Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, and the “Notorious RBG” is set to be replaced by the “glorious ACB,” jurist Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett’s nomination will, no doubt, send many into hysterics and the affair will be enveloped in dirty tricks, smear campaigns, and intrigue. But before we crank out the popcorn, it’s important to take a step back and examine the true nature of the Supreme Court. What does this institution—a priestly order of conformist yet immensely powerful midwits—tell us about the nature of the American government and who exactly is in control. 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, September 27th, and welcome back to the McSpencer Group.
We are not subject to judicial review.
I'm joined today by Mark Brahman.
Main topic, America's Sanhedrin.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, and the notorious RBG is set to be replaced by the glorious ACB.
Jurist Amy Coney Barrett.
Barrett's nomination will no doubt send many into hysterics, and the affair will be enveloped in dirty tricks, smear campaigns, and intrigue.
But before we crank out the popcorn, it's important to take a step back and examine the true nature of the Supreme Court.
What does this institution, a priestly order of conformist yet immensely powerful midwits, tell us about the nature of the American government?
And who exactly is in control?
All right, hello everyone.
Welcome back.
Mark is along with me on this one, and I think you'll see why shortly.
Mark, how are you?
I'm doing well.
Thank you for inviting me on.
You kind of are reluctant to come on this because you feel like you're not following.
Could you detect that?
You're like, okay, if you want to, we can do a podcast.
I mean, if you want to.
No, no, no.
I'm always happy to do a podcast.
I just hope that I can contribute something valuable.
This is the thing.
I think you were a little bit timid to go on here because...
You're not following day-to-day politics.
And I'm not following day-to-day politics in the way that many people are who are true junkies.
But I'm following it enough to understand what's going on.
And I think what we can add is different than what other people can add.
For other people, this stuff is their life.
And they can give you the ins and outs and who said what.
You know, who's screwing whom and all these, you know, nuances and rumors and whatever.
I think we just want to kind of just take a stand back from that and look at what's really happening with this.
And then also, I think even more importantly, look at how battles over the Supreme Court are indicative of this just kind of flawed, fundamentally flawed American system.
At least that's my take on this matter.
But let's go.
I don't think I need to catch everyone up to speed too much on the Ginsburg situation.
So, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, God rest her soul, she has passed.
She's now lying in state in the U.S. Capitol.
And she was one of the nine Supreme Court justices.
So there are three branches of government.
A legal judicial branch, the Supreme Court on top, the court that has the final say on many legal cases, but I think their real power is in what's called judicial review.
That is their ability to judge whether a piece of legislation is, in their eyes, constitutional.
Then there, of course, is a legislative, the congressional branch, where laws are initiated.
And there's, of course, the executive branch, the president, the man who executes the law, the kind of bureaucratic system that gets it done.
And this is supposedly, from what we've been told in middle school, this is supposedly just a brilliant apparatus, couldn't be perfected on.
Amazing mechanism of checks and balances where no branch becomes too powerful and the other branches can...
Well, I think that's a lot of hokum, but I think we'll get to that a little bit later.
But there are some interesting politics about this.
And so just four years ago, Antonin Scalia, who was a famous conservative judge, you could say libertarian in some ways, but also was someone who...
He was integral in the conception of a kind of unitary conception of an executive and certainly was integral in granting George W. Bush war powers and so on.
He was also a big Catholic.
We are in a situation where I think it's six to three of Catholics and Jews.
There is not a WASP on the Supreme Court.
Remarkable trend will continue.
And I don't know if we have anything to say about that.
I don't even quite know what to make of it, to be honest.
Other than the Jewish interest in law and just basically being high IQ and successful and so on, that doesn't terribly surprise me that Jews are overrepresented.
The Catholic aspect is interesting.
I think it probably has something to do with this Catholicism that infects the conservative movement, which really, ever since the mid-century in William F. Buckley, has been, to a very large degree, a Jewish and Catholic movement.
There were kind of older versions of the right previous to National Review and so on, but it is, it's definitely, it's kind of Catholic tinged American conservatism that has won out and that has, is still winning out to a very large degree.
I don't quite know what that means about Catholics, but it probably doesn't mean anything good.
Yeah, and I don't think that that's very threatening, either, to the current establishment.
The fact that there are two Jews on there, or even one Jew on there, and the rest Catholics, is pretty meaningless.
I mean, at this point, if it were...
Eight wasps in one Jew, it would be pretty meaningless, right?
It operates on the basis of consensus and precedent.
And the Supreme Court, on so many issues, will just slowly edge their way towards something.
If the overwhelming majority and elite opinion believes that a runaway slave who gets to the North must be arrested and returned to his master.
The Supreme Court will determine that that is in the Constitution somewhere.
In 2020, the Supreme Court will discover that transsexual rights are part of the civil rights movement.
Ginsburg actually had a famous decision on marriage.
And she actually put this, you know, marriage has traditionally been, you know, with a has been about a.
Dominant male and subordinate female.
And now we're moving beyond that.
And this is all part of the Constitution and this check that we haven't yet cashed at the basis of American history, which is this dream of equality, this injunction towards equality that we're inching ever closer towards.
So, I mean, the whole legal profession, again, is a kind of, it's like the ultimate midwit profession.
It's about...
Being smart, you do your homework, you cite your work, you use evidence to support a case, etc., an argument.
But it's ultimately just kind of slowly moving with the tide of elite and majority opinion.
And just kind of interpreting this text and kind of digging something out.
And I would say this for both sides.
You know, an insult towards liberal jurist or whatever.
It's pretty much the entire profession.
But anyway, there's, you know, there have been some, you know, a tumult going on.
I don't know if we need to go into this too deeply.
But after Antonin Scalia died in 2016, the Republicans were in charge of the Senate.
They actually increased that lead in 2018, but they were in charge in 2016.
And they made up this precedent.
I mean, I guess it's kind of a rule, but it's just a thing they did, that President Obama nominated Merrick Garland.
Merrick Garland.
And from what I've read, he's a liberal jurist, but kind of a neocon as well.
What's really the huge difference here?
He was by no means some left-wing fanatic.
And he's the kind of person that I wouldn't be surprised if conservatives liked on many issues.
But they decided they wanted their own guy in there, and they made up this justification of, we won't do that in a lame-duck term of a presidency.
The American people have to decide.
Which, again, you know...
Fair enough, but that's really not what the court is about on its own terms.
The court is about not letting democratic opinion decide anything.
It's about overruling or overseeing legislation to see if it's constitutional or not.
The whole thing was...
Bullshit.
I mean, they did it for political reasons.
And, you know, might as well just admit it.
And then now we get to this point where we have a, you know, all but identical situation in which a justice dies and they are not waiting.
And a lot of people thought they were going to, in their words, cuck and not, you know, follow the rules.
And Lindsey Graham would be like, well, God, you know, dagnammit, I said I wouldn't do this in four years.
And well.
I won't.
But no, they are just simply going to go forward with it.
They have the votes to endorse or confirm anyone that Trump nominates.
And I think they're going to do it.
Unless there's some new drama that occurs, they're going to do it.
I don't even know quite what this means.
I don't know.
Whether they're going to overturn Roe v.
Wade or all of this stuff, maybe.
I think that would create a situation that is somewhat similar to where we are now, where abortion is available across the country.
I mean, I can't imagine that most states would make abortion illegal.
But there would be some states that would.
And we saw a battle, I think it was in 2019.
In which Alabama made some strong noise about making abortion effectively legal in all but a few circumstances.
But right now, in many of these states, access to abortion is very difficult.
And many of these state legislatures have...
You know, kind of effectively banned abortion to a large degree, if not totally.
But it is not illegal.
So I think, you know, we would probably, even if they overturned Roe and the Federalist Society were, you know, slapping each other in the back and breaking out the champagne and, you know, Mitt Romney, I guess, would crank out a Diet Coke or something, go wild.
I don't think anything would change that dramatically.
But go ahead.
Yeah, no, it goes to like the sort of the old debate in the alt-right or the dissident right or whatever we're calling it now.
But back when it was called the alt-right, that was one of the debates.
Is abortion even a bad thing?
Like having abortion available, is that ultimately a bad thing?
And there is some evidence that it's had a...
dare I say eugenic effect to one degree or another and it's kind of disproportionately affected certain disadvantaged populations you could say that you know probably our society is in better shape now as a concept of abortions being legal in a lot of ways, right?
Particularly the South.
Ironically, the Republican Party...
They run on abortion every year, but then they might be outvoted if abortion weren't available.
I mean, it's a weird thing.
It seems like it's a religious question, ultimately, too, as well.
But even there, things are ambiguous because the Southern Baptist Convention in 1973 endorsed the Roe decision.
And they said, you know, we understand a right to privacy and we're not going to fight this issue.
And it was really the development of the religious right, and particularly a Catholic-led religious right, weirdly, at least intellectually-led religious right, that they...
Adopted this issue in the late 70s, and then by the 80s, they had turned it into this hot-button issue that it is today.
I think George Herbert Walker Bush was pro-choice in 1980 or something like that.
I can't remember the exact details.
Similar story with Reagan.
But by the 90s, to be a pro-choice, like an openly You know, I support a woman's right to choose Republican was very difficult.
And by the, you know, W years, those people were exceedingly rare.
I think a lot of people probably have, you know, ambivalent views on this, like you and I do, of, you know, well, it's not something I like, but to make it illegal is almost worse than...
Having it exist right now.
And we're just going to kind of not address this issue.
Abortions have been going down due to a number of factors.
Due to the fact that people are having less sex.
Which is also kind of sad.
Teen pregnancies are going down?
Yeah, go ahead.
You can make an argument for...
position in the sense that, yeah, I mean, if, because really what we're concerned with ostensibly is white births.
So if there are no abortions, more white people will be born and it doesn't really kind of matter how many non-whites are born, for example, you know?
So I, you, I, you can make that argument.
Um, I don't really, I share your ambivalence.
I don't have a, I mean, the problem, the real problem with this society is the society doesn't have a kind of direction, it does have a direction, but it doesn't have a desirable direction from our position, right?
So all of this stuff is sort of kind of random and it's not like, it's not kind of, um, you know, these policies are not directed toward a goal.
They're just sort of policies, um, that are part of this generally bad direction, um, Yeah, and in terms of abortion, I think that...
You could definitely make a racialist case to be pro-life, no question.
You could definitely make a traditionalist case in the sense of, first off, based on a notion, even if you made a mistake or something bad happened to you, the child did not make that mistake.
And so you are punishing him under your own discretion.
For something that he has no control over.
And that's a reasonable argument.
You could also say that you could make a kind of rad trad argument and say that all these women out there are aborting their babies left and right and going into careers.
And if only we made that illegal, then they'd stay home and have productive families and so on.
I'm not sure I buy any of that.
Though, I think the kind of higher IQ, the kind of women that we would want to have children, to be frank, I think are fairly good at using contraception and avoiding things like getting raped or knocked up.
You know, by an unknown man or what have you.
They avoid those kinds of things, much like they generally take care of themselves throughout their entire lives and they kind of live in bubbles to a large degree.
So I think the types of people who are having abortion are not those career gals that you think of.
It's something very different.
And I don't know.
I think...
These women, I mean, I'm sorry to be just totally brutal and, you know, Malthusian or something here, but those women who are bragging about their abortions and, you know, like, yeah, I had an abortion and I'm proud or so on.
I'm not exactly that saddened by the notion that those types of people are not reproducing.
I mean, it's one thing for this to have happened to you and for you to kind of make a tragic choice or something.
It's another to make that part of your identity and think it's wonderful and not see that you are ending life.
And I don't know.
I think the kind of spiteful mutant thesis seems to apply here.
These are really bizarre people and they have really profoundly disordered minds.
I know this is kind of brutal, but Ed was even talking to me a little while ago about this irony of banning abortions in Ireland, where you now have these ridiculous governments in charge.
How many of those spiteful mutants might not be walking amongst us if abortion were legal in Ireland?
A not insignificant amount.
Yeah, I don't disagree.
There's a genetic question with some of these people, but there's also a larger, broader cultural question where, to one extent or another, Everyone is sort of suffering from a kind of mass psychosis, as it were, right?
In the sense that, you know, sort of the ideas that we hold are, you know, you and I believe them to be very sound and rational and fair and humane ideas.
But they're sort of roundly villainized by just about everyone else.
So, you know, there's that.
And so some of these people, some of these mutants, as it were, might have been relatively healthy psychological people under different cultural conditions, as it were.
I agree.
I agree.
Well, anyway, I don't, and I'm a little bit ambivalent myself.
I won't make a strong prediction.
If this justice gets in, whether they will overturn Roe or not.
I'm curious about that.
I could see someone like Roberts going the other way, but I would say this, that even if it were overturned, again, I think effectively we would be in a very similar situation where we are today.
And where we are today is where access to abortion is quite difficult in many states.
And it is legal and available and safe.
Most areas of the country.
And I think actually it would just remain like that if Roe were overturned.
And this is one of those things with the conservative movement.
I mean, how many billions have been dedicated to the Federalist Society and grooming all of these potential Supreme Court justices?
We've got to get our man in the White House so we can appoint this judge to overturn Roe.
And you do it and you're kind of ruined by your success in the sense of like, well...
Nothing's really changed, actually.
We haven't fundamentally changed.
We haven't won the culture war.
We haven't fundamentally changed the environment by doing this.
And I think this is, again, one of those kind of conservative false victories, if they do get it.
And they might.
I think it's actually reasonable to say that if Trump wins a second...
Well, if Trump appoints a justice and if Trump, say, wins or for some other reason the conservatives are kind of...
Feeling themselves.
And they bring up a case that would directly affect Roe.
It is very possible that that could happen.
But what I really wanted to talk about, and why I wanted to have you on, is the kind of like, what is the Supreme Court?
What is this thing that has so much power?
And that we, you know, how many votes?
Do the Republicans get every year just on that basis of the possibility that they could appoint a justice?
One of these nine, nine humans have this much power, and they're appointed by political parties, but they're kind of nonpartisan, at least.
What does this kind of situation...
Their job is not to actually make political decisions and make policy.
Even the most liberal justice will say, we're not here to make policy, even though they have had tremendous effect on actual policy.
What does this kind of situation remind you of, and how is it problematic?
I was thinking about this.
The other night of, you know, who is sovereign in the United States?
And I'm using a Schmittian conception of that in the sense of who ultimately decides, who in exceptional matters decides, who kind of makes the rules and breaks the rules and doesn't just follow the rules.
And in the United States, unlike, say, Prussia or a, you know...
This actually is dubious.
It's in dispute.
We don't quite know.
I think if you ask your average Joe on the street, who's in charge?
He would say, the president.
Well, that's not exactly correct if you look at the actual mechanism of government.
So all legislation, that is all laws, originate...
And are initiated by the Congress.
And so the President doesn't actually have an agenda or a group, you know, a big host of laws.
He might talk about those things, but those aren't ultimately his.
And those come from Congress.
He has the ability to veto them, which is a kind of kingly-like ability.
I believe the Queen still has that ability in Parliament, doesn't she?
Parliament still kind of is...
Is almost kind of confirmed by the Queen.
She can veto legislation, although she doesn't use that power.
Well, the President does use that power, and the President can veto a law.
So you could say he's sovereign, but Congress can override a veto.
So Congress can just say, no, we're doing this to the President.
So the President really isn't in charge.
The President is the...
He's not a lawgiver.
He's a law enforcer.
And the lawgiver, in that kind of traditionalist sense, is the Congress.
In terms of war-making and foreign policy, the president has a great deal of power.
He is the commander-in-chief of the military as the executive.
So usually a non-military person is in charge of the military.
Of course, Washington was a military person and other examples, Eisenhower, retired officer, but a civilian is in charge of the military.
And particularly in the 20th century, the president has had a great deal of just unilateral power.
I mean, the last time, I mean, Congress...
Apparently, Congress is supposed to be the one declaring war, but that actually hasn't happened since the Second World War.
And in between that, we've had situations like the Korean War, in which that war was authorized by the United Nations, and Truman executed it.
So that was a kind of tossing...
Tossing sovereignty over to another entity.
Although I've not seen anything.
We've seen a few instances like it.
We haven't seen anything on that scale like it since.
What usually happens is that Congress passes the buck and the president engages in foreign policy adventures.
The president does have powers to engage in adventures with some oversight, but to engage in adventures on his own, particularly in an emergency.
So the president is largely sovereign.
The Senate will, I think they can confirm treaties and diplomacy, basically.
But we know that the president does have that charge.
At the same time, I think you could make a very good case that the Supreme Court is the sovereign entity in the United States.
And the reason I would say that is that while a presidential veto can be overridden by democratic means, a SCOTUS decision cannot.
Since Marbury Madison in like 1803, so very shortly after the Constitution was ratified and the Articles of Confederation were nullified, the Supreme Court has had the ability, at least, they don't always use it, but they have the ability to simply say no to any legislation and say this is not constitutional.
And as we know, Times change, opinions change, the elites change, and decisions change.
It's kind of like groupthink, where everyone's just battling to cover their ass, effectively, and not be the one who tries to change the paradigm.
But then once the paradigm changes, they kind of all get in line with it.
And the Supreme Court is like that.
but the Supreme Court has judicial review.
They can just veto a law effectively.
And also, as we've seen in the year 2000, The Supreme Court basically can...
It has been known to determine who becomes president.
I mean, you could really strongly argue that if the Supreme Court had been made up in a different manner, that Al Gore would have been president in 2000.
And probably not much would have changed, to be honest.
I'm not even sure our destiny would go a different way.
But they had that power.
Actually, Justice Ginsburg herself dissented in that decision, Bush v.
Gore, in which they, if I remember correctly, they cut off the manual recount in Florida and Bush was president.
Boom, rubber stamp.
The Supreme Court ultimately has power over the president and thus war-making and foreign policy-making decisions.
Even though they don't always use it, they do have that power.
You could strongly argue that the Supreme Court is sovereign.
What does that mean?
That means that we don't have a sovereign entity who either has that by right or birth or by democratic will.
We have a sovereign entity at the very highest level that is a bunch of lawyers arguing about this text.
They are a priestly class, and they dress like it in these big black gowns that are solemn, but are highly reminiscent of priests.
And their holy book is the Constitution, and much like any good priest, you can kind of read what you want.
Within reason to the Constitution.
That they are engaged in exegesis.
And this is what the justices will all say, whether they're liberal or conservative.
They'll say, I'm not the batter here, and I'm not the pitcher.
I'm the umpire.
I call balls and strikes.
But that's kind of the story they tell about themselves.
In reality, even though they do it kind of in exceptional instances, and they do it...
Glacially, slowly.
They change policy.
They aren't lawgivers, but they're kind of law interpretists.
They fetishize this holy text from years ago that is called the Constitution in this sense.
And so we have a kind of priestly order at the very top of American government.
It's not quite the deep state.
It's not the military-industrial complex.
It's not big finance.
But to underestimate its power is pure folly.
It is extremely powerful.
And just the fact that that is considered a branch of government and the fact that we have this priestly order at the very top of American government, I actually believe is extremely problematic.
from our standpoint.
And I think it also kind of reveals something about the nature of American government.
Yeah, well, I agree with what you're saying.
You know, I think that there is, and maybe you had the intention of me bringing up this parable in the Hebrew Bible, but one of the ways it seems that Yahweh...
Triumphs over other gods or false idols in the Hebrew Bible is the scene at Sinai where Aaron has melted all these golden rings into a false idol, the golden calf, right?
The famous golden calf.
Now, I argue that that represents a kind of Aryan figure.
At the very least, obviously, it represents a non-Jewish idol, right?
So gold may signify a kind of solar identity and Aryan identity.
So this golden calf has been erected, but it's overturned or usurped by these laws, effectively, right?
Because what ultimately replaces the golden calf?
It's the Ten Commandments that are brought down from the mountain.
I argue that that parable exists to show that law is a kind of will to power, right?
In other words, if you have a people who have these sort of tribal gods and are worshipping ancestors, for example, or it's a kind of ancestor worship that was going on in a relatively healthy way in this country, I'm not going to say until recently.
I mean, it's been a kind of slow and steady decline.
But we've seen all these kind of idols very explicitly knocked over recently in our country, whether they're civil war monuments, whatever the case might be.
And so it's a similar thing that's happening in the sense that, and Solzhenitsyn talks about this too, this legalism, the danger of legalism.
But law becomes a kind of will to power.
And I think that Jews identify it as a world of power, and that is the meaning of that parable, is that they understand it as a way of usurping these tribal gods or these ancestors, which is probably kind of a more generic and easier way to understand it.
It's a way of basically disrupting the tribal identity of the goyim, as it were, right?
Or it's a way in.
It's a way to assert this invisible God, Yahweh, as the God of Israel, right?
Because that's what's happening in that parable.
So it's a will to power, effectively.
And it's a will to power that is especially one that Jews are able to use because it fits their skill set, as it were, in a very close way.
Because they're very verbally gifted people, and they're the people of the book, right?
And they're the people of the Talmud, and they're the people of sort of making these fine distinctions in laws.
That word, that adjective, Talmudic, is a reference to making these parsing fine distinctions, right?
And so they are, you might even argue that they're in a way a kind of race of lawyers, to some extent or another, right?
That is a kind of advantage to them.
I mean, I think that there are a number of ways that the pagan religion, you know, from my analysis, appears to address problems like this.
And one of them was the concept of Nomos in Greece, which means law.
Nomos means Greece.
But Nomos was also a god, right?
So Nomos was also this god named Nomos, right?
But Nomos was also Jupiter.
Like, he was a form of Jupiter or Zeus.
Right?
So you couldn't, so already the law has a kind of racial ancestral character where, you know, and Zeus is even in the Hebrew, the words for Zeus mean justice, right?
So he's a god of justice and he's a judge on some level, right?
And so the whole character, and we talked about the spirit of the law.
I mean, literally the spirit of the law is this kind of homage to this ancestral.
You know, Jupiter, who is a kind of avatar, who is exactly a kind of avatar of, you know, Aryans or the white race.
So I think that that is a kind of helpful mechanism that they developed in the ancient world.
And then Nomos became an idea that was discussed by the Sophists in Greece, right?
So you see how it becomes undermined eventually and how, you know, through...
Philosophy is one way.
But these things, these sort of religious structures that the ancients developed, these problems, they had already encountered these problems, and these were some of the solutions they came up with, is what I would argue.
And I would give you one more example of this, which I think is an even better example.
Well, you have Apollo, who's the god of truth, right?
So on some level, Apollo represents truth.
And what is Apollo?
He's the Hypoborian.
He's a symbol of the Aryan race.
So truth becomes synonymous with, I would argue, with racial survival and racial success.
So even the definition of truth itself, right?
So when Pilate in the New Testament, in that famous line in the New Testament, when he says, what is truth?
I think that that's also signaling that the Romans had basically lost a sense of truth.
They had lost what truth is.
There's another deity that the Romans worshipped called Veritas.
Her name is Veritas, which means truth in Rome.
In Latin, rather, it meant truth in ancient Rome.
And she was understood as either descended from Jupiter, which would make her a daughter of Jupiter, right?
Or she's descended of Saturn, right?
Who is a Semitic God, right?
And that's a kind of important distinction, distinction, because it reveals that there were actually kind of two different truths in the sense that, and there were, I think you understand what I'm saying, but the idea that truth becomes embodied in effectively something that represents a kind of racial ideal or type gives us a direction or gives us an actual palpable and tangible notion as to what truth is.
You know, a truth is survival.
It's continuance.
It's our race.
Truth is our race, right?
The health of the people is the supreme law.
Yeah.
The Roman concept as well.
Yeah.
There's just nothing you...
I don't know.
I mean, I think this came about...
That sentiment came about...
About 20 years ago, and it is somewhat unfortunate context of the Iraq War and 9-11 and all that kind of stuff.
But the Constitution is not a suicide pact, which was declared by a bunch of conservatives who wanted to go to war in Iraq.
But just because they declared it doesn't mean the sentiment itself is actually wrong.
And of course, any good sentiment can be abused and misused, of course.
But that basic notion that there is no law above our survival and our flourishing, just simply put, I don't think that is a, that's not a Judaic sentiment or a Christian sentiment.
I mean, in the sense that there are laws above your survival.
And in fact, even if you do not survive, if you go extinct, those laws will remain.
It is a kind of reversal of the way that a Roman would understand these things.
Yeah, no, I agree with that.
I mean, though, I think that, you know, I mean, obviously, I think that they have, intelligently, have a kind of cynical way.
I mean, cynical is one way of thinking of it, but they have a sort of practical and realistic way of looking at some of these constructs that we often lose sight of.
There is this whole cult around the Constitution, for example.
Those are some of the most ostensibly conservative people in the country are these constitutionalists.
So you see exactly what's happening.
They basically accepted the two tablets from Moses and they're worshipping Many people are proud of the so-called separation of church and state, which isn't quite constitutional.
I mean, there are laws about establishing a national church and so on.
I think the separation of church and state might come from a letter of Thomas Jefferson, if I'm not...
You can correct me if I'm wrong.
But there shall be no established national church.
And that's understandable.
You're creating a new country.
There are Quakers.
There are Puritans.
There are some Catholics.
There are some Jews around.
We're not going to have one national church.
Again, an understandable sentiment.
But I think it's taken in this...
In this false way, which is that religion and the state should always be separate.
And that is an anti-traditionalist view.
But I think beyond that, I think it's an anti-human view.
Religion and your national order are always going to be combined.
And these goofy conservatives, as much as we want to make fun of them, who kind of talk about God and country and Jesus and the Constitution, all that kind of stuff.
We can smirk a bit at that, but...
They are getting at a fundamental traditionalist worldview, which is that the state and the religion are one, and they reinforce each other, and God is on your side.
And your people, as articulated by the state, will triumph with God on your side.
And that actually is a natural and healthy view.
That is the view of all humans up until...
Fairly recently.
So it is an evolved view, you could say.
But then I would say that the whole doctrine of the separation of church and state is a false one.
And you hear this from both sides.
I remember Rick Santorum was saying that combining church and state is bad for the state, but it's also bad for religion.
We need to have our own kind of private, personal God and sphere of religion.
But I think that is a naive view.
We don't have a separation of church and state.
We simply have a different type of church within our state.
And that church is diametrically opposed to previous ways of doing things in Europe.
And it is basically creating this, you know, Judaic textural exegesis system in which the Constitution are the stone tablets or the holy book.
And we have these priestly midwits interpreting it for us.
We live in a theocracy, but it is a theocracy of the Constitution, of natural rights and enlightened humanism, you could say.
But that is how our system fundamentally functions.
And we have to understand it on that basis.
And not just go in for the slogans of, you know, we have separation of church and state in this country or something.
We don't.
And we never have.
Yeah, you know, I mean, it actually reminds me of something, too, is that...
You're right.
I mean, politics are effectively religion, right?
Or they're part of this sort of larger kind of religious culture, as it were.
And they're indistinct from it.
So they're just part of that fabric.
You know, one sort of comparison that comes to mind is that in Greece, when the Athenian theater developed, It was a kind of break from earlier cults, right?
Because it evolved from a cult.
It evolved from these dying and rising cults.
Dionysian cults.
Yeah, it was called the Dionysia.
So it was a form of worshipping Dionysus, right?
But what happened, though, is that religion changed on some level with the development of the Athenian theater.
It became in some way...
Less formal and less serious.
But simultaneously, it also became more cunning and more enthralling.
In the sense that people ostensibly were not taking it as seriously as they would take an earlier religious cult or religious initiation.
But I don't think that's the case.
I think that they were as enthralled as we see in the media today.
We see in Hollywood, for example, which I think is a kind of continuation of the Dionysia.
We see a similar kind of cult thing happening where we have people who are getting their morals and their identity from these TV shows they watch.
These are the parables that kind of inform them morally.
I think that that's very clear.
So the idea of the cat lady with, you know, the bottle of wine watching, you know, whatever her favorite TV show is, she's being sort of taught what to think about everything, effectively, by watching those TV shows.
So that becomes a kind of more cunning and effective way of religion than a person going to church where it's kind of explicit, like, you know, you have to listen to these commandments.
It doesn't kind of appeal to the vanity in the same way that entertainment does.
Where in the sense that they don't feel like they're being told what to think, but they are being told what to think.
So I think you can draw a similar comparison to politics in the sense that, you know, sensibly there is this division between church and politics, but there isn't.
The culture is kind of woven into one sort of larger cult, as it were.
And the Supreme Court justices will go with the flow.
They'll go with the flow of academia.
Famously, in desegregation cases, they were calling upon the latest in social science and how black children prefer a white baby doll or something.
I think that's what it was.
It was a footnote, but they were clearly justifying judicial decisions on the basis of...
I would say it is an executive who can take responsibility for his actions.
An executive who will ultimately wear his power on his sleeve.
And this is, again, someone who would be demonized as a dictator or whatever, but someone who ultimately has to take responsibility for decisions and does not claim that he's acting on the basis of some holy text or some new interpretation that he's come up with.
But someone who simply acts.
And that is...
And that is the type of system that we have in every other way of life.
In the military, there isn't a Supreme Court.
I mean, I guess there kind of is in the actual Supreme Court, but no, there are generals and officers.
If your football team is going poorly, the coach, whether he's really to blame or not, maybe he is, maybe he isn't, he kind of is symbolically Beheaded, so to speak.
He leaves.
You do this in all forms of corporate society, which are corporations, are not democratic institutions.
They have to be legal, of course, but they don't have some magical priestly class determining what they do.
Is this new product constitutional or not?
No.
They just simply act, and people have to take responsibility for their actions.
And that is just a more honest way, particularly as opposed to the American system, where no one takes responsibility at some level.
And it's all of these, you know, this churn of new representatives, churn of presidents, you know, whether the president is more powerful than, say, the media or the military industrial complex or big finance or the Supreme Court is questionable.
And you just have...
These so-called checks and balances are just this kind of infinite way to pass the buck and cover your ass.
And no one is really in charge, except, again, ultimately, this group of midwits who are interpreting legal documents.
And it's just, I don't know.
I mean, I don't want this to sound too dire, but I...
Until we can move beyond this kind of thing, I'm not sure whether the world we want is really possible.
Because we don't just want white people in America.
Keep our demographics 60% white.
That's great.
Let's keep it.
That's not the ultimate end of what we want.
And we don't just want the end of anti-white slander in Hollywood and academia or whatever.
That would be great to end, no question.
But that's not ultimately it.
I mean, we do want a different way of being, a different way of life.
And that would entail learning from the past mistakes of creating a system like this and creating a better one.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, I think that should be our focus.
But at the same time...
There is certainly, even within this system, as kind of fettering as the system is, as you've described, there are opportunities for someone in the position of Donald Trump to cause a lot of mayhem, which he sort of failed to do, effectively.
He's caused a lot of hysteria, but he hasn't actually fundamentally gone after anything or changed anything fundamentally.
It's caused a lot of heartache and liberal tears, I guess you could say.
But what you're describing, though, becomes sort of his, that becomes his alibi, effectively.
Like, the system becomes his alibi.
And, you know, and we still blame him because we don't think the system, you know, we do actually, even within the system, a strong man could, you know, the golden calf could usurp, could usurp the tablets, yeah.
You know, I mean, that's...
Sure.
Anything is still possible on the political level.
So far, we haven't seen people that are willing to kind of take those steps.
And maybe in some cases, it's because of a lack of sort of profanity, right?
Or a sense of history or a sense of...
What are they actually doing?
What is Trump actually doing?
What is his legacy going to be?
Can you stand outside it?
I've joked on Twitter, but I was serious.
You have all of these liberals freaking out about Donald Trump nullifying the election or somehow staying in office and whatever.
They see that as an evil in itself.
It's fascist.
It's kind of like...
Okay, let's take this thought experiment and ask, what would he actually do if he did that?
My guess is that he'd do the same stupid crap that he's been doing for the past four years.
That even if he did something that dramatic, and I don't think he will, by the way, but even if he did something as dramatic as nullify an election, we'd just still be in the same position where we are right now, where we have these other forces that are more powerful than he is.
and think that there could be something better.
Yeah.
I mean, we've seen no evidence that he would do anything interesting.
I think that, you know, and I actually don't know if we've actually talked about this, but I mean, it's just a sort of ongoing phenomenon that I'm sure that you've talked about.
Maybe we've talked about it offline and I'm sure you've probably touched on it on other episodes of this show with other guests, but you know, there is a kind of, uh, And I guess Dutton makes this point, actually, that religiosity increases during times of stress.
And I think that we've seen that in the former alt-right or in the dissident right, where we've seen people like, we've seen the rise of the tradcasts, for example.
No, I mean, which I think is an actual kind of real phenomenon.
It makes sense that they're like a lot of...
What's going on here?
All these Zoomers adopting Catholicism.
What is that?
Sure, but it does make sense that there are all these kind of young kids in the sense that that's a time when people can really be formed or impressed at a certain formative stage of their life.
They can actually be turned in this direction or that.
Whereas, I mean, the average person, and I think that there are certainly exceptions, and I think that you and I would count as exceptions to this, is that...
You and I, I think, have probably changed a lot over our lives.
Like, we've had multiple stages of kind of change and growth, as it were.
And a lot of that is us sort of reacting to our times and kind of getting over our times, I would say, right?
And looking, you know, trying to think beyond our times, as it were.
But I think that most people are basically fully formed on some level at the age of like 25 or 26. This is an idea that actually that a friend gave me, but I think it actually kind of rings true that most people are kind of just fully formed in their mid-20s for a number of reasons.
You know, they're getting married, their career is on its track or whatever the case may be, and they're just who they are going to be, you know?
And so I think that that...
So it makes sense that we see a kind of religious radicalization at that Zoomer level.
And I don't know what the numbers are.
I suspect it's not even really that large a percentage of Zoomers that are going in that direction.
Oh no, not a large percentage of Zoomers, but it's interesting that it's a large percentage of the alt-right.
Yeah, and it does feel like...
The conditions have become medievalized on some level.
It does feel like there's a kind of spiritual desperation, as it were, in the DR, where people are really looking for something and afraid of being deceived or whatever the case may be.
But it's a real phenomenon.
Where people are lost.
And, you know, it's a kind of dark time in a lot of ways.
You know, and I think that really, I think that the future belongs to those who kind of can keep their, you know, it's sort of like the Kipling poem.
Those who can kind of keep their heads, as it were, and remain sober through this kind of crazy period.
I mean, Gibbon describes this as well in The Decline of Rome.
He describes how superstition becomes rife like during this decline period where all these sort of weird cults pop up and people are just kind of going crazy effectively.
And I think that we've seen that in our own lifetime.
We've seen this like in the various sort of like sects that even developed, you know, of people that even we know and some people who we like are kind of like going in that direction effectively.
You know what I mean?
They're becoming more religious as it were.
And whether something is true or not, it's no longer really the question.
It's kind of like, what is going to kind of take away the pain?
What is the opiate that's going to just kind of make it go away?
Can I just kind of fix myself on this thing?
And just, that's it.
You know what I mean?
So but because it's unpleasant to do what you and I do, which is kind of walk through the valley, the shadow of darkness as it works.
You know what I mean?
So it's better to kind of go to sleep, I think, on some level.
Yes.
Speaking of that, it's getting late.
Thanks for being on.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, I hope we were able to...
I think that's what we can add that others can't, which is that if you want to just follow the horse race, you can go elsewhere.
There are people who are better at that than we are.
But if you want to take a step back and think about what's going on, that's what we do.
