America, it seems, is breaking down. The BLM demonstrations just won’t end. And these “peaceful protests” are getting really violent. Cities look like war zones. Elected officials are joining in and getting gassed. Boomers, who just wanted to grill, now look like they’re ready to kill. A federal response from the the Trump administration was all but inevitable. But instead of the police or national guard taking back the streets, we get shadowy, masked figures in camouflage, driving mini vans, swooping in to apprehend organizers. What does all this mean? Is this the long-awaited of re-assertion of authority? Or does this reveal weakness and sympathy with the protests? Does Washington view its own territory much like it does the Middle East—a place full of foreigners, where the only form of engagement is “black ops"? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
It's Sunday, July 26th, 2020, and welcome back to the McSpencer Group.
We submit to the Schmidt.
Joining me today are Edward Dutton and Tyler Hamilton.
First topic, anarcho-tyranny in action.
America, it seems, is breaking down.
The BLM demonstrations just won't end, and these peaceful protests are getting really violent.
Cities look like war zones.
Elected officials are joining in and getting gassed.
Boomers who just wanted to grill now look like they're ready to kill.
A federal response from the Trump administration was all but inevitable.
But instead of the police or National Guard taking back the streets, we get shadowy masked figures in camouflage, driving minivans, swooping in to apprehend organizers.
What does it all mean?
Does Washington view its own territory much like it does the Middle East, a place full of foreigners where the only form of engagement is black ops?
The panelists discuss.
The U.S. government is getting a bit hardcore when it comes to dealing with the protests and riots and chaos that have...
eventuated after the George Floyd incident.
I don't even know what week we're on this.
I guess the bigger question is when this will ever end.
But we've seen protests of the goofy, quasi-religious nature.
We've seen just outright looting and rioting.
We've seen a...
Semi-sovereign state in the middle of Seattle for a little bit by Roz Alsoundcloud, one of my heroes.
And we are now seeing some kind of federal response.
Now, I would say that people like us, along with probably the majority of conservatives, wanted to see a kind of outright open response.
Mono a mono suppression of the riots and violence.
They wanted the police to come out in force and put it down.
Maybe the National Guard, Trump...
Indicated that he was interested in doing that a few weeks ago.
The other night, I rewatched The Dark Knight Rises.
And in the climactic moment of that film, all of the Gotham City police officers who were stuck out of ground just come out in broad daylight and fight Bane and his thugs alongside Batman.
I think that movie is a conservative film, for better and for worse.
And clearly Bane is a kind of almost like conservative nightmare of BLM or Occupy Wall Street or any kind of left-wing group.
But again, they were openly put down by the police.
In the words of Matthew Modine, there's only one police force in this town.
But I don't think we're ever going to see that.
And instead, what we seem to be seeing, what seems to be the ultimate solution by Trump and company, is to treat the U.S. kind of like they treat the Middle East.
That is Black Ops.
Now, these aren't entirely black because, in the sense of being completely secretive, in the sense that everyone has a cell phone, and we're now seeing countless images of camouflaged masked men in minivans, of all things.
Going around and sometimes grabbing the leaders of the protest movement, sometimes suppressing them.
There have been some scenes of a transsexual antifa or BLM or whatever leader being...
And so basically, the United States is kind of becoming like the Middle East.
And so this organization called BORTAC, which is connected with the border control, seems to be the organization that is being used.
And actually, the leader of that group has openly confirmed that.
There are actually some new information that Trump might very well be using such techniques in Chicago.
Not only have there been massive COVID outbreaks, massive protests, there's also just been Chicago being Chicago in the summer, which means serious death.
And there's actually been a lot of very heartbreaking deaths of infants and children.
So this seems to be where we are.
There's not going to be an open suppression done by the police.
Instead, we are going to treat...
The United States is the Middle East and engage in black, semi-legal black ops, effectively.
And there's this weird situation where there's an almost constitutional crisis.
I'm not sure it's going to amount to much, but where these local liberal officials are kind of saying, you know, we have our constitutional rights and the federal government's encroaching on us and making things worse.
You know, the South will rise again.
Our state's rights almost sounds a little bit like that, although I don't think it will eventuate into civil war.
But this is where we are.
So, Tyler, I'll let you go first.
Do you want to pick up on some of these threads or bring in something new?
Yeah, well, it's interesting because one thing I noticed is that some of them, like the representatives in Portland, were actually outright saying, you know, shouldn't conservatives be defending us because they historically have been defending the idea of states' rights?
And they've been using this, like, secondary mode of resistance against the federal government by trying to prop up their own authority on the local and state level against the federal level.
And so you have this situation where it's like...
They're openly saying, like the mayor, for example, the Mayor Wheeler, he outright said, you know, the reason Trump is doing this is because his numbers are staggering and he needs to attack the Black Lives Matter movement in order to earn credentials, right?
And then at the same time, they're saying they're trying to stop this peaceful protest, which is obviously you have to, like, rewrite reality when you say something like that because you just take a quick look at it.
And they're saying they're trying to stop the spread of Black Lives Matter.
That's what Trump's trying to do, to appeal to his racist base because his numbers are staggering.
So you have this inter-elite warfare going on at the level of rhetoric and who they're trying to appeal to, right?
And so I think this goes back, I guess, to the whole question of anarcho-tyranny, which Francis was talking about before, where you have this weird situation in which there's an over-policing when it comes to law-abiding citizens that we've seen in the past few weeks.
Right, when it comes to the couple outside of their house, with their weapons.
And there's been quite a few instances of that, of the pregnant woman who pulled a gun when those people were attacking her van.
And so you have this, but then you have a situation where you can just...
Quickly look at the footage, you can see buildings being burnt down, police stations attacked, people beaten in the streets by anarchists and BLM, and they say, well, it's peaceful protests, and Trump's just trying to stop our peaceful protests.
This needs to happen.
We need to become more aware of the state's rights.
It's not the federal right to intervene on this.
So then you have, of course, Trump's new tactic, what's going on here, which is, like you said, it's not like actually just bringing in full force and just putting a stop to it.
It's this weird tactic of bringing...
Grabbing people here and there, pulling them in for questioning, instead of just clamping down on it right away, which would actually, of course, make more sense to do so.
So it's a really newer situation for America, I think.
I mean, back even in the 60s, when they had these kind of riots going on, they were just brought in the full force.
But now, when they send to the National Guard, they do the Macarena with the protesters, so that's not really what's happening.
But it's a different...
Interesting situation.
I'll throw it to Ed for now before I say any more on it.
Yes, I think that it is an interesting...
It's not an unpredictable situation, though.
There's this balance he's got to get.
We've got a situation...
It reminds me of the Jonathan Haidt five moral foundations kind of idea.
The five moral foundations are care, fairness, hierarchy, disgust, and group loyalty.
And there's research on Haidt, which has found that...
Conservatives are roughly equal in all of those, although extreme conservatives tend to be very high in hierarchy, disgust and loyalty and not so high in fairness and care, whereas the leftists are high in fairness and care, but they are pretty much absent in terms of things like hierarchy, disgust and in-group loyalty.
And what that means is that the leftists can hijack people on the right because the right, the people on the conservatives, they can empathise with those on the left.
Because they have a sense of care and a sense of fairness as well, a sense of equality, whatever.
But the left...
We cannot understand those who are on the right at all, because they don't, beyond care and fairness, they don't share any sympathy for the things which affect and which are important to people that are on the right.
And so you can see how people that are on the left can basically use this relationship to hijack and to manipulate those that are on the right and push things in an ever more leftward direction, push the culture in an ever more leftward direction, manipulate people so that they are ever more concerned.
This is what's happened since the war, really, but particularly in the last 30 or 40 years, ever more concerned with care and fairness, equality.
Those are the big things.
Care, harm avoidance and fairness, equality.
And you get this down to the minutiae of life.
I mean, my son's nursery school.
school.
They were asked, we were asked, don't send your kid in with birthday invitations to give out.
Because it might hurt the feelings of the children that don't get invited.
Instead, here's a list of all the parents.
Phone numbers, We have a society that is so brainwashed with the importance of care and harm avoidance, and is so unable to cope with the idea of harm, the idea of hurting yourself, the idea of violence, that to send in the army or the National Guard or the police or whatever, he's got to get that.
That balance right.
Between doing something, between not offending against a society that is, even conservative people, that are so concerned about the idea of care and harm and, oh God, we can't have that, we can't have hurting people, we can't have people getting even slightly injured, even emotionally injured, and the fact that what you end up with when you have extreme leftism and why there's always a backlash, always there's a backlash, a right-wing backlash, eventually.
Is that you have a society that is increasingly an evolutionary mismatch.
We are evolved to find all five of these foundations important.
The average person involves all five of these foundations important.
The leftist can hijack society because of his extreme concern about care and fairness and push it in that direction to such an extent that the other three foundations are neglected.
And then, of course, the result is we have an evolutionary mismatch and people are unhappy.
But those people have been indoctrinated and brainwashed with this importance of care and affairs.
So he has to get that balance right.
What's the way of getting the balance right?
Well, one way is that you don't have anything public.
You don't have a Tiananmen Square type of situation.
You don't have any confrontation.
But you clearly are doing something to address the balance behind the scenes and letting that leak out subtly, which he's doing.
So I think in a society that's utterly brainwashed with the importance of care and harm avoidance and, you know, my child cried because my child didn't get a party invitation, whatever, this is perhaps the most sensible tactic to engage in.
And as for Richard's comment about a foreign country, and Richard and I were discussing this on Skype yesterday, I think it was, I thought that was very interesting because if you think about it...
When you go into a foreign country as soldiers, part of the reason why you have to engage in black ops, part of the reason why you have to be very cautious, because you don't know how they're going to react.
You don't understand them.
You don't know where they're coming from.
You don't know what they're going to do.
You don't know what they're capable of.
And in a society that's utterly polarised...
Where the left is so extreme, so unhinged, like they turn truth on its head.
They say falseness is truth and truth is falseness and right is wrong and whatever, you know, just Nietzsche, sort of God is dead, insanity.
You don't know what they might do.
And so, therefore, the best thing to do is to treat them like foreigners.
We're so polarised.
That were basically two separate foreign groups.
And so to go in there, maybe that's when the North went into the South during the Civil War.
Would they have treated them more like foreigners?
I don't know.
But you treat them more because that's what they kind of are.
Because they're so different from you that you can't understand them.
Yeah, I mean, they reconstructed them to a...
Very serious degree, although that did start to wane after a while.
But yeah, they were definitely treated as a foreign enemy that needed to be educated, i.e.
brainwashed on some level.
Precisely, so that would be Congress with this idea that what you've got is that America has so come apart, in the words of whoever it was, is it Charles Murray who said that?
But it's so divided, so polarized, that you're treating them as...
Because there's no fundamental way on which you think in the same way.
Whereas perhaps in the late 60s, when it was all the riots around the time that Nixon was elected and around that time, then at least there's a certain level on which you kind of trust each other.
Kind of.
Right.
Kind of all Americans.
You're kind of one group.
And this is a usurpation within that group.
And you can put it down.
But you're not dealing with that.
You're dealing with something else.
You're dealing with a level of hatred and difference that is so profound that perhaps the best way is to treat them like what they really are, which is foreigners.
And they are.
I mean, these are an occupying power within part of America that has tapered.
Let me roll on this for a little bit.
Yeah, I mean, I'm glad that Tyler mentioned Anarcho Tyranny because this Sam Francis concept, and I think it's a very valid one, but I almost feel like it's being outmoded to a degree.
And I'll explain that.
I think the black ops engaged in by Bortak or whatever are almost like the other side of the coin of all of these horrifying images that we saw of National Guard or police doing the Macarena with people or kneeling or joining the protests themselves.
That was an almost comical expression of soft power.
So the police...
I mean, that is the essence of these types of organizations.
They are the brutal tip of the spear of the state.
In our kind of postmodern world, we've depicted these as almost not what they are.
So it's like, you know, the U.S. Navy is a global force for good, as they describe themselves.
So they're like a humanitarian organization or charity or something.
And then the police or National Guard, well, we're just here to dance.
You know, we're not here to, you know, do anything to.
It's this weird kind of velvet glove, you could say, on an iron fist or kind of so on.
But then it's kind of the other side of...
Things are kind of getting out of control.
Even the Roz Simone thing, which didn't eventuate into anything outside of a three-week-long weird semi-sovereign state.
Just doing that, you're testing the limits of what the state will tolerate.
And you have to respond.
These protests are not just some simulated corporate act.
They are real.
They can get out of control, and the state has to respond.
But it can't respond openly.
It has to respond of the National Guard during the Macarena, or the flip side of that, the It can't ultimately act openly.
It can't be itself in a way that...
Well, go ahead.
Sorry, I was going to say, I think that's the balance.
I think if you act too openly, then you will inflame the leftist nutters even further, and you will get more degeneration into more violence.
But if you don't act at all, then there will come, as I say, as I would suggest, a kind of right-wing backlash, a sort of a backlash against the entire system.
A reassertion of these three moral foundations that have been ignored for so long and so many people feel unhappy about.
And they don't want that either because that would also involve radical change.
So there has to be a balance between the two.
And that would, I suggest, be what they're doing.
And as for anarcho-tyranny, what does anarcho-tyranny involve?
Basically, it's the idea that you need to brainwash the population.
So that they don't question the ruling class or the managerial class or the class that makes money.
They don't question them.
But you don't do much about crime.
You don't really bother controlling that.
You let that control itself through protection rackets, I suppose, or whatever you end up with in response to a lack of law and order.
And you enforce laws in a corrupt way.
Well, what's the difference between this anarcho-tyranny he's coined, Sam Francis, and just the concept of just Tudor England?
I mean, that's what a lot of countries now around the world, that's what Somalia's like.
That's what 16th century England was like.
You have a system where ultimately the population have to be kept in line, ideologically, so they don't fundamentally question the system.
The state lacks the power, really, to enforce the law.
So laws aren't really enforced.
We therefore have a gangland where gangs baffle it out and the law is occasionally enforced on a corrupt basis depending on who has power and who decides to do so.
And lots of people can just get away with crimes.
And that was the system.
It's just a corrupt society.
That's what it is.
It's the essence of a corrupt society.
I think it is, and it's bigger as well.
So I don't disagree with that.
But what I was pushing towards is how it's a little bit outmoded.
Because let me try to get at some of the kind of contradictions that are going on.
So, I mean, I mentioned the Dark Knight Rises and Bane came in and, you know, brought Gotham back for the people.
And, you know, if you can go to these protesters and find revolutionary statements in a way that you could not find revolutionary statements like that in, say, the Charlottesville protests.
We are going to fundamentally transform.
With Roz Al-Simone, there was a...
Bit of a revolution there going on.
I mean, it was kind of fake, sure, but he...
He did it.
He was questioning sovereignty and questioning law and order.
At the same time, on the other side of this, what we've seen is that the BLM protests are expressing the ideology of the state.
I mean, there were some amazing images that I was reposting on Twitter a couple weeks ago of, you know, the U.S. embassy in many of these countries having big rainbow flags and saying BLM and, like, Black Lives Matter and Korea or whatever.
You know, gay rights and...
Somalia, wherever the hell there's a U.S. Embassy.
There's this weird contradiction where...
The protesters are at one point saying that they want to end the system.
The system, it's not even that it's corrupt so much as it is wicked, that it's white supremacists, etc.
We need to end this.
They are at least rhetorically directly challenging the state.
And to some degree, they are actually attacking federal buildings.
They're bringing about chaos.
At the same time, they're doing it through the ideology of the state.
And so like the U.S. government, the State Department, the U.S. military empire doesn't fundamentally disagree with the protests.
This is what I was getting at when I was saying this is an unprecedented new example compared to how these things were dealt with in the past, like looking at the 60s.
The idea that they're putting forward while they're saying we need to dissolve the American state, we need to completely dissolve the United States of America is, like you were saying, they're doing it through the ideology of the state.
You watch the clips, you're seeing priests clapping along, you're seeing a lot of the people being arrested are like attorneys and they're actually a part of the managerial class.
You have the mayor of Portland getting in on this.
You have people in positions of political authority supporting this message.
And so this tied in a lot to actually what we recently talked about on EBL, which was we did a show on Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics.
And we talked about, which fits in there very nicely with anarcho-tyrity, is the way in which the trace from liberal government up to neoliberalism is this discovery of the natural rationalization of institutions, where you're trying to homogenize society and to figure out the most effective way.
To rationalize it as a part of the managerial class.
So what's the managerial class?
It's competent governance.
It's not that they're incompetent.
They're fully competent.
They're aware of what they're doing.
But it plays into the role of their ideology because it's a method of affecting a means of biopolitical control where you are enforcing that same spirit of resistance that they're...
And that they're bringing up themselves, like through Black Lives Matter, right?
It's a part of the state's functioning, but it's also through the rhetoric of being anti-state.
And so if the mass is going through this process where this is an accepted protest, it's something socially allowable and socially promoted and enforced, then you're not going to crush down on them because that's who you want to appeal to, right?
That's who the corporations want to appeal to, and that's why they're all a part of the same message.
But if you're looking at, like, it's not that they don't have the ability, and this is why it's anarcho-tyranny, is because they can crack down on it pretty easily and a lot more effectively.
Just look at what they do to people on, you know, loosely speaking, the right.
They've shown that they very clearly can crack down on it and end it.
But they don't choose to do that.
So the question that comes with anarcho-tyranny is why they choose to, like, what's the function of allowing this to happen?
And it's because they're a part of the managerial state themselves.
And so it's weaponizing that rhetoric against the federal government.
And the federal government themselves, the Trump administration, is also part of pushing the same rhetoric.
So it's not that the Trump administration is really stopping the left.
I mean, if you look at the executive order, he actually outright said, gave him a bunch of brownie points, like, well, if you look at these monuments, some of these guys fought the KKK and fought the Confederacy.
They're historically illiterate.
They're just as much pushing the same window.
It's about effective rationalization policies of dealing with a mass, and it's a part of the state.
And that resistance, because it's being taken up by the state, is not really a threat to the system, because it's very much a part of it, right?
I don't think we need to sort of overcomplicate this.
Oh, yes, we do.
No, we don't.
We need to get to its bare essence.
I think the best way you can do that is by comparing it to things that have happened in the past.
And so if you look at it, the whole notion of this virtue signalling leads to this kind of insanity.
So the way that reasonably intelligent people tend to operate is they tend to play for status by taking that which is the view of the establishment, which is the establishment view, and pushing it in a more radical direction.
It's a more extreme version, as it were, of the establishment view.
Not the opposite of the establishment view, a more exaggerated version of the establishment view.
And that's how these things spiral out of control.
That's how Protestantism spiraled out of control.
That's how, you know, whatever.
That's how these kinds of things spiral out of control.
but they then become useful to the state that has the more nuanced, diluted version of the now extreme view, because these people can be used as these stormtroopers, these shocktroopers of the state.
They can be used to sow discord and to make people obey and whatever and to scare people.
And so it's not a bad thing for the government to have people who have a much more extreme version of their own view, but they need to be clamped down on occasionally.
But that is basically a more, it's the other way with Putin.
He's on the right.
So it's a more extreme version of his own situation.
And so it strikes me that if you look at something like, well, let's say religion, let's say something like Christianity, when Christianity was established and it was the religion of the Roman Empire, then you have the people that are the most extreme, like these are the equivalent of these Oregon protesters or whatever, who are the monks who take it too far.
And it becomes this extreme spiralling out of control and so on.
Anarcho-tyranny, we could even call it.
And they have to be reined in occasionally.
But ultimately, they are taking the state view.
The state view is Christianity.
It's based around Christianity.
And they are taking that state view to an extreme.
And therefore, they are radical, in a sense.
Even though it is the state view that they are taking and they are just pushing it to an extreme degree.
So that, I think, solves the paradox of how you can be both a functionary of the establishment and also radical.
And in doing so, you can be a slight danger to the establishment because you can then start to turn on the establishment itself.
As we discussed on the thing with Keith, the way in which you have these Anabaptists who came out of Protestantism and then turned on the original Protestants and the original Protestants had to...
I think it's just the same kind of relationship.
So I kind of get the feeling that although it seems so bizarre, it's very much a kind of Ecclesiastes, you know, there is nothing new under the sun.
I think this could be directly compared to other manifestations, other points of breakdown in history.
Right, I agree.
But I mean, like, the complicated question for me is to have the situation.
Where it's not just you have a virtue signaling mass that gets out of control from within the own ideology that it's given to them by the state and they have to rein it in every now and then.
It's that you have a situation like in Portland where the political authorities are openly against the federal government and they're using this political rhetoric and they're denying reality openly and they're saying they're fully a part of the radical politics.
The Reformation, you had the same thing.
You as a person that wants to gain power can use this as a means of leveraging more power.
The question here is what is the purpose of the inter-elite conflict going on right now when it comes to the Portland authorities versus the federal government?
What's their strategic interest?
I don't doubt that there's obviously similar phenomena with the Protestant Reformation and things like that.
There definitely is.
All throughout history, there's been a situation of subsidiary authority versus sovereign authorities and the way in which they...
The weaponized, the masses, kind of like the so-called wars of religion, where princes change religions overnight to appeal to a different crowd, right?
So it was very little to do with religion.
But now, in this situation, I'm simply trying to get the question, what is the function of the whole thing?
You make a good point.
I think that in terms of how these kinds of political operators work, they want to come across as powerful.
To come across as alpha male equivalent, whatever they are, you know, alpha non-binary.
And one of the ways you can do that is by, you know, you play for status in the same way that Pete Buttigieg is the acquire.
Played for status with his fruitless attempt.
There's no way he was going to be the Democrat candidate, obviously, but it's just a play for status which then empowers him within whatever state he was from, Indiana or whatever it was, as a means of running for governor or something like that.
And so in much the same way, I guess that...
One of their strategies is just gain prominence for themselves to elevate their status within the Democrat Party or whatever it is, and that's why they're doing this.
I guess my ultimate question is, is there a legitimacy crisis or is there, in a kind of funny way, not one, in the sense that...
You know, if you listen to some of these people, you would get a sense that there's a serious legitimacy crisis, or at the very least, a kind of minority of revolutionary actors.
I mean, they are saying all cops are bastards.
The whole system is white supremacists.
We need to tear it down, and so on.
They are saying this.
But then at the same time, I mean, I think it's almost like the genius of the American Empire.
And it might kind of drive us crazy because we have these, you know, id-like right-wing instincts.
We kind of want to live in Prussia, you know, where our leaders are badasses and wear military garb and, you know, like, say, you know, l 'état c 'est moi.
You know, we just, that's kind of how we think.
But the genius of the American empire is that it's its own contradiction.
It comes here not to conquer you, but to liberate you.
And at this point, it's almost like we are liberating you from the white supremacy inherent in America.
It's this kind of like weird, contradictory, ongoing process that actually has been successful in ruling.
There is no I mean, China.
OK, there is no real threat to the unipolar world, even though from our standpoint, we see it as kind of, you know, inherently contradictory and silly and childish and almost revolutionary.
There's almost no legitimacy crisis at the end of the day.
There's no one really fundamentally questioning American individualism and liberation.
Thank you.
Those that are at the extremes.
Right.
One way of understanding it is just like Christian ascetics or something in a Christian context.
Yeah.
There's a minority of them.
They play a certain purpose in the overall scheme of things.
But it's not obviously going to go their way, ever.
Because if it did, then that group would just be crushed and destroyed.
But they play a purpose in kind of religiously inspiring people that are towards the centre and pushing the society in a more left-wing sort of direction.
Yeah, you're right.
Although it does penetrate things that are relatively mainstream.
So now they're saying it used to be that they had blind auditions for orchestras to avoid racial discrimination.
So you sit there, you can't see who's auditioning, and the person who's the best musician gets through.
Now they're saying, oh, more important than basically good music is that you represent demographically, racially, the area that you're playing for.
And so that's what Bruce Charlton, my colleague Bruce Charlton, he has a book called Not Even Trying.
And that's an example.
It's not just that we're becoming more stupid so we can't come up with more genius stuff and whatever.
It's that we're not even trying.
We've literally moved away from an ideology of trying to be the best towards an ideology of just trying to be just something else.
So there is some mainstream element to it.
But yeah, you're right.
These people ultimately, a few of them extreme, they want to live in tents or whatever, but ultimately they want their iPhones and their internet connection.
And frankly, so many of them suffer from mental illnesses and depression and anxiety and things that if these things were taken away, they'd go bonkers.
Yeah, I agree.
There's not a challenge to the American unipolar world yet.
I mean, China is overrated when people say it's going to bat that.
I mean, the fact is their economy is fully bound up with American manufacturing, right?
There's no way that they could rise up to challenge American hegemony.
And even if we're talking on a grand ideological scale, their authoritarian capitalism is still a part of the global finance system, right?
So it's not really an authentic challenge.
And I'll pose that against Benoist and maybe even Dugan's hope in this regard.
But either way, that being said, there is certainly...
A lot of truth in what you're saying, Richard, because you look at what the complaints they're making about the police or about the system, like in general, like who gets a job if they're not represented enough.
You have the right to become that identity you want.
Cops are too violent.
They're basically saying all these things are not liberal enough, right?
And so the American empire, it's entirely a part of its own ideology.
It's just saying...
It's just pushing it to its conclusion, right?
And so it's a mode of governance where you're governing by having them actually fully conform to this rational set of market principles within their own side of resistance.
And so then they're just affirming American identity from what was latent in the very beginning.
And it's an interesting thing where there's no real mask behind it.
The lie is that they're in The Dark Knight Rises, that they're like Batman, that they're like fascists coming to stop the anarchists.
But in actuality, the reality that they're doing the Macarena with them is the real face of American strength.
In the Industrial Revolution in Wales, you have this situation where on Sunday...
These people could be what they like.
They could have their Methodist chapels and on a Sunday you can be the Methodist preacher and you're this radical and you're going to go to heaven and other people aren't going to go to heaven and you're important and you're the Methodist preacher and all this.
As long as on Monday to Saturday you work in the mine and shut up and contribute to the empire.
And that's kind of what it's like.
That's kind of the thing.
Make them think they're radical.
Make them think they're important.
Make them think that they're doing something such that their life has eternal significance and that's them.
As long as they work their very dull job which they commute to for an hour a day and commute an hour back and put lots of data into computers they don't understand and shut up and pay tax.
So it's quite a clever system.
I'm seeing pictures of attorneys with very poorly fitted suits And then pictures of them arrested with these masks covering their face.
Is there that much of a difference, I think, between the Methodist preacher who works down a coal mine, but he's someone radical and important, and he's so radical, he's so doing something for the betterment of the world on Sundays, and these people, oh, he's a corporate lawyer, he does bugger all, he's basically a pen pusher, but he's doing this.
It's a similar kind of manipulation.
I think I'll play.
I think I'll play.
Tyler, you've combined a metal hoodie with a cowboy hat.
Remarkable.
Yeah, it's in style.
Now that Brooks brought it on, this is what I have to wear.
