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July 14, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:01:17
Who's Cancelling the Cancellers?
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It's Tuesday, July 14th, 2020, and welcome back to the McSpencer Group.
Grindelwald did nothing wrong.
This week, I'm joined by Edward Dutton and Tyler Hamilton.
First topic, who's canceling the cancelers?
Did you ever post some edgy shit on an anonymous chat forum?
Do you think that gender might, in fact, be real?
Well, you'll probably soon find yourself cancelled.
But never fear.
If you're a best-selling author of young adult fantasy fiction or a tenured researcher at a neoconservative think tank, you can publish an open letter expressing your devotion to free thought and liberal principles and your status will be secured.
Otherwise, you'll just be fired.
The panel discusses the ins and outs of cancel culture.
Okay, so I wanted to talk about the dominant political dynamic of our age, at least on the intellectual scene, and that is cancel culture or canceling and what this means.
Obviously, we can complain about it, but I think it's more important to understand it.
So recently, there was some...
Pushback against the cancelers that was apparently led by J.K. Rowling and of Harry Potter fame.
Wildly popular books that are pretty extremely shallow, in my opinion.
I've never quite gotten the whole Harry Potter thing, but then I'm not a millennial.
I actually have listened to one of the books and was not impressed.
But J.K. Rowling has basically put forth the wild and outlandish extreme right notion that biological sexes do in fact exist, but that doesn't mean that she wants to undermine all of her trans friends.
And for that, she's been called a TERF and other epithets.
And I don't know if they'll be able to really cancel her.
She's a multimillionaire at this point and wildly popular with young people.
But just the fact that there is pushback against someone like Rowling is remarkable.
And kind of demonstrates the lengths that they will go.
They will even destroy their favorite childhood stupid fairy tales.
But she put out something in Harper's this week that was co-signed by a number of liberal and neoconservative intellectuals, some journalists, some academics.
And so there is pushback against this in some way.
But I think the main thing about it is that I think the boomer liberals and neocons are going to lose this battle.
Because all of the energy is on the other side.
So anyway, before we start kind of diving into cancel cultures, again, you know, every conservative show will complain about this phenomenon.
I think it's more important to kind of get beneath the surface and understand it.
But Tyler, do you have any kind of opening remarks on canceling?
Yeah, I mean, I saw the letter, you know, some of the figures in there, of course, were remarkably consistent.
So you have people like Noam Chomsky in there, who's always been on the side of free speech against canceling no matter the cost.
And so to me, there was a consistency in a lot of people that signed it.
But then you also have others who are obviously very culpable when it comes to cancel culture anyways, at least in their actions in the past and how they've supported it on other people when they go against it.
them.
So my initial thought upon reading and discovering this whole controversy was really the fact that it seems to me to be more of an inter-elite conflict rather than anything to actually do with the phenomenon that we see right now, where average working people are being canceled in a far worse way than the word canceled encapsulates.
They're having mobs on Twitter go after their jobs and every facet of their livelihood over something they might have said six or seven years ago even.
And that's where we are right now.
And so you have this inter-elite conflict between these various figures who themselves are a And then the whole actual, you know, what we experience as cancel culture, which is affecting the lives of everyday people, is completely lost in that dialogue.
Yeah.
Also, I would agree with Tyler.
Yes, it's totally...
I looked at this on my show a while ago.
It's a steaming hypocrisy of these people.
I mean, basically, they're afraid that they're going to come for them next.
That's it.
And they may well be right.
They're realising when you're in a cultural revolution like we are in, that it's...
An example we looked at on the show with Keith was Munster and the Anabaptists and all this kind of thing.
What did they do?
First, the Anabaptists came for the Catholics and smashed up all the Catholic churches and whatever.
And once they'd done that, then, of course, they go for the next stage, which is the Lutherans, which is other Protestants.
And they, as it were, cancel them in the 16th century equivalent of cancelling, which is killing.
And this is what they're obviously concerned about, and they're realising it's going to affect them.
They will be targeted next.
And so what can they do?
Well, one way is to try and calm it down, which is exactly what the Lutherans did.
They realised, Martin Luther and whatever, realised it was becoming absolutely insane, and it could even sweep over him and whatever.
And so therefore there was this magisterial reformation, which was this kickback against the radical reformation of these nutters of the Anabaptists.
And so that's what you'll see.
They've had to make a decision.
It's quite a difficult decision for them.
Do I shut up and hope they don't come for me?
Or am I so convinced they may well come for me that I will use the last effort and energy and power that I have to try and calm this down, reverse this insanity, which I have helped to set off.
Right.
And that's what they've done.
Look at the list of people.
Look at the kind of people.
Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 year rule.
Race differences in sport.
Nothing to do with genetics, apparently.
Naomi Chomsky, who said that if you research race differences, you are ipso facto a racist.
Right.
These are the kind of people that we're dealing with.
They're not in favor of freedom of expression.
They're not in favor of scientific freedom.
They're in favor of themselves and their own interests and preserving themselves.
And that's why they've written this letter.
And so it's an attempt to calm down this cultural revolution.
It's quite predictable, really.
Yeah, I mean, I sincerely hope that they come for them next.
I mean, the other thing, David Frum is on that.
A very famous person for canceling the paleos in the pages of National Review.
I mean, that's in a way the least of his crimes.
But the idea that we would want to stick up for any of these people, I mean, I might stick up for J.K. Rowling if she actually wrote good books that were expanded people's imagination.
But being the fact that she writes crap, yeah, feed her to the wolves.
I don't care about a single person on that list.
The other thing is that...
I like them.
Oh, go ahead.
Go ahead.
I like the way that she stood up against this transsexualism insanity.
I mean, I like, you know, obviously I do think she's taken a risk by doing that.
She did, she did.
I mean, she's prepared to publicly question this ridiculous dogma, and she's doing so with a person that has some influence.
So on credit, she has done that.
But if you look at the nature of the books, there's plenty, because that's the thing with this offence culture.
You can always find something.
It's not about being rational or reasonable or fair.
If you want to look for it, then you will find something.
And you can find something.
Of course you could find something in her.
You could talk about, if you wanted to, if you wanted to push it that far, anti-ginger prejudice.
Having one ginger boy and calling him Weasley, like a weasel.
You could try and insinuate this relates to racism, perhaps, and her views on race.
Oh, and look, she doesn't have any non-white characters among the main characters in Harry Potter, or any gays, to the extent that she had to retrogressively declare that one of her characters was gay.
I've only read one of the books.
And then you've got this fetishisation of the public school system, of the English public school system, I mean, Eton, these kinds of places, which this is based around.
What is this other than a fetishisation of power and tradition and of all the things which these people are trying to tear down?
And so if you wanted to, if you really wanted to, you could go for her, go for the jugular with regard to those books.
I hope so.
I mean, she did push back kind of philosophically against transsexuals in the sense of saying that gender is biologically based at some level, but that shouldn't actually change our opinions of transsexual rights and so on.
So it was a rather meek pushback.
And, you know, the thing is about it, they start off from the beginning where they surrender the past before the battle's begun.
So they basically endorse all of these people canceling them on a philosophic level, but then say, oh, they just don't.
The argument was that Trump is a dictator.
That was at the beginning of the letter.
The insinuation and the wording, I don't have it in front of me, but I recall it was something like, this cancel culture will create a backlash.
Right-wing demagogues will make hay with this.
And so it was kind of trying to say to them, please stop it.
If you don't stop it, then bad...
Bad people will be empowered by this because people...
They didn't directly say it, but because people will be so upset by it.
Basically, if you create chaos, then you make people want a right-wing government.
And that's kind of what they said.
And then they went into the importance of...
They ceded everything to these nasty bullies immediately and then kind of begged them to...
So look, we've frustrated ourselves before you, but we do think this is going a bit far and it really shouldn't go so far as to affect us.
So could you leave us alone?
This is...
It is institutionally revolutionary, and we are the ones who are better at managing new people in the sense that the Steven Pinkers or David Frums or JK Rowlings of the world are the better ones who are highly placed in institutions who will throw various bones to Black Lives Matter or non-white identity politics.
And they're actually kind of seeing that these things are becoming so powerful that they're Actually creating institutional instability.
I don't think they would have done this five years ago when they felt like they had these things out of control.
But they recognize that it actually is getting out of control.
And they feel like they have to push back in some light way.
But yeah, I mean, from my perspective, you know, let the bad times roll for these people.
I will not defend them.
I think that's a good way of summing it up.
Yeah, they recognize it's got to a point where it is out of control.
It's like the popular reformation.
It's out of control.
Chaos.
Chaos.
You dread reading the newspaper website the next day because you think, what's it going to be now?
What now?
Who's been cancelled?
Who's been declared a heretic?
Who's been exiled from normal society, from polite society, from BBC, whatever, now?
Who's next?
Who's the next person for the show trial for the witch hunt?
And, um, it's, and they know it, it could get to a point where it swallows them.
And so they had done this.
they're just the most important cowards Stephen Pinker for example oh yeah he's really in favour of free speech he's the person that with regard to my my perfectly reasonable and cautious defence of Kevin MacDonald's paper sort of He said in public that it should never have been published.
He couldn't believe it had been published.
It was terrible.
It was awful.
And sort of put pressure on the editor of the journal to come out with a statement against it and all this kind of thing.
And now, of course, they go for him.
They go for him in terms of this survey, this petition against him, and they go for him in terms of this council culture he's scared of with the letter.
And, of course, it strikes me he might have other problems which will come to life and on.
But, you know, it's...
It's utter cowardice.
And then one of them, of course, drew her name from it.
She said, oh, I wouldn't have, or he, or this transsexual person on it, said, I wouldn't have signed it if I'd known J.K. Rowling would sign it.
I'm really in favor of free speech.
I wouldn't have signed it if I'd known that bitch signed it.
Absolutely extraordinary.
So even among themselves, they're not united.
Yeah, well, it's like with Rowling's case, right?
She helped create this before it got out of hand when she declared Dumbledore retroactively gay.
Yeah, that was the one.
And then there's a backlash among the fans.
And then they were, you know, like, you're not a real fan if you don't accept that Dumbledore is gay because she said that you're homophobic or whatever.
So she helped create and insulate this mass consul culture from the mob mentality.
Now, though, it's getting out of hand because these other elites, like Daniel Radcliffe, for example, who's like...
He responded to her tweets, and he's like, you know, Rowling may be famous.
She may be a part of the elite, but I can't endorse this, and I have to speak out against her in this.
It's just this way in which inter-elite warfare is coming up, and they recognize the tide is coming for them, and so they're trying to be the ones who can sit on top of it and attack the other ones, right?
And so then you have even people on the letter, a few of them, like Ed was mentioning the one who was like, oh, I wouldn't have signed it if Rowling was on there, but there was a...
Others are saying, I've reconsidered it after the pressure.
You know, they're right.
Maybe cancel culture isn't really real at all.
They're just holding us accountable for our speech, right?
Of course, anyone knows when you're actually a victim of cancel culture, it's not holding you accountable for your speech.
It's preventing you from your livelihood.
The only people where it's holding them accountable for their speech are people like J.K. Rowling, who are multimillionaires, who have no possible real consequence to their livelihood from being canceled.
Right.
Yeah, and I think it's worth mentioning someone else who got cancelled this week, and this opens up another line of discussing this matter.
Obviously, a week, ten days ago, we were all cancelled, at least from YouTube.
I actually...
I thought we were going to hang on there for a moment, but alas, no.
We'll work it out, but it actually is clearly detrimental in terms of reaching a wider audience and ultimately being monetized, and that's what it's all about.
And it's, in a way, far less detrimental from the canceling from payment processors, which is something that has gone on for quite some time, and that is where it...
You know, the rubber hits the road, and it really affects your pocketbook.
But there was another interesting thing.
And there was this case of this young person named Blake Neff, who is someone that I had heard about.
He wrote for the Daily Caller, that I understand.
I had heard about him a few years ago as, you know, one of these various hour guys working in the conservative movement.
And then he became, apparently, the chief writer for Tucker Carlson's program, Tucker Carlson Tonight.
And he bragged to, and I think probably accurately bragged to his college newspaper, that, you know, anytime Tucker says something on television, I wrote the first draft.
And that probably is true.
I'm sure he has these writers doing these work, these scripts that he looks over and approves, but I have no doubt that he has people like Blake Neff writing them.
CNN went after—I'm forgetting what the journalist's name is, Darby or Darcy.
Anyway, I've heard of him for a number of years now.
But they went after him, and they found this web forum that I had never heard of, but is supposedly a hotbed of red-pilled dialogue of some sort.
And they found all of these comments by Blake Neff that were— Kind of, I don't know, maybe something you could hear on this show.
Certainly things that I've heard a million times on Twitter or in private company that were kind of red-pilled talk about race and women and crime and all that kind of stuff.
But said in rather humorous, juvenile, kind of tongue-in-cheek manner.
So, I mean...
Was I offended by anything that he wrote?
No.
Was that stuff meant for public?
No.
And I think we should have a right to some kind of space where we can crack a joke and not feel like this is going to be secretly recorded and broadcast on the internet.
Or we can express ourselves in some way.
I think carving out that private space.
So basically, I don't have any problem with what he said whatsoever.
But, you know, again, it gets to this point with Tucker.
And apparently, according to some of these reports that I read, Tucker will address this subject on Monday's show.
So we'll see what happens.
But Tucker complained.
And Tucker's not the only one.
He's just the most famous and maybe most articulate.
This is a longtime theme on Fox News discourse, which is that the left is about canceling people.
They don't believe in free speech.
Blah, blah, blah.
They're out of control.
And really, what would it mean?
You know, this is like almost Dave Rubin.
What does it even mean to be right?
That just means that you're interested in ideas and so on.
This is one of the narratives that they present about themselves, which is a completely false one.
The fact is, Tucker accepted his resignation, Blake Neff's resignation, or fired him.
Fox News condemned him.
So they did not say, you know, well, we hope he gets his life together and he's going to take a break or something like that.
They condemned him, which is a slightly...
A little bit different than that.
They also sent a message to these dozens of alt-right or alt-right friendly people who work in the conservative movement and write for the Daily Caller or write for Tucker Carlson.
And basically, the message was loud and clear.
We will find out about you.
You cannot post anything on Facebook or some web forum that I had never heard of.
I don't know if it's famous or not.
We will find you, we will target you, and we will destroy you.
That is the message that people should have heard a long time ago.
But again, did Blake Neff do anything that was immoral?
No.
Did he do something that might have been unwise?
Sure.
Okay.
But the fact is...
Tucker, Fox, the Conservatives engaged in the exact same cancelling that they have been engaging in for decades.
And that actually does go back to the beginning of the Conservative movement.
Go ahead, Ed.
No, I was going to say, the worst thing about it is that it's such a basic thing that if you give in to bullies...
Then bullies don't just go, OK, yeah, I'll bully about that.
That's fine.
They'll find something else and something else and something else.
Ultimately, they're motivated by a kind of death wish, by a kind of death lust to destroy what are the target of their bullying.
And there's evolutionary reasons why this happens.
But anyway, that's what they do.
And so if you give in, if you give ground, then that's one of the reasons why things always push leftwards, because the right always gives that ground.
Because once the left are the people who dictate what is respectable, who dictate what is polite society, who have got to a point where what is polite society, what is acceptable in public is what they say it is, then in order not to have the sort of stigma of being a dissident surrounding you, which I think the people like Fox don't really want, they don't want to be seen as dodgy, extreme, therefore they will always placate them and they will always give in in situations like this.
The mail online is a bit like this.
So on the one hand, it will campaign for free speech and whatever, but on certain things, it will completely cuck and just give in to leftist pressure.
But who are the bullies?
Are the bullies really the left or the conservatives themselves?
I mean, conservatives engaged in this kind of behavior long before cancel culture began.
And I think they are actually more culpable.
In terms of the suppression of free speech and dialogue and, you know, alternative ideas than the left is.
And, I mean, I think it's kind of a convenient narrative for them to tell themselves that, like, there are all these bullies out there, these journalists who are doing this to us, when it's they who are doing it.
And they've been doing it for decades.
But they're doing it because they're giving in to that pressure.
They're doing it because they're weak.
I hate them, too.
All I'm saying is that they are the ones enforcing their own dogma.
And I think it's almost letting them off the hook to say that they're weak.
They're sinister.
And they're not weak when it comes to other issues.
In terms of other issues that are actually important to them and important to their ideology, they will defend people to the death.
No one got canceled because Ben Shapiro quite literally called for displacement, ethnic cleansing, you could say, of Palestinians.
And every conservative would lay down the gauntlet for him.
But they won't lift a finger when someone posts some edgy content on some web forum that no one saw outside of...
a bunch of kids in their basements.
So I don't know.
I feel it's like it's letting conservatives off the hook to say that there Yeah, I mean, when you take a look back, I mean, the left critique of the conservative emphasis on free speech is not entirely wrong, really.
I mean, they're kind of trying to set the tone for who has the hegemony to actually determine which ideas are going to disseminate and they're going to gatekeep those ideas.
You had the same dynamic all the way going back to the neocons versus the paleocons and who won out on that.
You look at the free speech movement in the 60s.
I mean, they were largely leftist.
Of course, there's always a cynicism in that because now that they have, you know, they've moved the Overton window, they're the ones enforcing these very same rules.
And that's the way these things always play out.
So it's really about who can actually set the tone for dialogue and who is going to be gatekeeping access to other kinds of speech that aren't allowed.
What is the purpose of it?
Like Tucker Carlson's show, if you look at what he's saying and what Blake Neff is saying in these comment forms, they're not really that different from Tucker Carlson's own ideas.
They're just stated in a very more rugged or more honest way, you could say.
And so what it seems to me is it's more of an effort of gatekeeping, which is the same thing we see with...
Maybe Tucker Carlson's show in general, which, you know, I do like some points that he makes on that show.
But it's the same phenomenon that conservatives have always engaged in, is setting the parameters for around what actually constitutes free speech.
And then so once you get to topics of like Israel or AIPAC or things like that, and next thing you know, poof, these free speech advocates, they just completely disappear.
And they're very much part of behaving like cry bullies, you know, somewhat.
Someone might call them.
And so it's interesting because they're very much a part of forming that culture, and they've been like that all throughout the conservative history.
And to me, so battles over free speech isn't really about free speech.
It's about who gets to set the parameters for what is socially unacceptable, like what's verbatim, off-topic.
You can't reach that because it's somehow sacred, right?
Questioning Israel is wrong because it's morally wrong to do so in Zionist America, right?
I suppose you could argue that one of the problems with conservatism in the sense of mainstream conservatism is that they are kind of almost by their very nature against things which are radical.
So radical conservatism, anything that rocks the boat seriously, anything that seriously questions the status quo, even though the status quo is being pushed in a constantly left-wing direction.
If they push back against that in a moderate way, then that's fine.
But if they push back against it in a pronounced and clear and divisive...
And charismatic way, like Enoch Powell, let's say, in Britain in 1968, then that's too much.
Because that's incendiary.
And they don't like that.
That's too much locking the vote.
That's too much.
And therefore he gets sacked.
And I think that's the thing with the conservatives.
They have these values which parallel those of the people who are, let's say, radical conservatives or extreme conservatives, but they don't like controversy.
They don't like rocking the boat.
They don't like incendiary, which causes a lack of control.
They don't like sincerity and seriousness, I think.
I have not heard very many denunciations of, say, QAnon.
And I'm sure you could find some here and there.
But generally speaking, QAnon is going with the flow.
It might be totally wacky and fraudulent.
And risible, but it is going with their general flow, and they're not going to denounce it at all, despite the fact that it actually is a huge phenomenon of wild conspiracy theorizing going on the right.
But it ultimately supports the GOP and it supports their foreign policy and business agenda.
And they're not going to go against it.
You can go back to the early stages of the purges with William F. Buckley and see this very similar dynamic.
Um, so the John Birch Society was much, much larger than it is now.
I think the John Birch Society is still around and they still publish some pieces, uh, but they're way out of the mainstream.
And I can't even remember the last time someone, I saw an article by them, but they are still publishing.
They were, uh, an extremely powerful organization that was attracting actually a lot of good people, kind of civic leaders, businessmen, um, kind of middle American types, uh, but people who had money and influence of some kind.
Uh, certainly they weren't attracting the, you know, East coast elite, but they were attracting people who, uh, were actually powerful in their way.
Um, they were purged, uh, because, uh, Robert Welch, uh, was in opposition to, uh, the Vietnam war.
Robert Welch and the Birchers supported the Goldwater campaign before Buckley and them did.
They might have even given them the idea.
But Buckley and the conservatives purged them when they went against real...
The real power agenda of the state.
And at that point, they brought out all this conspiracy theory stuff.
And then later on, they started to claim that they were racist and anti-Semitic, which the Birch Society actually was in fact not.
And they just kind of tell this story about how Buckley, you know, cleaned up the right and saved the right from anti-Semitism or something, when he didn't do that in the slightest.
He actually had anti-Semitic friends, Revelo Oliver being a major one.
But it was basically when the Birchers opposed the power agenda that he decided to, you know, engage in a kind of destructive, a destruction of them, which was successful.
And so, again, you can be wacky.
You can be out of bounds.
You can say all sorts of nonsense, and conservatives will more or less defend you so long as you are going along with their agenda.
If you say something that is sincere and sincerely divisive in the sense of, you know, I mean this, and there are implications to the words that I'm saying.
This isn't just me mouthing off on Facebook about my ex-girlfriend.
No, this is actually a sincerely held belief that has implications and that means that we have to change our lives.
The connecting thread here is lack of sincerity.
What I always found interesting about the right-wing in America is this connection it's always had with allowing a proliferation of conspiracy theories.
You could say things like "Obama is secretly a reptile." And then this will be allowed.
This is acceptable discourse.
And it's always been bound up, partly from the history with Cold War paranoia, then partly just that legacy carrying on forward.
So you have this allowance for...
As any wackier conspiracy theory that you can possibly have.
And then conservatives like to present themselves as like dangerous truth tellers, right?
We've uncovered the real conspiracy or we're going to stick it to the PC crowds when we do our university tour and Crowder is going to tell the real dangerous truth that nobody wants to hear.
But of course, we know the moment that you actually say something sincere about, you know, maybe we, you know, AIPAC has a role in our...
International affairs, right?
Then it's like, okay, well, you can't say that.
We've got to shut you down.
And like I was saying earlier, then all of a sudden, poof, they disappear.
And it's interesting to me how these leftovers or these conspiratorial thinking that's so allowed because it services the interests of the elites and distracting you from the real issues, is it spills over into these same terrains as well.
I mean, that's why you get endless comments saying, oh, well, maybe...
Because Spencer has a picture with the Bush that he's secretly a Fed working blah blah blah.
These very same currents run through all notions of the right in America, not just mainstream conservatives, but it's within our own spheres as well.
It's very prevalent.
And it's a huge problem to try and get over that, because when you're trying to appeal to people and get them on board, you're always stuck with these leftovers of conspiratorial and libertarian thinking that just permeates.
All the political atmosphere.
They don't like anything radical.
That's the point.
And so sometimes things that are radical have to be proposed and things that are radical have to be done and decisive things have to be done.
And in those kinds of situations, often there are exceptions.
Someone like Mrs. Thatcher perhaps in some ways was an exception.
There was a difficult situation.
There was this thing with the Falklands.
The Argentines invaded the Falklands.
A decision had to be made.
The Belgrano had sailed into the exclusion zone around the Falklands.
What do we do?
And she made that decision that was dramatised in the movie The Iron Lady, you know, sink her.
And that's it.
Someone like Boris Johnson is much more of a conservative, or David Cameron.
They don't want to have to do things like that.
It goes against their instincts to have to do radical things.
And when you're in a situation of a cultural revolution like this, then what you need is to stop it or to confront it, is decisive action.
And that's what I was referring to earlier about Enoch Powell.
What he was saying was there are terrible things happening in the land.
And we need to do something decisive.
We need to do something dramatic.
We need to do something radical in order to stop this, in order to nip this madness in the bud, as he saw it.
But a conservative of the Edward Heath kind, they can't do things like that.
They would freeze in the headlights like rabbits in response to that kind of thing happening.
And that's their problem.
As far as I'm concerned, in situations of crisis, in situations of non-crisis, then fine, they can manage things and they'll be quite calm and whatever.
But this is not the situation we're in.
We're in a situation of basically existential crisis for the West that's been pinpointed into this.
And they've prevented the rise of people who actually would do something decisive.
I mean, and they have, every one of those people you mentioned.
And so one of the fundamental reasons why nothing can really be done No, indeed.
Well, this is probably what interests me about it, is because we're talking about cancel culture, this division and battle between elites, which it is, but at the same time, the cultural purge is happening on a mass scale, right?
It's hundreds of thousands of people participating in it and allowing it to happen, and as we were talking about the conspiratorial thinking and the gatekeeping occurring even within the right and within the distant right, it spills over the exact same attitudes, usually without people knowing it.
Is it self-purging of any...
Actual challenging authority that could rise up or movement that could actually say no.
Because it's always, you're attacking, ultimately at the end of the day, you're attacking a large cultural revolution mass, which as well has its origins in battles between elites.
That's infecting every manner of how we actually think and engage politically on the online sphere and in the real world, right?
And so you're always pushing against this mass, and it's always nameless, and it's always overwhelming.
And this is why it's so hard to get proper organization going, because that's thinking spills into it.
And everyone starts to get very distrustful.
You immediately cancel somebody like the moment you hear, OK, well, this person shook hands with somebody at a conference years ago.
They're secretly working for Russia.
But this permeates everything.
And it's a part of the same cancel culture that the left and the liberal left.
We're very much a part of that.
Citizen right is not culpable.
Right.
I think I would also add that there's a trend over the last two to three years and one that's really been accelerated in the last three months.
And that is that the online cancel culture is starting to reach new people.
It's starting to reach the white middle class.
And it is increasingly moving from online into real-world matters.
So I can remember with the alt-right in 2017 and Charlottesville and all that kind of stuff, there was this huge engagement in doxing of people who attended that rally.
And it quickly moved from doing the typical attack on Richard Spencer or whatever that we had seen for months, and which wasn't really affecting me at all, to let's figure out who that one guy was in the polo shirt holding up a tiki torch, and let's figure out where he works.
And let's get him fired.
And they were successful in some pretty dramatic ways.
There was actually one young person who I had never met or even heard of, who after being doxed, committed suicide.
And he was actually, I believe his last name was Dodson.
And he was actually someone who was an impressive young man who was doing research of some kind.
He was doing intellectual activity.
But there were also attacks on people who were so far out of the way.
of power, the idea that you're going to attack them is just grotesque.
People who had blue collar jobs, who attended something.
Oh, we need to get them fired from the restaurant where he's working.
It's obscene.
Let's put this in different terms.
I did a book many, many years ago on a collateral ancestor of mine called Sapir's Dutton.
It was called The Ruler of Cheshire.
Sapir's Dutton, Tudor Gangland and the Violent Politics of Palatine.
And what you have when you have a breakdown in law and order, which is what you had in Tudor England and particularly Tudor Cheshire, it was extremely lawless, beyond the control of the crown, it was this Palatine anyway, is that you just have gang warfare.
That's what you have.
That's what happens.
If you go to, let's say, London, the Catholic part of London, that's what you have.
The British government aren't really in control in parts of these areas.
It's gangs.
It's gang warfare.
And that's what you have.
Now, if you look in Tudor England, you can see it.
You can see it whenever there's gangs is you go for the weaker members of each other's gangs.
Because those are the easy targets.
So you kill off.
There's two rival gangs.
Fighting control of some particular part of Cheshire.
And so you get a court case which says that this person killed one of Sapir Dutton's servants.
The servant was all-encompassing.
Anybody in his gang is his servant, is his retinue.
But it would be someone low down, a husbandman, a yeoman farmer, someone like that, because those are the people you can easily get to their property and kill them.
And then, oh, and then as a consequence, then a load of people from the other gang, William Brereton or whatever, lay in wait for some people.
And that was more effective.
Ultimately.
Yeah.
Yeah, I remember going after Kyle Bristow, who was acting as my lawyer, and so on.
Yeah, going after...
Support, buttressing support, is absolutely more effective than doing yet another article on how Richard Spencer's evil.
And that was what effectively destroyed the alt-right.
But I guess to return to the longer thread that I was making, so we had that in 2017 and 2018, which was, you know, grotesque in many ways.
And then now you have people getting cancelled in real life in really real...
I don't even know if they had children, but a couple of tort lawyers who became fabulously wealthy and created this home outside of St. Louis in a gated community that seemed to evoke the Tudor age in parts as well as the 18th century.
Black Lives Matter is a cause that this couple endorsed over and over.
Then it came to their doorstep, and they stepped outside wearing khakis and dockers, carrying machine guns and pointing them at people.
And it became an amusing meme.
But their home was recently raided, and so on.
There was another now notorious example of a woman who seemed to be I would say that, you know, one of the rules of firearms is that if you ever draw your weapon, you should use it.
That is, you don't point your gun at people.
If someone is threatening your life, you draw your weapon and you fire it.
Pointing a gun creates...
Nothing good.
But that tactical critique aside, these people were in chaotic situations.
They likely feared for their life in a very genuine manner, and they were attempting to protect themselves.
Uh, these people are going to be arrested and going to be absolutely destroyed.
I think we're actually even passing over a point where being a McCloskey and, you know, suing corporations for anti-discrimination or whatever they did, or for discrimination or whatever they did and talking about how you love Black Lives Matter or whatever.
...is not enough.
And those people are being cancelled actually in a much kind of realer way than the cancellation of any suffering that I've undergone or even suffering that some people underwent by getting fired from a job.
These people are going to be depicted as national pariahs.
They might, in all likelihood, they're going to serve some kind of jail time for this offense that they committed that isn't really an offense at all.
And yeah, I think things are escalating to that point where the white upper middle class is going to be increasingly canceled, at least in
Yeah, we know how that goes as well.
I think this was just yesterday or a day before, but a mother got shot in the head.
In front of her three-year-old son and husband for saying All Lives Matter in response to a Black Lives Matter protest.
And that was what she got.
So if she was able to defend herself, well, then she would have been in a situation like the couple or the lady in front of the grocery store, who was pregnant, by the way, and they were kicking her vehicle and standing behind it so they couldn't get away and trying to beat her down, basically.
So it's this deadlock where you can't defend yourself.
And then on top of that, you have the middle class, even the upper middle class, the white upper middle class is already disappearing anyways, right?
It's being removed out of positions of influence and jobs and status.
They're already losing that to higher IQ immigration, not just mass immigration from below.
So you have that situation from the top.
And then from the bottom, you've got, you know, if you defend yourself, you're going to go to jail because this is OK.
Get hundreds of thousands of people to support you in this because you might have said the N-word or something, or you might have said all lives matter.
And the interesting thing is creating this situation, which to me reminds me of not just the legal side of this, of course, but reminds me of how we used to have honor and shame societies instead of, historically anyways, in ancient times, where you were outcast from the group.
So instead of having guilt, you had shame in the sense that the way in which you We had this case recently in Canada.
At UBC, the University of British Columbia, the administrator who was working there, he simply liked a tweet that was supporting Black Lives Matter, but was saying, maybe don't go too far with the protests, right?
And they demanded his stepping down and then They pressured him, he had gotten fired, and he wrote a letter of apology after he got fired.
And that's the strength of it, is that even once you've been outcasted, you're still trying to reconcile yourselves and redeem yourselves to this group shame that you're feeling.
And to me, that is part of the real danger of all this, is you've got the legal side, the attack on your livelihood, and with that, you have the moral justification.
Which is permeating the way in which you see yourself and try to redeem yourself to the group.
Are they really feeling shame, though, these people?
Or are they just hoping that even though after he's been fired, doing some public apology might help them in some way to get back on the ladder again?
Well, I think they're actually feeling shame.
Almost anyone I've encountered that's been called out online or something, they say how dirty they feel for even thinking that.
All right.
Like there's a strong move to make it so like this is the moral norm.
And if you're transgressing in the group in this regard, you're transgressing against something that's moral, like you're being immoral.
Right.
And that's the real strength of this.
And I've seen this dynamic play out.
I mean, yeah, maybe if you're like a conservative, outrageous speaker and you maybe overstep the bounds when you're on some tour and you're trying to be crazy, you know, I didn't really mean it that way.
Then, yeah, I doubt that they're really ashamed.
But I mean, if you're like an average.
Working person like you're an administrator or you're just like a lawyer and you say, okay, yeah.
I might have liked a clique that was a little bit too critical in Black Lives Matter.
Now I'm being socially ostracized by my family and friends.
And I mean, no man's an island.
You only have your identity in relation to the community.
It's a community saying, you know, you're failing to live up to who you should be.
I think they do feel genuine shame.
They feel like, you know, they're the morally wrong.
They're the social outcast.
I agree.
I think it is a combination of both.
I mean, there are serious incentives involved with, you know, entering the upper middle class by basically, you know, announcing a series of shibboleths.
But I also agree that we don't...
I mean, when people attack the postmodern age as...
You know, anti-moral or purely rational or something like that.
I think they get it entirely wrong.
We live in a hyper-moral age and people need that, particularly the upper middle class people who are really sensitive to that type of stuff.
Yes, I mean, it's the replacement of the sexual shame in that sense, isn't it?
A hundred years ago, it was the way that you...
Signaled your middle classness by your sexual constancy and your sexual ethics.
And then there was a period of chaos where this was all questioned and whatever.
And even when I was a child, there was an element to which middle class was about that.
And then some kind of flip over.
I don't know when it happened.
The 90s, maybe.
And it became the people that were questioning that system, the people that were the outsiders questioning that middle class system, the radicals, whatever, that were saying, oh, let's have sexual liberation.
That became the sign of middle classness.
And that and its associated, although, to be fair, even though their sexual behavior is...
It's more regulated than that of working-class people.
That's just a fact.
They can't help that.
I think it's probably a genetic issue, K-strategists, whatever.
But that became their new morality, the way you are moral.
You are moral if you are anti-racist.
That is the essence of moral.
And anyone who is a moral, that's what moral is.
And any deviation from that is a sign of immorality.
So yes, I suppose you're right.
If they've been strongly inculcated with that, that's what moral is.
That's what good is.
That's what goes to heaven.
That's heaven.
That's God.
Then you're a devil worshipper.
You're going to get a hell mate if you've been accused of these kinds of verbal...
Verbal rather than sexual inconstancy.
Rather than, oh, I've tried to be sexually pure, but I had this moment of weakness, and oh, it's so terrible, and maya cooper and shame on me.
It's I do my best to be morally pure by being anti-racist.
And I had this moment of weakness where I made a little joke about a Chinese person or whatever it was that I did.
I used the wrong word thoughtlessly.
Apparently this week the word oriental is wrong, but last week it wasn't, whatever it is.
And so, yes, I think perhaps you're right with that.
People like David Wilde, this thing in Britain, it's called Little Britain.
It's quite a funny, quite simple comedy, but quite funny and reasonably kind of prepared to mock everything, including politically correct type things.
And that's been cancelled.
That's been cancelled.
And these are people that have spent their careers, to a certain extent, they're not really over the top in this regard, but to a certain extent, they're part of this politically correct establishment that gets wheeled out on British panel shows and makes jokes.
And they've had their programme, both their programme, two of them, Little Britain and another one called Come Fly With Me, removed.
From BBC.
So I wonder how they feel about it.
Yeah, I think you are right.
I think some of them are faking it, fake it to make it kind of thing.
But I think others, they must...
I don't know what it's like, because it's part of your group, being ashamed in front of the group.
And I don't perceive left-wing middle-class people as being part of my group at all.
Well, here's the thing, I mean...
I think we can explain the origin of this new morality by looking to incentives and the carrot and the stick.
But at the same time, just because we've explained the origin doesn't explain away that to people that this is actually the truth, right?
Like this is what Foucault would call a verediction.
It creates this space of truth and justification in which knowledge power and institutional power is oriented around.
It's not that they know it's entirely constructed.
I mean, to them, that is the truth that they live.
Right.
And so we can explain it.
We can explain it with incentives and carrots and the sticks, which is all true.
But that doesn't mean the real morality of it is any less true.
I mean, that's what they actually dwell in.
That's how they understand themselves.
Yeah.
So it's like it reminds me of the studies I did when I was a postgraduate of the Christian Union.
They believe this stuff.
This is their religion.
This is how the world makes sense.
This is the means through which you compete to be the best, through which you try to get to the top.
And they balls it up, and the community aren't happy with them.
And if you were in the Christian Union, the way you balls it up was by being known as a girl to have got off with a random bloke at a nightclub, got off being snogged, you know, necked, whatever you call it in America.
And...
What do you call it?
You know, kissing with tongues, whatever.
Oh, okay.
Making out.
We call it getting off.
Anyway, and that was the thing you weren't allowed to do if you were in the Christian Union, and then there'd be gossip, and there'd be shame, and there'd be going and reconfessing your Christianity and doing a new kind of public confession.
That was what you had to do, a public confession where you admitted, basically, that you would stop being a Christian, and you'd become one again.
It was your testimony.
And often you get these people that in the first year they'd turn up, they'd be from a Christian household, and they'd go off the rails a bit.
And then in the third year, then Jesus would visit them in the shower or something.
And then there you go.
Then they do a public confession.
And that's what these people have to do in order to, a public, like what you mentioned, this guy from Canada, you have to do a public confession of your sins and hope that that will be enough.
To permit you.
And then you get, of course, an arms race in how over the top and how emotional and how self-debasing your public confession can be, as we saw with the Black Lives Matter protest.
But I can't...
At least it's not as defacing as confessing publicly that you're snogging.
Imagine saying that.
They put it in some terminology.
They used the word backsliding, which I think might be biblical in origin.
Backsliding.
That's not a form of sex, by the way.
That's a term, which means that you move away from your Christianity back towards the world.
Although if they had done that, then that would have been very bad as well.
Yeah, sorry, I digress here.
But yeah, I do think this will pass, though.
I think there is a reaction against it.
And also you have to think about what's happening behind the scenes.
You talk about these academic papers that have been withdrawn, the Council of Culture and Academia.
And there was this paper by Corrie Clark.
Her name is, she's quite a spunky fellow, really.
But she did this paper in which she looked at how...
IQ and its relationship with criminality at the national level.
And she showed that...
Anyway, the point is that it used the Lyndon Van Pen IQ data.
They then withdrew the paper, publicly withdrew the paper, because they were getting all this pressure because of Black Lives Matter, even though there's been maybe a thousand papers published using Lyndon Van Pen's data.
And obviously they're not all going to be withdrawn.
That data has been redone by somebody else who found a 0.87 correlation, which is extremely high, between his redoing of it and what Lynn did.
So, OK, there were mistakes in it and there were problems in it.
I mean, the guy's 90 years old.
But it was redone and there was no reason to draw the paper at all.
But they did because they were put under pressure and they were told, oh, if you do this, then this could happen.
If you don't withdraw it, then we'll complain to the publisher and we'll complain to the advertisers and all of these things magicked up and you get all these emails coordinated, obviously, saying, oh, and then you'll get mass resignations from the editorial board.
And all of these threats are given to you and we'll come for your work and we'll try to get an academic misconduct investigation done against you and they're normally, you know, stitched up, those kinds of things.
And so then they just caved in and shut up and hope it goes away.
But what you don't know about, I can't talk, is things going on behind the scenes.
It is happening behind the scenes that people are being pressured to withdraw their papers.
And they're not doing so.
And the journals are being pressured to withdraw their papers, and they're refusing to do so.
And entire, you know, people have resigned from editorial boards over racist papers.
And then, tough.
People are standing up against this behind the scenes.
But that you don't hear about.
You only hear about the ones that cut.
I don't think this is going to pass so easily.
I think it will reach a culmination.
And we are seeing that right now.
But it can get more intense, and I do think it will before it passes.
What do you think will happen before it passes?
Do you have any back-of-the-hand prognostications?
I think we're going to see increasing examples of the criminalization of defending yourself.
I don't think that police departments are going to be totally defunded or anything like that.
But I do think there are going to be serious reforms, quote unquote, that are going to affect crime.
I think the upper white middle class is going to be increasingly unable to insulate themselves from these issues.
But until there is a real alternative to these things, and not just people saying, well, What happened to free speech?
So much for liberal tolerance.
There won't be any real pushback.
Because, I don't know, it's kind of an all or nothing thing.
You're either dominated or you dominate.
And unless there is a new hegemonic system of people willing to force others to get in line, these people are the strong ones.
And they are going to increasingly force us to get in line.
One of the things I think we discussed a while ago and before the BLM, but during the riots, when this disorder starts to hit the middle class, when it gets to their communities, then you might see some sort of backlash against it.
And it is now hitting them.
In America anyway, not anywhere else, but in America.
It's definitely hitting them now.
I mean, it's got to be some instinct still there.
For the survival of your children, your kids don't get killed, you don't end up like a South African farmer.
There's got to be some that would hit in, I would suspect, which makes me slightly less pessimistic.
I'm ultimately not pessimistic.
I think this has to reach its culmination before another domineering force takes over.
But I don't expect much of anything from the middle class.
Well, I mean, their backlash is going to be impotent.
I mean, really, their backlash is just about this washing over them.
It's not even that they're presenting a fundamental challenge to what's going on.
They're just saying, no, we are tolerant, but you're on my property, and we've supported you all this time, and how could you do this to us?
They're not actually challenging the entire main current.
They're swimming with it, still, at the end of the day.
And any kind of backlash is just going to be like a petite bourgeois one about their own plate in the system.
And so I think that process does need to start washing over them as well.
In that sense, that may be what Ed's getting at when you have people refusing to rescind articles out of journals.
That's a form, maybe you could say, an early form of white strike.
But it's only when you reach a certain critical mass in which it starts washing over everyone and there is no solution.
At that point.
And then once you like, OK, well, if you want us to withdraw from the system, then we're going to withdraw from the system.
And that's the only way I think you can really send an effective message on this regard.
But you can only do that once you've been sufficiently cleansed.
You can't have people holding on to all these, you know, positions of, OK, well, I'm somewhat affluent.
I donate to BLM.
Right.
Just don't go on my lawn, which basically that's what we're seeing right now, which is, of course, is horrible to.
Not be allowed to defend yourself.
I'm not saying this is a good thing.
I'm just saying that's still coming out of just a position of defense, not a position of actually attacking the paradigm, which a lot of these people, of course, were going along with in the first place.
The paradigm has to be attacked at a moral level, and it has to be undermined totally in order to defeat it.
Otherwise, it's just simply going to be stronger than any kind of reactionary force.
That's what we're doing in our own little way.
I don't think what we want is for the upper middle class whites to have their way where they can say, just imagine if BLM listened to them like they're not, but just imagine that for a second.
And they'll be like, okay, we're not going to go on your property.
We're not going to loot too much.
We're just going to protest down the streets, attack more working class whites.
Or we're going to burn down our own neighborhoods or something.
It's still not good if they get their demands anyway.
So of course it's about a whole fundamental restructure in what is the moral, what is the good, and that's really what we're trying to change at the end of the day.
Alright.
That was good.
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