind funding or supporting smaller Islamic enclaves or smaller ethnic enclaves.
But, you know, the biggest danger to them is that idea of, like, a national socialist kind of imperium, whether that's under Baathist Arab rule or under Persian rule, under the hegemony of Iran.
Exactly.
Well, we went into deep theory early on this one, but...
I was planning to talk about COVID-19, but I'm glad we had this useful preface.
I was going to suggest we first talk about something, one of these phenomena that occur that kind of trigger both the left and the right on social media.
And so the right wing starts cheering, and then the left wing starts talking about a coming theocracy or something.
And that is the thinker known as MyPillowGuy.
You might not know this, Keith, because Fox News is an American thing, but whenever you turn on Fox News, MyPillowGuy is there.
He is hawking pillows left and right.
Maybe his audience is in need of a lot of pillows, the 70-plus people watching that stuff.
But he But he's doing something which I think is unequivocally good and which I support, so I don't want to totally bash this guy.
And he seems like a nice man as well.
But he is transforming his business to make masks, which makes sense, and I'm glad he's doing that.
So, you know, one or two cheers for MyPillow guy, who's...
You know, dealing with the crisis in the way that he can.
But he said something that was pretty remarkable, I thought, which was that America had turned away from God.
And then we turned back to God, apparently, by electing Donald Trump, this thrice married womanizing Bulgarian from reality TV.
And that is what made the stock market go up.
God was happy, and the stock market went up.
And, you know, African-American unemployment went down.
Wages went up, is what she claims, but I'm a little bit skeptical of that one.
But apparently this, you know, kind of external thing came in, the COVID, but we'll get back to there if we...
God gave us grace on November 8, 2016 to change the course we were on.
God had been taken out of our schools and lives.
A nation had turned its back on God.
And I encourage you to use this time at home to get back in the Word.
Read our Bibles and spend time with our families.
Our president gave us so much hope where just a few short months ago, we had the best economy, the lowest unemployment and wages going up.
It was amazing.
With our great president, vice president and this administration and all the great people in this country praying daily, we will get through this and get back to a place that's stronger and safer than ever.
Look, I unquestionably understand the religious impulse.
I think religion is indispensable for a functioning civilization.
And religion can be the most powerful force in the world.
But what I'm really getting at is this kind of strange...
Calvinistic impulse, which seems to be at the heart of generic American Christianity.
And this notion that if we pray more, if we turn back to God by electing a Republican, that the stock market goes up because God is happy with us.
And it just seems bizarre.
And God, of course, is not blamed for stock market crashes.
Or anything like that.
But it just seems like a very bizarre thing and something which is genuinely anti-Christian.
And not to mention just factually inaccurate.
The stock market crashed the last time under the George W. Bush administration.
And then it was rising for eight years, effectively, under Barack Obama, this godless globalist...
I don't know.
I don't know.
You know, again, I think the main thing that bothers me is this connection between getting rich and believing in yourself, this prosperity doctrine, which is genuinely anti-Christian, I would say, and also just vulgar and toxic.
And this struck me as one of these points where it's like the left is getting triggered for the wrong reasons.
They think that this is a coming theocracy when it's clearly not.
It's a guy who is basically worshipping money and worshipping the Republican Party as a symbol of God's love.
And then the right wants to defend this guy as some kind of traditionalist when he's not...
Approaching being a traditionalist.
This is a totally anti-traditional, anti-nationalistic, just individualistic, materialistic, greedy kind of outlook at the end of the day.
And so we kind of have the left and right triggered, but then they're both wrong.
It's the Caducean, you could say.
But that was my kind of impression of all this.
You guys want to jump in?
Yeah, drink them if you got them.
Caducean is the word.
I'm drinking coffee.
I'm not going to pull a Janine Pirro and get wasted on a podcast.
I apologize for that.
I'm sure that would be good.
Well, other people might be watching Friday evening, I guess.
But, so, what I would say is, yeah, I mean, you bring up an interesting point, that there is this kind of, the Max Weber premise was that, Capitalism sort of arises from a kind of Protestant work ethic, or from the shift that occurs in Christianity, especially with Calvinism.
I don't know.
I think that premise is plausible on some level.
I would argue that, though, it probably—what we see with the Protestant Reformation in general is a kind of slow death of Christianity, and we're still kind of in that now.
So in other words, Protestantism is actually a kind of move away from Christianity.
And it seems like it's largely Protestantism is a function of these sort of autistic sort of northern Europeans who— So they kind of pursued it in a very kind of pure, kind of a sort of intellectually honest and pure manner.
And the consequence is that they basically, it's been a kind of process of moving away from Christianity, is what I would argue, is that ultimately this sort of intellectual pursuit brings us to figures like Nietzsche.
And that Christianity is basically in a kind of period of decline or death.
Now, in America, we still see this kind of particular brand of American Christianity, as it were, that is very capitalistic.
And I think a part of that, too, is during the Cold War, where communism became an antipode, that American capitalism and Christianity could...
So what we're seeing now is kind of a remnant.
of this idea that the platform is God and capitalism, right?
Which, to your point, I mean, that's not really what Christianity was in its origin.
So Christianity has now become its sort based on a kind of practical level.
So it's kind of fascinating to watch.
And it's kind of but it does feel sort of soulless on some level.
I don't know.
I'm sure Keith has plenty to say on this.
I do think it is true that certainly the reform and capitalism, the rise of capitalism, those things can be linked.
But I would define it more as a kind of slow death of Christianity than the development of a Protestant work ethic, as it were.
And also, real quick, just to jump in because I'm thinking about this, I mean, I agree that there is this meme which is largely true if you judge things by just a religious attendance and so on.
Religiosity, and particularly Christian religiosity, has survived in America to a much greater extent than in Western and Central Europe.
And, you know, I think there's a...
You know, religion is always connected to the state.
There's never really a separation of church and state.
And so religiosity was, you know, believing in God was a feeling of power.
We're going to be wealthy.
We're going to win this Cold War for the battle of the soul of humanity against the commies.
And so on.
It just kind of lent itself to that.
You know, lent itself to that confidence that one would need to really believe in God and not become kind of a different variation of the last man in Europe where there's really no need for God and it's just all about, you know, comfort and pleasure and welfare.
And so on.
But you could take this further and say that as the American way and the American government faces a crisis of legitimacy, which I think it's clearly facing every day, and as America loses its place as the big kahuna of the world, which it inevitably will, it's probably going to lead to a religious crisis as well.
And, you know, particularly with, if we look at the, you know, my pillow guy as just an expression of this, there's this direct connection between getting rich and being the world power and believing in God.
And as that declines the United States, there's going to be a resultant and, you know, co-committent crisis of faith.
It's interesting.
I think Bertrand Russell, when he was talking about the Reformation, he said that, Catholicism, I think it's a good explanation of it.
He said it was, you know, it was Hebrew scripture, Greek theology, and sort of Roman majesty or aesthetics.
And the Reformation removed the Roman element, greatly lessened the Greek element, and extenuated the Judaic element.
How would you describe American Christianity?
It's like McDonald's aesthetics.
A further extenuation of that.
Yeah, Zionist theology.
Yeah.
But you know what I find interesting is, you know, in a lot of ways, the U.S. is the only place that stuff like this, like the prosperity gospel, could come out of.
But you know another place you see this a lot?
And there was a few, I don't know, there's a few migrants in this place where I live, maybe you can guess, but it's Brazil.
You know, Brazil, since the 50s, has had this massive shift to Protestantism, and it's weird when you talk, there's all these new Protestant churches popping up in Brazil all the time, and most of them are heavily Zionist and very, very Americanized in the way they talk about things.
It's interesting.
It's kind of interesting looking at the demographics of Brazil, and people talk about the Brazilification of the US, but maybe what characterizes...
American Protestantism, especially, is the lack of rootedness.
You know, Catholicism in Southern Europe or somewhere like Ireland is such a rooted religion.
You know, it's rooted in the soil, it's rooted in the people and the traditions.
And, you know, the way it was synthesized with Greek theology and with Aristotelianism, it was something, you know, it had its majesty, it had its aesthetic, it had its own traditionalism.
And, you know, you look at some of the Protestant churches you see in places in the United States, and they just look like sort of modern monstrosities.
Like, there's no tradition.
There's no harking back to anything there.
They look like a mall.
The megachurch.
The aesthetic really is that of a mall.
And many of the churches even include like a Starbucks inside them and, you know, a daycare and a hamburger joint, a food court, and so on.
But yeah, that is the aesthetic.
It's the American McDonald's or mall aesthetic with Hebrew scripture.
although they're not even, despite their claims to be fundamentalists, they're not really that fundamentalist.
And then, uh, the theology is that of American capitalism.
Uh, Yeah, I'm glad you reminded me of that Bertrand Russell quote, because I think it's a, you know, kind of insight into understanding a religion.
But, yeah, so, I mean...
It's interesting how you even see the sort of Americanization of Eastern religions.
Buddhism and Hinduism are taken, and it's turned into a nice hobby for an upper-middle-class housewife while her husband's at work.
Everything is just reduced to the absolute lowest common denominator.
Even things like Buddhism and Hinduism, Eastern spirituality becomes this thing about positive visualization, and you're basically having a really successful material life using...
tricks from Eastern meditation or spirituality.
It's just always that, you know, reducing Right.
Right.
Well, it seems like it would, those faiths would always have that potential, since they are essentially scriptural.
On the kind of final base level, it's scripture, right?
So it's the word, as opposed to something more tangible or concrete.
I would argue that something that had a racial basis, for example, among whites would be something that would represent something more concrete, that you could represent through idols, and that wouldn't be a form of sacrilege, for example.
Right.
In any case.
Yes.
Back to the virus.
Well, yeah, it's funny.
We've talked about everything but what I thought we were going to talk about.
But I think it's good to kind of dive into theory.
I think that's something that we offer that's more unique.
And that's something needed as well.
But yeah, I mean, and I think this is kind of...
This does help explain, to a degree, the inability of the United States government to really deal with this properly until they are just absolutely forced to.
And even then, we're going to struggle with it.
And so on, because there's this notion in America where we can't really make a decision that is Political in the real sense of the word.
The government is there to maintain your individualistic lifestyle or to keep the economy buzzing and the stock market up.
And the notion that, at least domestically, or do other things like be a therapeutic state, as Paul Godfrey described it, is, you know...
Promoting tolerance and diversity and transsexuality or whatever, which now seems to be an injunction of the government, but it can't actually handle real political decisions.
And this reminded me of two thinkers whom I admire quite a bit, one of whom is Carl Schmitt.
Oh, I guess we could drink to that one, that I or Keith mentioned Schmitt.
I'm out of coffee.
And the other one is Sam Francis, who was a great American kind of political columnist and so on, but who inflected all of his writing with very important theory.
But, you know, Schmidt had this notion of the total state, and it's a notion that is, it was kind of a bit of an ambiguous, or you could say kind of double concept.
And that lends it to be misunderstood.
He's obviously writing much of his works in the age of totalitarianism, whether it's with Mussolini using that term, there's nothing outside the state, there's nothing above the state, and so on.
I think he spoke of his totalitarian will and so on.
And then the totalitarian thinking that emerged after the Second World War and Soviet communism and And the horrors and the imagined horrors as well.
But his point was different.
It was that, in some ways, the total state is a weak state.
And what he meant by that is that a state that has been...
That doesn't have its own identity, that can't itself differentiate friend and enemy, defined territory, defined injunctions, etc.
This total state that just becomes, say, the tool of a political party, or the total state in the sense of, say, communism, what wants to revolutionize everything from the economy to the family to social life to art and culture.
Everything's in its dominion.
It becomes weak because it's...
It's kind of doing everything except what it should be doing.
And so this total state actually becomes a weak state and one that is actually going to collapse or at the very least dissipate and become extremely weak and not be able to define itself in the most basic terms.
And this reminded me of a very Schmittian concept, although I don't...
I don't know if there's a great deal of evidence that Sam Francis was reading Schmidt, or at least reading him seriously, but...
Sam Francis' concept of anarcho-tyranny.
And it's a dialectical concept, much like the total state, where it's both.
It's anarchy and tyranny.
And what he's basically saying is that the state isn't doing those things which it actually should be doing.
Defining a territory, protecting the nation, engaging in military efforts that have a purpose and clear aims and so on.
But then it's tyrannizing everything else.
So it's not...
It's tyrannizing its population through therapy and generating tolerance and endless surveillance and so on.
But then it's actually not doing those things that it needs to do.
So it's both anarchy and tyranny at the same time.
And I think these are interesting concepts to apply to the current American order.
I was tweeting about this a little bit this morning, but...
I think what we're seeing really now is that the state is weak.
And we have all of these conservatives yammering on about how we're giving up liberty for security.
And, you know, the state is going to be in all of our lives, and we have, you know, people like Roosh or Ramsey Paul, like, I'm going to go out and drink a margarita because my ancestors died for this, or I'll never take a vaccine that's given to me by the evil government.
It's this kind of American libertarian virus that is ever-present.
But then what we're seeing is a state that is actually weak and that cannot...
That cannot handle its basic business.
You know, everyone, Alex Jones and so on, wants to scream about FEMA camps, as they've been doing for two decades now.
Well, maybe this is actually a time for us to have FEMA camps.
If you cannot protect yourself from a foreign virus that has entered the nation and is threatening our lives and our livelihood and so on, then what exactly is your purpose?
This is the time for bold, ruthless action by the government, and yet the government is incapable of doing these kinds of things, whereas it puts under its domain its list of priorities promoting feminism in the Middle East, or making sure that public school teachers teach social science in a way that's not racist or transphobic.
But in the sense of doing its most basic task, we've seen it being actually extremely weak.
And so I think we are living through a kind of legitimacy crisis with the United States, but also just a decline in state power.
And yet we're not always really able to see it.
And one of those reasons is that conservatives have this bug in their head that any time the state undergoes action, it's like, And you could recognize it critically, but you have to recognize that the degree to which the government is undergirding the lifestyle which they think is theirs.
The fact that there are U.S. gunships protecting trade routes.
And so on, is undergirding this debt-fueled consumer lifestyle that all these conservatives love.
What we call free market capitalism is not capitalism.
It is a product of political and military decisions.
And, you know, to think of that as kind of like freedom or, you know, consensual or so on is to just...
And so conservatives aren't able to see where the government is actually protecting and undergirding their lifestyle.
And then they freak out and claim it's tyranny when the government kinda sorta does the things that it should be doing, that are the basic existential injunctions of a state.
They freak out when it does these things.
And I find it kind of amazing, to be honest.
That was a long rant.
You guys need to jump in here.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it's boomer tears, they say, right?
Yeah, there have been some...
Pretty bad takes with the virus.
And it goes to that fear, this fear of government, which is kind of a, I don't know if it's, you might say, because the thing is, the alt-right or the dissident right or whatever we call it now, is fed by different streams.
And one of those streams is kind of this libertarian stream.
Which has more this anxiety.
It's more for small government, and it fears anything in a kind of reflexive and dogmatic way that it represents government intrusion or government influence.
And so this is one of those examples.
And the truth of the matter is, the virus itself, there are some things that are unknown about it, but it's a global problem that many people from many nations are dealing with.
So it's not like I think...
A fear kind of emerges or a kind of logic emerges in the alt-right, for example, where people, they understand that, for example, Zionists have a disproportionate influence in our government.
That's just a kind of objective fact.
And that's had a very bad influence on our foreign policy in terms of military actions and these sorts of things.
It's also had a bad, to the extent that a Jewish lobby has been very proactive in encouraging and being effective in promoting and encouraging immigration, for example.
These things have had a bad and deleterious effect.
And so people, as a consequence, people in the alt-right just see the government as kind of Zionist occupations.
I mean, people have to kind of use their common sense, as it were.
Something like this, where...
Everyone's kind of lives are at stake, and everyone can suffer, and especially, I mean, to the extent that you understand the government is designed to occupy territory, not to speak in an overly vulgar way, I think that you can understand as well that we've seen already that the disease has disproportionately affected Jews.
APAC had a problem with this.
The synagogues have a problem with this.
And in fact, the religious communities in general, which is something I think that we'll go into on this program, have had a problem with this, including Jews, in the sense that they insist on attending worship during the quarantine.
And in fact, in Florida, what's the name of the guy down there?
DeSantis?
DeSantis, yeah.
DeSantis.
He's making this sort of exemption or allowing people to attend church or religious services.
And that's, you know, so this is not something, but my original point is that Jews are concerned with this as well.
So we shouldn't fear or we shouldn't doubt, rather, that people are looking for quarantine in an earnest manner and that it's kind of all hands on deck.
Yeah, I mean...
Well, I found it interesting.
I mean, I'm sure you guys have noticed there's been a large increase in the amount of infighting in the distant right or the alt-right or whatever.
The last few weeks have exposed, you know, on one side you have people calling everyone Nazbal, and on the other side you have people pointing out that so many supposedly alt-right people are libertarians.
But I mean, it has kind of exposed maybe the limitations of having a movement that was composed of people coming from that libertarian bent.
And it's kind of showed that as much as people talked about the libertarian alt-right pipeline, that sort of deeply ingrained libertarian attitude to the state and to affairs hasn't really been exercised for most people.
And, you know, in many ways, much of the movement kind of was just a...
a mutated form of libertarianism or liberalism.
Yeah.
Because, you know, the problem, it shows the limitations as well, which is, you know, there was a good way to criticize the state and the elite from this.
I mean, you know, we all knew about this back in January or even as early as December.
And, you know, many people saw it coming and were asking the question, why aren't states in the West closing their borders now?
And, you know, there's a good way to hold the state to account for not doing enough.
And starting from the principle, you know, that the state is there to serve the people's interests.
And then, you know, of course, the people on the other side will say, well, you know, the people occupying our state at the minute, why would you give them any extra power?
And, you know, they'll always have this caveat that, well, I'm not necessarily against the state, but it's people in power now.
But, I mean, you're seeing the problem.
Yeah, and I mean...
It's one of those things, they're like, well, how are we ever going to get power back if we give it to the state?
But again, it's that Schmittian thing of there's a visible power center rather than, you know, we've slowly been losing, been being deplatformed and having rights taken away for the last four years or longer and no one does anything because it's private firms doing it.
But I think this really exposes the limitations of that.
if there's kind of a split to come out of this.
Because, you know, you're always on the defensive.
Anything the state does, it's always, they've gone too far this time.
You're never putting forward a positive vision.
And I mean, you can see, like Boris Johnson had like a 73% approval rating.
Everyone, every Western leader's approval ratings have gone up the more totalitarian the measures.
And, you know, that's a problem when there's an appetite for...
A stronger state and for a more maybe corporatist mode of organisation rather than what we have.
And when there's a dissident movement on the sidelines that's just kind of shrieking at power and acting outraged.
You can't really influence things when that's your approach to everything.
Exactly.
And I think it's a kind of moral blackmail.
And this is coming from that liberal virus at the heart of the right, particularly the American right.
But there's this notion, you hear Stefan Molyneux say this all the time.
I mean, Stefan did actually do a good video recently where he was like, look, we're past the denial stage.
You've got to take this seriously now, and if you don't, you're going to be held to account.
So I, you know, I'll applaud Stefan for that, but he still blocked me.
But anyway, this thing you hear from Stefan Molyneux all the time, which is this blackmail, which is never give the state power that you don't want to be used against you.
And so basically, you never give the state any power, because conceivably there could be someone else controlling it who would use that against you.
When Way of the World replied to me this morning, he was like, I understand your point, but, you know, there are terrible people in the government right now.
And you kind of, I heard a lot of this during the whole Brexit debate, which is like, you know, which you heard from identitarians or white nationalists, the alt-right or whatever.
They're like, well, okay, Spencer's right.
We like the idea of a united Europe, but we can't do it now because...
You know, they're these bad feminists in government or something.
I mean, first off, all of those bad feminists, maybe even worse feminists, are in your national government.
So don't tell me that they're like unique to the European Union.
But also...
Beyond that, it's like there's always going to be a state.
There will be people who think, if we were in charge of the government, there'd be people who think that we are bad.
But we still have to rule them, and I mean that in a good sense, not in some sadistic sense.
We need to rule them in a sane and sound way.
You can't just say that we're not going to use any kind of state power or we're not going to support the state performing its most basic function just because there might be some feminist or immigration advocate somewhere in the government.
There's always going to be that aspect.
But the state is or should be external to those things.
That kind of liberal blackmail, it basically prevents you from ever doing anything, from ever saying, we're going to be on the offensive.
We are going to actually start presenting our vision of the world.
Because our vision of the world is inherently going to involve power.
At some point, we are going to force people to be free.
We are going to use the government for an end.
And if you're just constantly seeing that as an evil in itself, Which is inherent to liberalism.
Then we're never going to be able to do anything.
And we also, of all the things to criticize the government, there's so many things that are totally legitimate critiques of the European Union, of national governments, of America, of whatever.
the government actually taking a crisis seriously is the last thing we should be criticizing right now.
So I just, I don't know, I kind of, Throw up my hands.
And I also sense with a lot of these people who just have this allergy to power that it's kind of like, if that is our attitude, we are going to be this kind of like gadfly dissident movement forever.
Forever.
We're always going to be just nitpicking other people's actions.
And that's maybe useful or appropriate in some sense, but it's...
That's not going to ever get us anywhere.
We're never going to actually enact a vision if this is our starting point.
Yeah, there's a problem as well.
I mean, you know, this idea like there's people that will call themselves fascists or national socialists or something.
And it's like, well, you know, in an ideal world, if we had power, I'd do all these things.
But then on the day-to-day level...
They're libertarians, in all but name, because they're opposing everything.
And regardless of what they might say, you know, in their ideal world, if they take power, what they're going to do.
The fact is, if that's your approach, how are you ever going to get power?
Your entire approach is a rejection and a running away from power.
And there's also a problem.
What kind of people are you going to attract into the movement if the only talking points you're ever putting out there is this kind of paranoid approach to power?
I mean, I see it in Ireland like the You know, the nationalist movement is more a kind of anti-establishment movement, and it's tending to attract more and more just people that are just kind of paranoid about everything and have this sort of negative, schizophrenic approach to politics.
And, you know, maybe it's good to get numbers and to get people that are against the system, but ultimately if those people are just advocating a vacuum of power, how far is that going to get you?
Yeah, no, look, I agree.
In fact, I take more or less the opposite position, that ultimately the state is a kind of necessary—it's necessary that the state becomes a very powerful thing as a kind of, you know, as a way of securing and ameliorating a civilizational development.
The state needs to be powerful, because the problem we have now is that we—it's— Our media is not controlled by state players that ostensibly could be acting in our interests, right?
So, I mean, to World of the Way's point, yes, we don't control the state now.
That's true.
So the state often acts against our interests.
That is true.
But we do have to start presenting a vision of what we're looking for.
You know, beyond this period.
And it's not this idea that we just want to kind of be left alone.
We want to be, you know, in fact, petty nationalism is kind of just a sort of broader form of libertarianism on some level.
In the sense that it's just, you know, we want to kind of be left alone in our little enclave with our own little sort of smaller ethnic family and not, you know, not to seek to kind of control the world in a way that will actually ensure the kind of survival.
libertarianism is kind of the, is just sort of the, the, the logical, logical extension of kind of, you know, the idea of you just want to be left alone.
Well, the problem is you can't be left alone.
People have an interest in you, whether or not you have an interest in them.
They say you, you have no place to hide, right?
So in other words, you have to kind of assert and manifest yourself in the world and seek a way of dominating the world.
And the way to do that ultimately is through, you know, assertion of culture, uh, This assertion of, which ultimately becomes a kind of state expression in the sense that we have to control the media that our children are watching.
We have to, to the extent that we feel that we need to control economies to our benefit, we have to do that as well.
You know, it can't just be every man for himself.
I can kind of tie the two things together here, you know, the idea of petty nationalism and, you know, who is influencing your culture, ultimately, and the response to the COVID-19 crisis, because it's interesting, you know, the anti-establishment figures in a small country like Ireland are increasingly adopting sort of Alex Jones' language around things.
So now, things you wouldn't have seen even five, six years ago.
You know, now there's like prominent figures pushing like QAnon stuff around Trump and then all talk about, you know, vaccines.
Yeah.
And talk about, you know, vaccines, chemtrails, not FEMA camps, but similar kind of language around martial law.
And like, this is something that was never a part of Irish discourse, even on the sidelines, even on the extremes.
And this is like a direct result of interaction with sort of...
I guess, American, like, internet politics.
Like, the Steve Bannon, Alex Jones-type discourse around politics is kind of infecting discourse here.
And, you know, libertarianism is never something that was natural to Europeans.
But you do see libertarian ideas increasingly being pushed and becoming popular in Europe.
I mean, I think Salvini in Italy was, like, advocating a flat tax, and I think there's countries in the Baltics that have, like, implemented flat tax based off, like, U.S. think-tanks economic proposals.
So, you know, you're seeing, again, that shift away, like libertarianism is the ultimate rebuttal of that rootedness, and you're seeing that take hold in Europe, and that's a direct result of the cultural hegemony of the U.S. now, especially with the Internet.
Yeah.
All right.
Bookmark.
Do we have anything more to say on this?
Yeah, well, one thing I wanted to add was...
We should maybe talk about the eugenics question a little bit.
That's another interesting kind of Twitter thing that's going around that we should squash.
But go ahead.
Sure.
Yeah, well, you anticipated me.
So that was...
Yeah, so there is kind of one idea that's floating around in our sphere, and this is the idea that it actually could have a sort of healthy or strengthening or eugenic effect if we just said, you know, screw it.
Whether or not the government is lying to us, it doesn't matter.
We should break these quarantines, and the government should not be imposing these quarantines, and we should just let the disease run its course and kill off everyone's grandmother, effectively.
This idea is not a good idea, but it's a kind of understandable idea, and I think that it emerges from an anxiety about people having financial difficulties right now, which I think we should all be sensitive to, because people are experiencing financial difficulties.
People who have small businesses are going out of business.
I've lost some business as well, personally.
So I understand the kind of instinct to be like, Let's get back to work so we can feed our family, we can pay the mortgage, or whatever the case may be.
And so this is all very kind of understandable.
But I think that to make a eugenic argument is incorrect.
I don't think that you can make a strong eugenic argument.
Here's the thing.
It's not good if the older generation dies off.
And it's not, you know, kind of nature taking its course.
First of all, we don't even really kind of know the origin of this virus, but the whole idea of nature taking its course.
I mean, humans develop to kind of protect themselves, as it were, which includes also protecting their old and protecting their young.
This is something that we're evolved for, and that's a good thing.
There is a value in old people.
They contain wisdom.
They take care of your children.
You love them, right?
Right.
I mean, there is a kind of basic human value, and we no longer are living in Iceland and Germany.
So that, this idea is a kind of, I don't think many people are advocating for this, but I don't think that a disease would have a eugenic effect.
I guess one idea, one argument you could make is that, well, there's all these sort of wealth-bearing boomers, for example, and if they die off, some of the wealth is going to go to these kids that are really strapped and need to buy homes, and therefore they'll be able to start having more children.
The whole thing, right?
Or they'll be able to get back to work and provide for their family support, and therefore will be able to have more children, young white couples.
And so that argument is flawed because the reason that wealth, the wealth and decadence of the West has not proven that it's able to produce fertility or children.
Right?
So the wealthier we get does not mean that we are having more children.
No.
It's the opposite.
Yeah, it means the opposite.
Because you always can be, this kind of American dream where it's in a manner, it's keeping up with the Joneses, but it's, you know, it's not really the Joneses because no one really has class in that sort of old sense.
It's keeping up with the guy who has the McMansion across the, you know, across the neighborhood or whatever the case may be.
And so...
That wealth is not going into fertility.
That problem is ultimately a cultural problem.
And you could make the argument for example which I was making on Twitter is that The fact that if we suffer a strong economic downturn, those would produce actually more eugenic conditions.
Now, my argument is more nuanced than that, and I'm not saying, wouldn't it be great if we all suffered a horrific economic downturn, which may be kind of inevitable at this point, frankly.
I mean, so one of the arguments that is kind of a trope of the alt-right is this idea that the communists emerged in a kind of healthier way from communism.
You know, part of it because they suffered and they learned a kind of strong political lesson, but also because they were impoverished.
They were in a way that they hadn't been previously because communism was a way of...
It was basically a kind of way of retarding their economic development.
So they became impoverished because communism didn't work in the sort of manifestation that appeared in the Soviet Union.
But we see another example of that in the 30s, when the world suffered an economic depression.
So this idea that we emerged stronger from the 30s, and you can't say that's totally false.
I think in some ways that people did emerge stronger.
Like it did have a kind of sort of eugenic effect, or it did play a kind of natural selection role.
And then, of course, one of the sort of consequences of it were the terrible world wars that would follow, and these had a dysgenic effect.
Some of our best people were dying in these wars.
So I think the idea is that that travesty will have, whether it's an economic downturn or whether it's the disease killing off the old people, which has no eugenic benefit because it's just killing off old people.
But let's say an economic downturn.
Our mind should be more not on how these conditions Could benefit us in some eugenic manner, or this is sort of a Ragnarok or a season that we go through and that we're going to kind of emerge stronger.
We should be thinking more about how do we, as a people, control these conditions?
That should be more our mentality.
How do we direct our people in a healthier, in a more fertile and eugenic direction in a conscious manner?
Not because some travesty occurred and Look, these travesty—I mean, to take that to its logical extension, then we should be—I mean, it's completely insane to take it to its logical extension, as you know.
And the other thing, too, I would add as well is that, I mean, wealth is not necessarily connected to decadence or degeneracy.
We should want to be prosperous and wealthy.
That's absolutely the case.
The problem then is, again, it's a cultural and ultimately a religious problem where we have to, what is the ethos of the society?
What is that wealth being moved toward?
Is that wealth being moved toward more children?
And thinking about mating in a kind of more eugenic manner because media is developed in a more positive way that's affirmative in a direction toward our people.
So I just think that these kind of discussions are just, They're kind of inane because we shouldn't be looking, you know, for these sort of accidents to improve us or these travesties to improve us.
We should be looking toward improving ourselves in a kind of conscious and intelligent way.
Right.
Well, what's interesting is most of the people using this argument now about eugenics are the same people that would totally oppose anyone that mentioned.
The state kind of consciously using eugenics.
And, you know, it's easy to forget, like, in the interwar period, eugenics was a very popular idea among academics, sort of the intelligentsia.
I think this is kind of like this, again, this, like, post-World War II idea that, like, the worst thing imaginable is that there'll be, you know, there'll be a state body that's the ultimate decider.
And it's like, even with eugenics, it's like this kind of liberal idea of, like, the, you know, the invisible hand.
We're really against tyranny and silence and freedom of speech if it's a government doing it.
But if market forces put someone in a position and they decide to do it, it's okay.
It's weird.
It's kind of a similar thing with eugenics.
We'd never in a million years allow something so horrifying that...
The state would encourage eugenics.
But if it's this impersonal thing like a virus that we don't choose who gets or not, then that's okay.
Because at least there's no decider.
At least no one is using biopower to decide on life.
It's the opposite.
We could engage in eugenics in a totally sound fashion, and we could do it in ways that even resonate with traditionalism in the sense of...
I've heard this guy, I believe he's of Indian background.
I think he's actually from Dallas, Texas.
Sanji Enjit or something, he co-hosts this Hill podcast with Crystal Ball.
I have all these weird connections to them.
I think I was classmates with Crystal Ball, but anyway.
Although we didn't know each other.
But he was saying, like, this is what the new right is.
It's basically which political party is going to help you get married and have a solid job by age 30, and therefore have a family.
And, you know, that's kind of basic bitch.
It's kind of Tucker Carlson type stuff.
But it's not wrong, and it's not bad.
In the sense of part of eugenics should be, we don't want a bunch of penniless millennials.
You know, barely, you know, struggling, barely making it and thinking that they have no future because they're saddled with a hundred grand in college loan debt and they can't afford health insurance and they just feel like they're just keeping their mouth above water just barely.
We don't want that.
During your 20s and...
Early 30s, that's when you should be kind of slowly settling down, having children.
And the fact that even more intelligent people who, I don't know, went to graduate school or have kind of some aspiration in their life that they don't just want to be a laborer.
They actually want to do something with meaning and so on.
Those people are being impoverished and not having children.
That is not eugenic at all.
And, you know, the social Darwinism of free market capitalism just does not hold at all.
It might actually be the reverse.
We're harming people who we want to be, you know, producing children and so on.
Yeah, I mean, again, it's like the state is the entity that could rationally do this, where we could say, we're going to help people, you know, put them in a position where they can feel comfortable and stable, and they're not burdened with debt for their entire lives, and they can actually have children.
We're going to bring really sensible family planning to places like Africa, so that we don't have these population exclusives.
that leads to these just unsustainable populations and so on.
We can do this in a rational and reasonable manner.
And liberals will, of course, never use the word eugenics in a million years because it evokes images of Hitler and so on, but that is what they want for Africa to a large degree.
And it's like a state...
Can do this in a sensible, insane fashion.
But just relying on the global economy or some terrifying virus that emerged from a Chinese wet market to do this for us because no one takes responsibility, no one's to blame.
