It’s Sunday, October 18, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group. I’m joined today by Edward Dutton. Binge watching “Jeeves and Wooster” is own his personal crack.Main Topic: Fear and Loathing in Odesa The long-awaited October surprise is here. This week brought scandalous revelations involving Joe Biden’s son, Hunter: wheeling and dealing on the international scene . . . strippers, sex, and drugs . . . and an incomprehensible backstory. Can this material be believed? Is there something more to the story. And does this all make Hunter, well, kind of relatable and maybe cool? We then move to the scandal within the scandal: Twitter’s brazen suppression of information related to the story. Deplatforming remains THE essential issue for any alternative, dissident movement. And Ed and I, discuss policies that could actually solve the problem. 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, October 18th, 2020, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group.
I'm joined today by Edward Dutton.
Binge-watching Jeeves and Wooster is his own personal crack.
Main topic, fear and loathing in Odessa.
The long-awaited October surprise is here.
This week brought scandalous revelations involving Joe Biden's son, Hunter.
"Biden is the living embodiment of the corrupt political crash that..." Wheeling and dealing on the international scene.
Strippers, sex, and drugs.
And an incomprehensible backstory.
Can this material be believed?
Is there something more to the story?
We then move to the scandal within the scandal.
Twitter's brazen suppression of information related to the story.
De-platforming remains the essential issue for any alternative dissident movement, and Ed and I discuss policies that could actually work.
So, Ed, how are you?
I'm, uh, I'm okay, yes, I'm, uh, I'm, uh, yes, it's all, uh, all right for me.
You're late there in Finland.
It is, no, it's all right, actually.
It's ten past ten.
Okay, that's not too late.
I put the children to bed, and the reason why I wanted to do this on my wife's away, you see, and the reason I wanted to do this on a Sunday is she'll be back by then.
But I forgot children are better behaved, in my experience, if there's only one of you, because they're completely reliant on you.
So they're actually more inclined to go to bed at a reasonable time when it's just me.
And so consequently, I decided to move the...
Right.
I've noticed that a little bit, too.
They're also kind of like different people when you're with them one-on-one than when you're with them together.
When they're together, they're a tribe, and they engage in what's the right tribalism, basically, and they're just different.
And when you're one-on-one, they're just more subdued.
They are.
They're less territorial, they're less fighting, there's less argument.
Of course, I'm an only child, so my parents only ever experienced, presumably, the subdued and pleasant me.
I don't know what they would have observed if I'd had a sibling.
Yes, no one would ever imagine that you had a lonely and traumatic childhood.
No, no, no, no, no.
Certainly not.
Okay.
So, let's talk about the Hunter Biden situation and then talk about deplatforming.
I've been kind of itching to talk about deplatforming.
I have a lot of things to say about it.
I have a lot of things that I have said about it, but I have some more things.
And I think this whole Hunter Biden situation is a great opportunity to talk about.
The bigger issue.
It's a kind of secondary issue, but it's really the bigger issue, which is what do we do in this day and age as dissident intellectuals, but also how is the world going to handle the situation?
And I think we are kind of at the tail end of that free and open internet era where anything went.
I don't think anything is going to go in the future.
Before we talk about that, let's talk about the Hunter Biden situation, because I'm sure you as a reactionary conservative were overjoyed.
Finally, we've outed this scandalous, although Chad-like, I would say, Hunter Biden, child of empire, making millions, buying extremely rare Rolexes, which are...
Visible in his photos.
Easter eggs for those who have eyes to see.
Were you jealous?
I was impressed.
I knew that.
But yeah, so look, this is a rerun of the Hillary email situation, although it's arguably...
It's definitely arguably worse.
The connection is more personal.
There's at least a hint of some kind of crime.
I don't exactly know what he would be punished for.
It's also the president's son and not just someone who is at least one or two steps removed.
I don't know.
It might work.
I might be proven wrong.
I'm not sure it's going to work this time.
But I think the whole thing is also just as suspicious though in different ways.
With Hillary's email, we were dealing with WikiLeaks and there was at least a very strong suggestion of Seth Rich.
I mean, Julian Assange kind of borderline made the suggestion himself.
I mean, he denied it, but he was almost nodding when someone mentioned Seth Rich's name.
The whole thing was...
Cloaked in intrigue and suspicion and mystery and misdirection.
This one is bizarre.
I mean, someone who lives in Los Angeles drops his computer off in a New York City laptop repairman.
The laptop repairman claims to have some medical...
Condition that does not allow him to see people, and thus he can't confirm that it was Joe Biden.
And then he goes into the laptop and just looks at everything, which is kind of the worst nightmare.
It does seem a rather implausible story.
And then he gives it to the FBI, and then Bannon is talking about it last February, January, or this past January, February.
And then it ends up with Rudy Giuliani.
The FBI don't do anything.
I'm not even sure it's in the FBI's purview of its international, but put that aside.
It's a domestic person.
Put that aside.
There's hints that there's strange pornography.
There's a lot of very personal photos that does give it legitimacy, authenticity, in the sense of this is real.
This isn't just, you know, faked emails that someone wrote up.
But Rudy Charles, The New York Post gives it this kind of air of Partisan, Republican hackery, to be honest.
And so, first off, before we start talking about the deplatforming issue, what are your thoughts on this?
Well, yeah, the irony that they spend the whole of Trump's presidency talking about how he's being influenced by the Russians, how the Russians interfered with the election campaign, and this idea that the East is nasty, the East is right-wing, the East is non-woke, the East is all of these bad things.
And then it turns out that Mr. Biden has been...
Gloating, I mean, boasting about how he instructed the Ukrainian government to sack this lawyer that the company wanted sacked.
And now it turns out that the company obviously employed his son because his son had access to the vice president.
There's no other possible reason.
In the emails, they all but say that's the case.
Basically, they say that's the case.
And we know that he went to the Ukraine.
For some kind of discursive purposes.
So it seems fairly obvious that we have very Nixonian levels of corruption at the heart of the White House.
You've got a person whose son has got the job, because he's his son, interfering in another country's affairs, Ukraine's affairs, in order to...
Basically can't assist them and assist his son and whatever.
I mean, it's appalling.
Watergate was kind of a mad caper.
This, although there was a cover-up, obviously, but this strikes me as also kind of...
I mean, and I'm not trying to excuse Hunter Biden, but it strikes me as just the inevitable...
You know, consequences of empire and that these scandals have been happening since Babylon.
These scandals have been happening.
These scandals are there.
And you keep, if you're a political operator of any good sense, then you will keep all information you possibly can on people and you will release that at the, you know, if they like.
Young boys or whatever.
You won't do anything about it.
I mean, this is what used to happen in the British.
The British whips, the Conservative Party in the 90s, talked about this.
They knew that there were Conservative members of Parliament.
There are, I don't know, pederasts or whatever.
But you didn't reveal that to the public.
You'd say to them, look, we've got a vote coming up and we might lose the vote and we'd rather like you to vote with the government line or, you know, we might have to...
House of Cards type stuff.
Yeah, House of Cards.
The original House of Cards.
Yeah, I love that show.
And to play the king.
Delightful.
And you do as you're told.
I don't know how long they've had this information.
If Biden is correct and his son is over his drug habit...
Then presumably it's quite old photographs because you've got the images of him with what looks like a crack pipe or whatever.
So whatever.
But I mean, I can't see how anyone can interpret this in any other way than the fact that the vice president of America under St. Obama was extremely corrupt.
Oh, and also, it gets you, I mean, remember, this goes back to the 2013 Maidan affair, which was a color revolution.
The term color revolution has kind of entered mainstream parlance again.
I know Beattie, I'm forgetting his first name at the moment, but someone who was actually employed in the Trump administration for a little while and then was sacked after it was discovered that he spoke at a...
group called the Minkin Club, which I actually co-founded like 15 years ago, but put that aside.
He was talking about how they're going to pull a color revolution on Trump, which I think is a bit dubious, but nevertheless, you have this geopolitical wheeling dealing.
You have this attempt to spread democracy and also utilize right-wing elements.
And if you look at the email written to Hunter Biden by the Ukrainian guy.
He's complaining about the Svoboda Party, which is this, I mean, national socialist aligned, you could say, hardcore nationalist anti-Russian group that was basically kind of empowered by this color revolution.
And then it's kind of engaging in pushback on the, you know, wheeler dealers who actually put them in power.
I mean, it's...
It's all of these just kind of inevitable consequences of this stuff.
This prosecutor that he got fired was looking into this company, which was considered a corrupt company.
Which he should have, obviously.
Right.
And he got that prosecutor sacks to aid that company, that company being a company that was paying his son.
So, I mean, that's what it seems like to me.
It's utter nepotism and corruption, and it's absolutely appalling.
And you can completely see why this Steve Turley fellow, are you familiar with him?
Did a quite interesting video on this the other day, in which he said, well, you know people are lying if they change their excuse.
If they give one excuse and then you undermine that excuse and they give another excuse, they know they're lying.
And of course, their reason why you couldn't give a link, because they were in total panic mode, their Twitter and Facebook, the reason why you couldn't post that link was first of all, oh, you might have a virus on it that could damage your computer.
And then when it wasn't that, it was something else.
And then when it wasn't that, it was something else.
Anything to prevent people, to prevent presumably young people that will tend to use Twitter for their news source, but anyway, from spreading this information.
I don't think it's just young.
When I say young, I'm 40 at the end of the month.
I mean younger than me.
But ironically, the fact that they did this, of course, it's like these...
In Britain, you have this judicial implement where you block all reporting of a particular case.
All reporting is blocked.
And of course, that almost almost backfires because everybody is absolutely fascinated by what this case is.
The Streisand effect.
Yeah, I think Barbara Streisand...
I think tried to suppress reporting on her home or something.
And then that became a secondary scandal.
And so more people saw her home than ever would have seen it if she just kind of allowed the paper to do its job.
That's it.
And that's what this has kind of resulted in.
And it's made people, I think...
More, I hate this term, it's so clichéd, but more kind of red-pilled, more kind of aware, more kind of red-pilled about just how corrupt and how pro-leftist and how biased the system is and how unacceptable the power is that these organisations, Twitter and whatever, Google, have, that they can attempt to basically interfere in an election.
But before we get to that, I want to talk about de-platforming, but before we get to it, I'm just going to float this, perhaps somewhat irresponsibly.
Now, there's an old...
There's almost an adage if something's too good to be true, it usually is.
But there's also a kind of secondary adage that...
If someone's story is just so bizarre, it's almost guaranteed to be truthful because why would they make this up?
And I kind of tend to say that about this backstory.
The backstory is just bizarre.
And it can't be exactly true.
But the fact that it's just so weird makes me think that this might be the case.
That somehow...
A laptop repairman who's right wing got this hard drive to Giuliani.
I mean, it's just weird, but maybe that means that it's correct.
Yes, that's right.
The idea that you just couldn't make it up.
Right.
Why would you make this up?
But I would say this.
This is, like, whereas the Podesta email leak, the Clinton emails, as they kind of became called, from 2016, was...
WikiLeaks was at least operating through that.
Stone seemed to be...
Roger Stone seemed to be exaggerating his influence in it all.
But anyway, this strikes me as...
There's a lot of fingerprints of basically Stone himself, it's Bannon who knew about this, and the girl who wrote the article in the New York Post who doesn't have any other bylines.
Her name is...
Emma Jo or Joe Emma Morris.
She herself, she's Jewish.
She has some kind of Israeli connections.
It's just in this world of Breitbart, the alt-like, the very, very strongly pro-Bibi Netanyahu type Zionism.
I mean, this in a way doesn't change anything, but I'm wondering if Bibi has got...
Dirt on literally everyone.
And this whole laptop repairman thing is kind of a cover story, to be honest.
That they got this through other means because it's being pushed by the kind of Breitbart type, Breitbart writ large, which is very pro-Israeli.
Now, Bibi Netanyahu and Israel would do business with...
But there is a very strong, you know, Zionist element with the Trump people of move the embassy to Israel.
That wouldn't have happened if Hillary Clinton had been elected.
You know, totally.
Dispense with the Palestinians.
Do all this very hard stuff.
If you're going to go down that conspiracy theory road, it's also worth mentioning that there is a strong anti-Semitic element on the left, clearly.
And that's been demonstrated in Britain very conspicuously with Jeremy Corbyn and his group.
But similarly, even among the Democrats and these far-left, extreme-left anti-Semitic people.
There's a big push within the Democratic coalition of being anti-Zionist.
I don't want to take this too far.
I'm just saying that if this kind of information was gathered through governments and passed through certain emissaries, it wouldn't surprise me.
It's just something to think about.
These connections are there.
And how did you get this information?
You just downloaded someone's computer?
Either the story, the bizarre story is absolutely true, and it's just so bizarre, I guess we should believe it.
Or this was acquired through very high-level espionage tactics.
And so I'm not making any accusations.
I'm just saying that this seems...
There's a motive to this.
It does fit, though.
Yeah, you're right.
If it's one or the other, I'd be more inclined towards the view that with a lot of these broad conspiracies and things, they have a tendency of leaking.
And so consequently, it's not that unreasonable if you have some kind of extraordinary story like this that these kinds of things do happen.
I mean, for example, T.E. Lawrence, not Lawrence of Arabia.
He wrote his memoirs and then just left them on a train.
And in those days, no computers or anything, so he just had to retype them from scratch.
They're normal people, these people that get into positions of power.
Okay, on average, they're slightly more intelligent and they have a slightly higher general factor of personality.
At extreme levels, they are much more intelligent and have slightly higher psychopathic traits.
But to a great extent, they're normal people.
And with his son...
You're dealing with a person who is a drug addict, who has all kinds of psychological problems, and so one can imagine that he's quite lackadaisical, that he's quite erratic and disorganised, that he was going to have a computer.
Why wouldn't he?
We all do, with lots of photographs of his family and himself, lots of stuff he wouldn't want other people to see.
He's going to forget about it because he goes through loads of laptops because he drops them when he's on drugs and things, and they get broken.
This one had water damage.
So he was on drugs or piss and he dropped it in the loo.
I mean, I don't know what he would have done.
And then he just sort of thinks, sorry, I can't bother to pick it up.
I'll get a new laptop.
And he just sort of forgets the significance of the stuff that could be accessible on there.
I had a university lecturer, a very good university lecturer when I was at Durham.
And he was...
He was a pederast.
I've done a book on this, Churchill's Headmaster.
These kinds of people go into these kinds of things.
He took his laptop in to get fixed and it had photographs on it that resulted in him getting a criminal record for downloading underage porn.
And these kinds of things occur, I'm afraid.
So I think it's not unreasonable.
I find it believable, and I think that it fits with the kind of person we know he is.
It's terribly appalling what happened, of course, to Biden in the early 70s when he was elected to the Senate.
Not long afterwards, his wife...
And all three kids were in a massive car crash.
The wife was killed.
The daughter, I think it was, was killed.
And the two sons survived.
And both of those sons have had serious problems.
One of them, I think, has died while he's not present.
Right.
The one that seemed to have his life together was Beau Biden.
And he died of non-suspicious circumstances.
But yes, Hunter does just...
He does strike you as the kind of...
Mal-adjusted playboy type who wants to get rich and have fun and knows...
Look, he knows who's buttering his bread.
It's dad.
We just created this revolution in Ukraine.
Might as well profit from it.
I mean, it's again, I'm not defending him.
It's just a story as old as time.
But, yeah.
Again, I'm just kind of suspicious about this in terms of the people involved and people who knew about it early on.
But again, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a wild story just is what it is.
But let's move on to the secondary scandal, but I think it's the real scandal.
So I woke up the day before yesterday and...
I was seeing a lot of chatter about this on Twitter, and I was kind of curious what it was, but I, of course, couldn't find the link.
The New York Post's Twitter account was not accessible for a little while.
Some major figures, I think the president's press secretary, her private account was suspended.
I'm maybe missing some details here, but you get the point.
It was just...
Total madness.
It was clearly a newsworthy story.
Look, I get, and we'll talk about this later, I kind of get the idea of someone...
Literally fabricating news.
You saw this in 2016.
The Pope endorses Donald Trump was a kind of notorious one.
I kind of get that you want to take this down.
But when something is this big, you just can't do it.
It was the absolute wrong move.
Created a Streisand effect.
Created extreme suspicion.
And it just blew up.
I actually have looked at these stories now.
Looked at them on their own.
And then yesterday...
I was busy with family stuff, but I just was, you know, casually checking Twitter and my Twitter was not working.
It was a Twitter outage of all the worst times to fuel a conspiracy theory that they're stopping Twitter.
They don't want to stop it from spreading.
Exactly.
The Babylon Bee, which is a historical website.
And then Trump tweeted it, of course.
All the times to have an outage.
Mine was out as well.
All the times.
And again, you know, if someone is going to accuse me of floating conspiracy, or it's not really, well, it kind of is a conspiracy theory, but it's just floating, you know, there might be more of a backstory to this thing.
Okay, in terms of there's a massive Twitter outage that affects us all the day after there was this scandal of suppressing news.
I mean, it might be a coincidence, of course, but just everyone thinks this.
They were either doing some massive update, changing all the stuff.
They were just shutting things down because things were out of control.
I mean, who knows?
But yeah, it was very bad.
It's end of the Soviet Union, kind of 1980s East Germany.
Levels of incompetence in terms of attempting to manipulate people.
That's what it reminded me of.
It reminded me of documentaries I've seen about the fag end of the Soviet Union in places like Romania, where they're not even reporting that the Berlin Wall has come down.
It's never happened, and everybody knows it.
Everybody's talking about it.
Everybody knows it.
They're insisting, oh, no, it's never happened.
Or everybody knows...
Well, actually, in East Germany, someone at a press conference, I haven't looked into this in like a decade, someone at a press conference asked a bureaucrat, so can we cross over to West Germany?
And he was like, well, I guess so.
He didn't know, because they were so confused.
That's the thing, they were trying.
But then it just created a disaster.
You had this effect that had occurred because of what was happening in the Soviet Union.
There was chaos over Estonia and Latvia and all this chaos that was happening.
The awareness that Gorbachev was not going to send in the tanks.
And you had this pressure in Poland and all these other things that had occurred.
And then suddenly, he hadn't been told.
He misunderstood the instruction and he just said, immediately, I think.
Yeah, and then it just changed geopolitics permanently.
The pressure of the group was so strong, the soldiers just mutinished, just gave it.
So, I mean, it reminded me, I don't know if I'm being overly optimistic, but it reminded me of the faggot of the Soviet Union where no one takes the authority seriously anymore.
And the new authority in some respects in our lives, because if our lives are increasingly online, which they are a big part of everyone's lives is online, we're online now, this would be impossible not many years ago, is people that run the world of online.
They're the government of an aspect of our lives.
OK, a big aspect of our lives is not online, and we have the governments that we elect on that.
But we have these governments that are unelected, that are taken over, that are in control, and that are run by the left.
It's gone from being a Wild West sort of chaos, 10 years ago or something, where there was no government online, to the government online of basically sort of Marxism, sort of Marxism, cultural Marxism plus capitalism.
And they had a bit of a loss of control last night.
But it's weird, and I don't want to push this analogy too far, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a legitimacy crisis where you could just start to do things that you couldn't do previously.
And it actually started as a kind of, at least in the German scenario, started as kind of a left-wing critique.
We want communism with a human face.
We are the people kind of thing.
And then it metastasized into...
Reunification and German nationalism, I guess, ironically.
In this case, it's different because there's nowhere to go.
It's just obvious that they can't handle this, that they don't know how to handle this.
And there was a kind of Gorbachev or this random bureaucrat moment with Jack Dorsey where he basically admitted that this was wrong.
He said, this is unacceptable.
This is the wrong thing to do.
We're changing our policies.
There's just no legitimacy to these things.
And I guess the big question is, you know, with the fall of the Soviet Union, there was at least a kind of push towards reunification with Germany and breaking down the Iron Curtain and all that kind of stuff.
But what do we do?
We're just kind of watching this thing.
And it's now more obviously fraudulent and more obviously controlled by people with partisan interests.
But we just don't.
What do we even do?
You know, we're just kind of watching it.
We don't go anywhere.
I mean, you're getting it increasingly.
I mean, it's just a realization.
It's slow.
It's gradual.
But people that I know, obviously, myself and you, we're on these online things a lot.
People that are into this, people that don't have YouTube channels or channels, are now talking to me about BitChute in a way that they weren't doing six months ago.
Oh, look, Ed, this is interesting.
I found it on BitChute.
And they're realising that BitChute is what YouTube was in 2006.
So you're getting a slow movement towards that and towards other platforms, DLive or whatever.
The problem is that with Google, the monopoly, I remember when I first started using the internet, really, which was in about 1999.
It's amazing to think that between then and leaving university in 2005, I only really used to check my emails.
That was about it.
But I wouldn't use Google.
It was something else with a sort of space invader sounding sort of name that was the search engine I used.
I never used Google.
That was the browser.
I can't remember.
Anyway, and I didn't cover Google when I came.
I really wasn't.
But that's the monopoly that needs to really be broken.
And of course, they should go, I personally think, what America did with the oil.
They had these oil monopolies and they broke them up.
Because they said that it's not in the interest of democracy for organizations to have monopolies.
Break it up.
Here's where I really disagree.
So hopefully this will spark a discussion.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I actually...
Okay.
In the digital...
Unlike the physical age, oil is a physical commodity you have to...
Tear it out of the ground and all that kind of stuff.
In the digital age, there is just a natural tendency towards total domination and monopolization for a couple of reasons.
First off, just the infinite reproducibility of the web.
So yes, the web is physical on some level.
It is a server in a room at some level, but effectively it is infinite.
1,000 barrels of oil.
You need to generate another 1,000 webpages.
The cost of that is infinitesimal, and certainly infinitesimal in comparison to physical commodities.
So the ability for the digital product to expand almost ad infinitum is there.
The other thing is that we're dealing with something different.
We are dealing with the public square.
And the kind of reimagined version of the public square, where I think that a monopoly is better.
If that's the case, if we're going to talk about it being literally a public square, then in a democracy, we have to have it accountable and we have to have it under the control of democratic institutions.
I completely agree.
Essentially, it has to be nationalized.
And we have to have an American president who will say, This is the American Constitution, and any website that is accessible within the United States must abide by that Constitution.
Yes.
Look, I am in full agreement.
I just think it's worth putting this out there because I do hear a lot of people on the right.
I mean, you know, the Laura Loomer kind of quixotic campaign in Florida saying, I'm going to break up big tech.
Well, will that really help us, actually?
Because first off...
Breaking up Twitter, Twitter is one company.
You're going to have three Twitters, three social microblogs.
How is this helping us?
This is just more stuff.
I'm not interested in Twitter itself.
I don't think the UI is that great.
What I am interested in is getting my thoughts out to the world.
Twitter won this battle 10 or 15 years ago as being kind of the...
Publishing platform for microblogging.
I don't care about products.
In terms of breaking up Facebook, you're going to have Facebook and Instagram again or Facebook and WhatsApp again?
Fine.
Who cares?
They're all going to censor us.
All of those companies are going to censor us.
You can break them up and maybe they'll make less profits and the billionaires will become millionaires.
Fine.
But I ultimately don't care because my issue is I want actual access.
And in that sense, a monopoly is...
Better.
Because Twitter is Twitter, YouTube is YouTube.
They have to be taken into effectively public ownership in that sense.
Right.
Or some way of doing it.
You can say whatever you want within the law, that's it.
Right.
Within the law of America.
And that's because America has extremely liberal laws on freedom of expression.
And so it would compel worldwide organizations to follow them.
The other thing I wanted to mention actually...
Because they benefit from America.
They're on the internet.
The amount of infrastructure that went into building public funds infrastructure that went into creating the internet that allows these companies to serve content.
Instantaneously around the world is tremendous.
And I know that's true to a certain extent, even for a gas station or a liquor store, but, you know, because there's highway systems and roads and I get it.
I mean, we're going back to like 10 years ago if you didn't build that.
I mean, it kind of is true.
There is a basic infrastructure that is created by the government that they benefit from.
And with the internet, in any internet company, it's just as plain as day.
They can't operate outside of these governments.
All of these companies, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, all those, they're on the NASDAQ or they're on the New York Stock Exchange.
They are benefiting from this infrastructure and they need to be regulated in some fashion.
And Amazon as well.
They should be declared, you are the national bookshop.
Right, exactly.
But the other thing I wanted to add, though, I was thinking about this, was we talked a lot in our discussions about this polarisation and Turkin's idea and the idea that America is on the brink of a civil war, according to his modelling.
And what I was thinking about was, well, perhaps the problem is that in previous cycles...
You have all of these things now that militate against the possibility of a civil war in the traditional sense.
So let's think about the civil war in Northern Ireland in the 70s.
You have no DNA testing.
You have no closed-circuit television.
You have no mobile phones to track.
You have no internet.
You have the possibility of a traditional...
On the ground civil war for a person, unwatched, and go in somewhere and plant a bomb and whatever.
Well, this is impossible now.
And then secondly, you have a society that was much higher in these kinds of group values of in-group loyalty and respect for authority and things like that, and lower in individualistic values, and in particular, harm avoidance.
And so the idea of harm avoidance, so harm avoidance, killing people, killing your enemies, shooting your enemies, we're now very, very high in harm avoidance.
And so even to the extreme left, okay, there's some nutters that will kill other people.
Physically hurting somebody or killing them is anathema in a society which is so low in this harm avoidance moral foundation.
Harm is so bad.
Physical harm.
And so maybe we'll talk about, oh, when's the civil war going to come?
Maybe we're in it.
Maybe this is it.
I think that's what it is.
And it's not quite a civil war.
I think we need to...
Distinguish between a real civil war and civil unrest.
We are seeing more civil unrest than we've seen in quite some time.
And this did start in 2016, in fact, with Antifa.
And if I may say so, me getting attacked in broad daylight while on camera, just someone attacking me.
That was...
One little salvo.
But now people are getting inured to street-level violence.
And they're still hysteric about it when a right-winger attacks a leftist.
They'll kind of apologize or say it's all an idea or something when Antifa burns down someone's building or whatever.
But nevertheless, we're getting inured to civil unrest.
But a civil war...
Is the battle for control of the central government by competing parties?
And so if you look at the United States, I mean, yeah, they were trying to break away, but it was a civil war.
You had a competing elite.
You had a planter elite that was connected in many ways, but distinguished from a East Coast traditional political and economic elite.
And they had two different visions for how the...
North America is going to be settled and work.
And they clashed.
And even though it was a secessionary feud, they were battling over sovereignty and legitimacy and territory in some ways.
I mean, the South did want slavery to expand throughout the country, by the way.
But now, the elite is all on the same page.
I mean, there's no competing elite.
The Proud Boys aren't the elite.
Or, you know, some guy...
It's just street huggery and violence, and it's almost sadder.
It depends how you define elite, because you have intra-elite competition, according to this.
Turkin modeling.
And so these people, people who are educated and whatever, who are on Right, but we don't have billions.
We don't have guns.
We have guns.
No, we do have guns.
Well, we have a six-shooter under our bed to protect ourselves.
But I'm talking about, you know, really taking care.
I'm saying in a situation where the government is, where the structures of society are so strong and people are so controlled and people, you know, you're watched all the time.
There's cameras everywhere.
Your DNA and all this stuff that can be very difficult to get away with crime, which is.
Then what form is a civil war or the nearest thing to a civil war going to take?
And that's what I was wondering about.
And I was wondering, this is the nearest thing that's possible to it.
We just hate each other.
You know, there wasn't even a presidential debate last night.
There were two sequestered groups where the Trump people watched NBC and the other people watched CNN.
It was just, we're not talking to each other literally at this point.
And when we do talk to each other, we're just screaming and bantering and whatever.
And we hate each other.
I mean, the level of distrust.
I was actually doing this thing for our election piece that I need to finish up next week.
You know, people, conservatives are more suspicious of their daughter marrying a Democrat than they are of their daughter marrying an African American.
Polarization has created these things that we've seen throughout history in terms of race and tribe and religion are now in terms of, do you pull the lever for these two political parties?
But the irony is...
Nothing really changes in the sense of, yeah, your identity is MAGA or your identity is I'm a liberal who hates MAGA, but you're still just voting for the system.
I mean, it's this weird kind of fake civil war that I don't think is ever going to actually, it's never going to be a civil war of old where there's a real battle for, you know, there are coups, there's, you know...
Two armies that used to march under the same flag fighting each other.
We're not going to see that.
We're going to see just endless hatred.
That endless hatred eventually comes to a point of some kind of breakdown, some kind of getting away, some kind of fissioning.
And that's what I think is increasingly happening.
I mean, the idea that this woman called this Afghan or something that is studying Oxford University, she was in the news a lot, and she put out a favourable comment about a friend of hers that's standing to be the head of Oxford University Conservative Association.
And she was condemned online for having a friend who was a member of the Conservative Party.
There was a tea company and Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain, Asian by the way, was shown drinking that tea company's tea and they put out things where we don't support the Conservatives, by the way.
When you say it's just one system, it is that, but it's the left that has the power and can control all of the cultural levers of power.
In Britain, something that was set off since the 90s, particularly.
America, I don't know.
And if that moves back the other way, swings back, which it did under Thatcher to some extent, and in Britain, then that's more of a sort of cultural revolution.
I don't think it can swing back because the way the right is articulated doesn't know how to do what the left does.
There's an asymmetry.
Granted, this is American-centric, so it might be slightly different.
But I don't think it is, actually.
There's an asymmetry between Fox News and the New York Times.
Just to use two things.
Different media, but bear with me.
The New York Times...
I'm glad both sides will be heard this time.
Or, you know, we're going to take back America for, you know, the citizens of this country.
You know, let's undermine that conservative media out there.
The New York Times is hegemonic.
It presents itself as the news.
You can call it liberal all you want.
It presents itself as the news.
Conservatives, for the last 30 years in the Fox News era, have been always articulating themselves from this accurate, in some degree, inferiority complex of we're pushing back against the elite.
Well, where does that really go?
So the Fox News stuff is kind of like, you know, I don't want to use the word propaganda, but you know what it is.
It's our side of the story.
It's punchy.
It's calling out the liberals for being unfair and mean and all that kind of stuff.
It's this like...
You know, little guy punching up.
The hegemonic news, real propaganda, in the way that Jacques Ellul defined it, is not doing that kind of stuff.
Real propaganda is presenting itself as, this is the news, this is your way of life, this is the truth.
They know how to rule in the way that the right just doesn't.
The right did rule.
If you go back to the 50s or something, it was the right that was doing exactly that.
We're not in the 50s.
No, that's the point.
But you do get these swings, these movements, because, as I've said, you've got these five moral foundations.
The left are only interested in two of them, which is fairness and equality and harm avoidance.
And the right...
They did in all five.
And so what you eventually get, always, is a situation with the others being authority, disgust and in-group loyalty.
And what this means is that the right will sympathise with the left.
The left will not sympathise with the right.
And so the left can always hijack the culture and take things in ever more left wing direction.
And the right will let them do that because it's a one way system of sympathy.
But eventually that needs because the left will sympathize with the right because they share some values.
The right will sympathize with the left because they share some values.
And so therefore things always move in a more and more left-wing direction until you basically have...
A situation, because we are adapted to have all five of these moral foundations, where the majority of people are extremely unhappy, because it's chaos, it's so low in authority, it's so low in in-group loyalty, the majority of people are disgusted and horrified all the time, and then people start to talk about this, people start to realise that others feel the same way, you end up with a challenge to the system, and then you have a movement back in a right-wing direction.
And what this will often be led by is people who are very high in in-group loyalty, in authority and in disgust, and very low, very low in harm avoidance and inequality.
And the consequence of that will often be that you'll end up with wars, expansionist wars, and very nasty situations, you know, right-wing tyranny, and this will make people unhappy, and then you'll get a move back towards the left.
And that's why things tend to go in these swings.
And if you think in England, for example, you have this movement left, Pretty much from the war, from the 50s, sorry, in the 60s, it goes left, left, left, left, left.
It creates eventually complete chaos.
And then you have this movement back under Mrs Thatcher.
And then by the end of the 90s, there's this feeling that we've become unsympathetic.
The very things that caused the leftward shift in the early 60s.
We're low in sympathy.
We're low in kindness.
We're low in equality.
All these people are unhappy.
Princess Margaret's not allowed to marry the man of her dreams.
Isn't it terrible?
Then you get the Blairite revolution, and now we've had a kickback against that in England over the last 10 years.
But the problem is that in that period, they've taken over the culture in such an extreme way.
I don't totally disagree with looking at personality profiles in terms of this.
I just think the arrow is pointing in one direction.
I mean, the general hegemonic discourse is so strong.
Because it's based on fundamentally liberalism and a kind of Christian heresy that we're just going in a direction.
And when we react, we don't consolidate any wins.
There have been these right-wing reactions that haven't really gone anywhere.
The David Cameron, Boris Johnson right-wing reaction.
The Trump reaction.
Look, trannyism is going wild.
It has been mainstreamed in a way that if you had told me this five years ago, I would not have believed you.
It's just insane what is happening.
You know, my eight-year-old is transitioning.
I mean, this is unthinkable a decade ago, even five years ago.
It's now mainstream, and this occurred under Trump.
So we are – the culture is just going in a direction.
I think if we're going to fight back, there has to be a And they deserve to lose.
And again, I don't have a lot of harm avoidance, I guess.
The right, they're weak.
They need to get kicked off the team.
We need players on the squad who are tough and who get hard-nosed.
That's what I want.
The right, they should go to the cheerleading squad.
It's your football coach speaking.
Coach Spence.
It should be an episode of South Park where Randy goes to watch these games and gets into fights with the dads every time and they play the in the background.
Yes, something like that.
But the only thing that I hold out hope for is that the fertility of the right is 40% higher than the fertility of the left.
It's 1.1% for the right.
If they're still in control of the culture, we're just going to be their cattle, though.
Heritability of 70 points.
So, but it's interesting.
All I can say is it's a positive sign of the confusion, the Soviet-like situation.
I totally agree.
Let me do one more thing before we go, because I do like to at least offer some kind of solution, and then...
Criticize what's happening now, offer a solution, but then also offer a kind of critical view of this, of saying this would be a solution, but let's just be realistic about the way the world's headed.
So what the right is now excited about is, and this is, again, this is American-centric, but I imagine there are analogs in Britain and all over Europe.
What the right is getting excited about now is removing This section 230 from the, I think it's like the Standards and Decency Act of Broadcasting.
Let me do this.
I'm just going to read a press release by Stephen Hawley from last summer, 2019.
And you'll kind of see where this is going because this is quite operative right now.
Hawley is calling for Jack Dorsey to be taken before Congress and read.
The Riot Act, so to speak.
So this is from June 19, 2019.
Today, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, introduced the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act, a major update to the way big tech companies are treated under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, CDA.
Senator Hawley's legislation removes the immunity big tech companies receive under Section 230 unless they submit to an external audit That proves by clear and convincing evidence that their algorithms and content removal practices are politically neutral.
Senator Hawley's legislation does not apply to small and medium-sized tech companies.
With Section 230, this is Senator Hawley speaking, tech companies get a sweetheart deal that no other industry enjoys, complete exemption from traditional publisher liability in exchange for providing a forum-free of political censorship.
Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, Big tech has failed to hold up its end of the bargain.
Okay.
This is what is being offered effectively by Trump.
I mean, he's monitoring the situation, but this is where the rubber would hit the road if the Republicans or Trump-aligned Republicans actually do something.
The Libertarian Republicans are like, it's a private company.
But this is where some Trump-aligned people are saying we're going to do something.
And this is where this just doesn't work.
First off, in terms of being politically neutral, it's already codifying things in terms of Democrats and Republicans.
Well, you and I arguably would not be protected under that because we're not always talking about...
You know, both sides of the latest political issue.
We're talking about stuff that gets denounced often by both sides of the political spectrum.
And I wonder if this kind of language, which is there at the beginning, would actually protect real alternative thought and not just some conservative on Twitter who got a little wild on Saturday night.
Secondly, if they don't submit to this audit of their algorithms and communication, Community patrolling or whatever they call it.
Then they'll be immune from that removal of liability.
So they could be sued.
So what is going to happen?
Let's say there's some perfect client who gets suspended from Twitter or kicked off Facebook or gets demonetized or whatever.
A conservative Republican law firm is going to work pro bono on his or her behalf.
They're going to perhaps win a lawsuit that this was an unfair removal.
You inflected politics into the situation.
This woman will be paid tens of millions of dollars.
The lawyers will get even richer than they already are in the process.
And what will really change?
Because they're demanding that you lawyer up.
In order to sue a company for doing this.
So that in itself is hundreds of thousands.
I mean, I know this.
Lawyers are horribly expensive.
To sue Twitter, you are going to need a lot of money.
Even to sue it on a small-time basis like it has been done, you need tens of thousands of dollars to do a serious suit that might win.
This is a huge endeavor.
We're already talking seven figures.
No one can do this.
And it seems to me like conservatives are looking for another folk hero.
Like, oh, look, this gal from Missouri just sued Twitter and she got $10 million and now she can post her conservative memes again.
It doesn't interest me.
The only solution that would serve us is Twitter is an American company.
It is on the stock exchange.
It operates through the internet.
Richard Spencer is an American citizen.
If Richard Spencer breaks the law in a semi-public sphere, then he can be arrested.
If he doesn't break the law but engages in the rights of a citizen, he will not be arrested.
He has the right to say things as controversial as they can be.
He has a right to say them.
Even things that are protected by Brandenburg decision, etc.
He has the right to say them.
Twitter is a semi-public sphere.
He has the right to speak.
It is a no censorship act.
I cannot sell drugs on Twitter.
I can't give a death threat, which is certainly not protected by the First Amendment.
I cannot pass a certain threshold.
But other than that, I have a right as a citizen to not be censored.
I concur.
It should simply be that if you are a company that operates in...
In the United States, then you must uphold the Constitution of the United States.
I have a right to get in an argument with you or someone.
I have a right to go to a bar and express my mind to a liberal and say, I don't like Joe Biden.
Twitter should be defined not even as a bar, because a bar is a private place.
Right, but it's kind of semi-public.
Twitter should be defined as a street.
Well, I know what you're saying, but free speech rights actually do extend to, like, malls or things like that.
I'm just saying.
It's different than going into someone's home.
Whatever, area of America.
It's non-physical, but it's America.
And if that's not expected, then it should be shut.
This is the solution.
It's so simple and it would ironically save these companies money.
Let them be monopolies.
The same should be true of YouTube and the same should be true of any other thing of this time.
And therefore you can't discriminate on...
They have laws in England that you can't discriminate on the basis of race.
They need to have laws that you can't discriminate on the basis of opinion.
Yes, and they do have these that are in California that were put in place on behalf of the left, actually.
The other aspect is bring back checking accounts, savings accounts, or maybe a PayPal-like service to the post office.
They used to have that kind of stuff.
If we could use a government PayPal, that would be imminently helpful.
Even if it's kind of janky, it would just be...
Fantastic.
No one would worry about getting their bank account cancelled.
We have to start thinking in these directions.
But I would say this.
This is the simple solution.
It's infinitely better than this Hawley 230 let's sue them into oblivion and make money off the deal thing, which I hate.
We shouldn't have to involve lawyers.
Exactly.
But I don't think it's going to happen because...
I think the age of the free and open internet has ended.
And what we were able to do, we kind of overplayed our hand, at least some of us who are getting really outlandish on the internet.
But I just don't think this is going to be allowed to happen in the future because the elite is now properly viewing Twitter and Facebook as the New York Times, as...
CNN, SNBC, they're viewing these as the media of power dissemination or the way that information flows.
And they're just not going to allow it to be the kind of like weird sibling of the mainstream media.
It is the mainstream media.
It's more powerful than these legacy companies in the moment.
And they're just going to simply use it like they did the other media.
I kind of understand their position.
I mean, if I were in their position, I would do much of the same thing.
You don't want the most powerful medium to be the Wild West.
If I were, you know, in charge.
But it just is what it is.
With reporting about Muslim rapes and whatever, in Britain, you get more truthful information from local newspapers.
The national newspapers are more censored and more under political pressure.
Local newspapers was where to go.
Nobody cares what you put in local papers.
Maybe we'll get to a point eventually where Twitter is less censored than the newspapers.
It's more censored than the newspapers.
They're acting like publishers.
Twitter is acting like...
That's another irony of they have this immunity to being sued as a publisher.
A publisher can be sued for publishing...
Total lies about someone or other things.
But Twitter is acting more like a publisher.
They're curating content.
They're kind of making it more of an app, almost like Apple News or something.
They're going in that direction, clearly.
And that's going to be how they're treated.
But again, what we want as alternative intellectuals, I don't like dissident.
I don't want to be thought of as a...
Some guy in the Soviet Union whining or whatever.
With alternative views, what would be best for us is some government regulation of the Wild West, basically, saying no death threats, no drugs, but other than that, if you're not breaking the law, free and clear.
Not exactly optimistic that we're going to get there.
The internet should just be constituted as America's 51st state.
