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Oct. 29, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:34:35
2020 Aftermath

It’s Thursday, October 29, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group. I’m joined today by Bradley Griffin, a man so Southern that his ancestors seceded … from the Confederacy. Main Topic: 2020 Aftermath The horses are rounding the turn and headed to the final stretch. In days, Americans will be presented with a stark choice between an old, out-of-touch, racist White guy … and Donald Trump. Brad and I delve into the gory details of the latest scandals. But we also take a step back and ask some big questions. Did Trump stumble upon an electoral strategy—“right-wing populism”—which gave him a miraculous victory in 2016 but simply can’t be replicated? After Trump loses, will the GOP give up on MAGA, or embrace it? And finally is political violence and rioting here to stay? And what does that mean for the coming Biden regime? 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

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It's Thursday, October 29th, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group.
I'm joined today by Bradley Griffin, a man so Southern that his ancestors seceded from the Confederacy.
Main topic, 2020 aftermath.
The horses are rounding the turn and headed to the final stretch.
In days, Americans will be presented with a stark choice between an old, out-of-touch, racist white guy, And finally...
which gave him a miraculous victory in 2016 that simply can't be replicated.
And after Trump loses, will the GOP give up on MAGA or embrace it?
And finally, Is political violence and rioting here to stay?
And what does that mean for the coming Biden regime?
We discuss.
How have you been?
Doing good.
How are you, Richard?
I'm well.
Have you been looking through all of the political erotica which has been bequeathed to us recently?
This just really wonderful images of Hunter Biden's escapades.
A Casanova of the globalist class of sorts.
I saw some of the images circulating on Twitter.
Then people were directing me to 4chan and I went over and I took a while.
I would say that Hunter Biden is beyond good and evil.
And is completely, completely not limited.
He's moved beyond good and evil, and he's reached awful.
Just, yeah.
Yeah, that is not wrong.
I would say this.
I really don't think this stuff is going to matter a whole lot.
I think it's kind of funny, actually.
Yeah, I mean, I did a podcast before, like, the really kind of gross stuff came out, and I was like, you know, do some of these allegations make Biden seem, like, relatable and cool?
You know, I was kind of joking.
I mean, obviously, a lot of this stuff of getting a foot massage du jour, I guess, and, you know, just smoking crack and things.
Like, it's just, you get an image of...
This child of privilege who is given these opportunities to be a bigwig in the global circuit and achieve that to a degree, but you basically just see this person who's given an opportunity to be either powerful or just degenerate and stupid, and he chose the latter, and we're just kind of getting a glimpse of it.
And it's pathetic and not erotic.
I underestimate the degree to which there's just been a general, like, coarsening and degeneration among Americans to the point where I wonder if they're even shocked about this kind of stuff.
I mean, I hate to say it.
I mean, who was the politician?
I believe he was from Colorado, and this was back in the 90s, and he was...
He had to resign his campaign, even though he was doing quite well, if not leading, due to he was carrying on a love affair.
Do you remember who I'm speaking of?
There was a movie about him with Hugh Jackman.
Yeah, I'll have to look it up.
There was this man who was obviously flawed, and maybe there were problems in his marriage, but there were images of him on a boat with some woman his age who he was carrying on a love affair with.
Sure, you know, I understand how a traditionalist like yourself might not like this, but this was an age-appropriate, extremely normal, kind of sympathetic love affair that he was carrying on.
And it is what it is.
And I think what we're going to see...
You know, going forward are not like, oh, did you carry on a love affair?
But, oh, were you getting a foot massage from a transsexual while doing, you know, PHP or something like it?
We've just degenerated to this level.
Yeah, I mean, like I said, I'm a traditionalist and I should be, like, shocked by this, but, like, I'm actually...
Not shocked at all.
In fact, I'm kind of curious what's on Don Jr.'s laptop.
Yeah.
I mean, is the Trump family really pretending to be any different?
Right.
Different here?
Yeah.
Come on now.
I mean, Donald Trump is on his third wife.
We've seen all his sex scandals.
We've kind of blown them off.
I mean, you've seen what Don Jr. is hooked up with.
Kimberly Guilfowl.
Yeah, I mean I think – This is probably the – I mean in terms of the lifestyle of these privileged brats like Don Jr.
I do not – this idea that they're up on their moral high horse about it is just kind of – it's just kind of – so this is what we expect from our elites, that they leave completely amoral, hedonistic lifestyles.
And, you know, use their wealth and privilege to indulge in any kind of degenerate, decadent behavior that strikes their fancy.
Yes.
I mean, this is what I've always – it's not shocking because this is how we assume that our political class operates in general.
This is – I mean – so some people are saying that he – I think it's come out that he had sex with his – that Hunter Biden had sex with – Beau's wife.
Yeah, you know, I find that more disturbing in a way than like banging some prostitute, to be honest.
Because to do that, to get a foot massage from some prostitute, whatever.
I mean, again, I'm not into that kind of thing, and I find it gross, but...
But whatever.
But to carry on a love affair with the widow of your brother who recently passed, I don't know.
There's just something a bit disturbing about that, to be honest.
Allegedly, he also had, well, this is what all the buzz about Hunter Biden is, is that he also had sex with his niece.
There were text messages where it seemed like he was inappropriate with his niece.
And I think some people in the kind of right-wing bubble of Twitter are expanding that to there's child porn on his laptop, which I do not think, at least from what I've seen now, I do not think that is true.
That's also something.
Extremely heinous and out of bounds.
I mean, you know, put aside Joe Biden.
I mean, you know, you have all this child pornography on your laptop.
I mean, you should just simply be arrested immediately.
I mean, that's just appalling.
But I think that's an exaggeration.
I think this guy is out of control.
I mean, that's clear.
He's just descending into, like, nihilism, you know, basically.
The tweet actually showed him doing push-ups in, like, I guess his house or something.
Kind of reminded me of, like, Patrick Bateman from...
Yes, yeah, exactly.
He's like a...
Yeah.
1980s, 1990s nihilism.
Yeah.
But I think what it is is that he was getting inappropriate with his niece, which, again, it might actually say something about him, the fact that he has these attractions to his brother's life.
I mean, there might even be a kind of inferiority complex going on.
Beau Biden was the one who stayed above board.
I don't...
We don't know what Biden did in his free time, but he was involved in the military and was kind of a better moral paragon of the globalist class, you could say.
And I wonder if there was some kind of weird jealousy going on.
I mean, we can only speculate, but I do find that kind of stuff rather just odd.
And, you know, disturbing, kind of more disturbing than visiting a prostitute in a way.
It kind of makes you feel almost like sympathy for the old man who has to deal with his damn sons.
Yeah, his degenerate sons having all their dirty laundry aired.
I have a little bit of sympathy for Hunter even.
I mean, he is being taken through the ringer.
You do not come back from this.
I mean, this is just utter personal destruction.
Not saying that he's a good person and that it's tragic or something, but I'm just saying, like, you know, there are other people who descend into nihilism and do not have that broadcast all over the internet.
And he is having that problem.
So I do have a little...
Touch of sympathy for Hunter.
I mean, he clearly is disturbed.
I know.
I mean, like, it's a sad, pathetic example of, you know, the children of Elisa.
And I would love to see what's on Don Jr.'s laptop, because I'm sure Don Jr. and Eric Trump is pretty much no difference at all, especially considering that, you know, didn't Don Jr. leave his wife, abandon his wife?
Yes.
Yeah, and Kimberly Guilfoyle is this, like, demon.
I mean, she, um, who knows what's on her laptop?
I mean, and she's, you know, and she's totally power-hungry.
I mean, you can just...
Since there's a little bit of, you know, Evita Peron in her or something.
Like, she just, she marries politicians.
She gives these kind of fascist-like speeches at the RNC.
She's a wildly ambitious woman.
And at least there were these accusations, which I would stress that these are accusations.
And I've been accused of things as well, so I would stress highly, you know.
These are accusations, but that she's kind of a sexual demon in her own right and gets Fox News interns, females, to give her boob massages.
Seriously, we're supposed to believe that there's a huge moral and cultural difference between...
It's just absolutely compelling between the lifestyle of Donald Trump and Don Jr. and Kimberly Guilful and their lifestyle and the lifestyle of Hunter Biden.
Especially with Trump being the president, it's really hard to make the argument that Trump is setting up.
A better moral example.
No.
And who knows?
We're recording this on Sunday.
But who knows?
Maybe the most outlandish version of the Steele dossier is going to be released on Monday.
Who knows about Trump?
I never believed that stuff.
At the very least, I kind of took it with a huge grain of salt and was just kind of like, well, maybe there's something going on there with some Russian prostitute.
You know, whatever.
This guy is a degenerate billionaire.
You can just buy anything and whatever.
But it ultimately brings me to my final conclusion, which is that if any global elitist is willing to adopt me, then I will promise to live a decadent...
Yet, ultimately, redeemable lifestyle.
So, I'm talking fast cars, a little boozing here and there, you know, the jet setting, but I will never do, I have no interest in all of the crap that Hunter got involved in.
So, I would be the good decadent son that you'd be proud of, and you'd kind of shake your head and be like, well, boys will be boys, but I would never jeopardize your political career.
Just saying.
I know it's kind of, you know, this is...
To adopt a 42-year-old who just wants to live a boyish lifestyle.
But I'm just saying, the option is out there.
I would be good.
Yeah, I know.
I don't really see it.
One of the big things is, you know, I mean, the election is...
How many people have already voted?
A ton.
Millions.
I think it's like 50 to 60 million have already voted.
Yeah, like 50 to 60 million people have already voted, so the time to release all this stuff, that window kind of passed.
Yeah.
And again, whether if they released it a month ago, it would have an effect is debatable.
And also, what we're seeing is that the 18 to 29-year-old set of voters, they are increasing their participation by multifolds.
And not only do they lean Democratic and towards Biden, they also would probably be the least likely to.
be scandalized by the stuff yeah yeah um i don't i don't see in the the people who would be the most scandalized by it too would be you know the oldest people the most right senior citizens and trump has lost them because of the way he's handled um Yeah.
Not so much as Hunter Biden's sex gamble.
Yes, I think so.
And they might also be so out of tune with internet culture that they don't know this is going on, or they've kind of vaguely heard about it.
And they might have heard talk of it on Fox News, but they don't really see it.
And in this way, the deplatforming actually does work.
In the sense of just the, you know, again, I totally oppose what Twitter has done to the New York Post, but like on an ethical standpoint.
But at the same time, it actually might very well have worked in terms of keeping the material away from older voters.
And they might have already kind of made up their mind.
I mean, they feel like Trump is abandoning them, doesn't care about them.
Biden is one of them in some ways.
The vague senility that he suffers from does not bother them.
They're suffering from it as well.
And Trump was willing to let them die so the stock market would go up.
That train has left the station six months ago.
And so it's just not.
It's not going to really touch them.
All right, let's do this.
So we talked about the utterly sensationalist tabloid level material.
It is disturbing and sad, but I don't think it's going to really affect the campaign.
But I think what I'm interested in, and I wanted to get your feedback and maybe even pushback on this, but...
The kind of, you know, the state of the populist right and how Trump is kind of like, you know, he actualized the populist right, something that was simmering there for a long time.
He actualized it.
But I think he also kind of demonstrated its limits and maybe even weirdly ended it at the same time.
Let me talk a little bit about what I'm saying here.
So Trump is wildly popular in the Republican Party.
He has 90% plus approval ratings within the Republican Party.
In terms of the primaries, now, granted, he didn't have a challenger, but he was getting, you know, there's some group out there that's talking about this, like, if an incumbent is getting 70-plus percent in primaries, then he's, like, almost guaranteed to win because this shows that he is consolidating his power base.
He is not.
Viewed as a lame duck or a betrayer or anything.
He's got his team in line, and that's what you need.
Before you face the other...
You've got to make sure that your offensive line is blocking the right guys.
Kind of get my metaphor here.
You've got to have everything in order.
You've got to protect the quarterback before you even talk about, like, oh, we're going to throw this flea flicker touchdown pass or something.
And I think that is a fair assessment.
And Trumpism, MAGA, is almost...
Like, beyond policy at this point.
Like, being MAGA is almost a lifestyle.
And you go to these events, and they're basically like comic routines.
You know, Trump, they're not particularly funny comedy routines, at least from my standpoint, but that's what they are.
He's going up there and he was like, so, you know, these guys came up to me.
They're like, sir, sir, you've got the COVID.
And then I wasn't feeling too good.
I wasn't feeling too good.
And then I took the Regeneron.
Boom!
I'm feeling amazing.
I wanted to rip my shirt off.
And all these people are like, oh, they love it.
They eat it up.
And he is...
Just this MAGA has become a lifestyle.
It's become a comedy routine.
And you and I might roll our eyes at this or whatever, but it is popular.
Like, you cannot deny that.
But I think...
So that's where we are right now.
But in terms of the...
Basically a populist strategy.
I think we've seen the limits of this.
And so let's go back to 2016.
Trump lost the popular vote, as we know.
So that is not unusual.
Republicans have been losing the popular vote since 1992, with 2004 being one exception.
So it's already kind of built in that it's difficult for them to win a huge majority like Nixon did in 72 or Reagan in 84. But what Trump did is that he...
Reached different voters.
And through those different voters, he was able to put together an electoral college coalition that was a winner.
And you can't deny that.
And so he did this, first off, by descending the golden escalator.
And saying, my campaign's about immigration, the wall, populism.
You know, they're not sending their best, they're rapists, they're murderers, they're not like you, you're good people.
He defined himself on immigration immediately.
That was also an issue that Romney talked about, but certainly did not make the preeminent issue of his campaign.
And he also, Trump also had this fuck the system component to him of, you know, that's why we liked him at some level.
Just screw it.
We don't want these politicians.
We want a total outsider, a guy who's going to be a bully on stage, who has wild ideas and is crazy, but maybe crazy is what we need right now.
And so he was able to reach different voters, and then he put together an unlikely, improbable, and precarious...
Electoral College strategy.
I think he stumbled upon it more than he thought through this.
But he stumbled upon this way of reaching former Obama voters in the Midwest or people who are apathetic, actualizing them as Trump voters, and putting together this coalition that entailed winning Michigan by 10,000 votes.
And just totally improbable, razor-thin, tightrope acts that he accomplished in 2016.
The issue with this, and so I think in some ways, 2016 was a redemption of right-wing populism, where you kind of talk about, I'm going to take care of you, the system's rigged, I'm going to rig it on your behalf, I'm going to talk about immigration, we're going to kick out the illegals, we're going to maybe even do immigration reform, which they were talking about.
But...
The problem is, is that it was a redemption of the, you could call it the sailor strategy if you want, but that right-wing populist strategy, but it also showed the limits of that.
So, people forget this.
Trump won less of the white vote than Mitt Romney did.
Mitt Romney got 59. Trump got 58. It was small, but actually significant.
He was able to win by winning over different whites.
So he won over whites that either stayed at home or voted for Obama, and he won the election that way.
But he actually did win fewer white people, and he won more minorities.
He increased his lead among minorities.
Now, there is some reason to believe that he's going to do well with Hispanics in Florida because he's a big, tough guy and whatever.
He has the endorsement of 50 Cent.
Could you imagine 50 Cent endorsing Mitt Romney?
No.
You know, never in a million years.
Kanye has kind of, you know, Kanye is running himself, but Kanye was at least attracted to Trumpism for a time.
And so he's weird, like through his own brash persona, he's kind of winning over some unlikely Republican voters who really aren't Republican voters.
They're Trump voters.
But then at the same time, he is getting decimated among whites.
So, like, we, you know, I talk about this a lot, but everyone talks about this a lot.
Whites with college degrees are just fleeing the GOP.
Suburban uppity professionals are just, they can't stand this stuff.
They hate it.
They're running away from it.
And in the...
In 2018 midterms, the GOP was getting 55% of the white vote.
Now, that is down 10 points from eight years earlier in 2010 when they got 65% of the white vote and just ran away with that election vis-a-vis Obama.
I have seen polls.
Now, granted, these are polls.
It's not real voting.
And you should even show some skepticism towards exit polling.
It's looking like Trump might get 54, maybe even 51% of the white vote in 2020.
And you just can't do it that way.
So this kind of gets back to my general thesis, which is that Trump demonstrated...
The power of right-wing populism strategy, what is called among, in our circles, the sailor strategy.
I think kind of misnamed, to be honest, but the sailor strategy.
But then he's also shown its limits, and it's kind of the fact that it is now unworkable.
And there, I've talked for a little bit, so I'll let you go.
Okay, I agree with a lot of what you had to say there.
What I would, from where I'm standing, I'm not like, I don't consider myself a right-wing populist.
A right-wing populist is a populist who's more focused on culture war issues, leans a lot more heavily towards social issues than economic issues.
My form of populism would be like your classical, early, mid-20th century Southern.
Democrat is the Huey Long type of Democrat.
That is more where I am.
So I'm a much more moderate to the left kind of populist.
And people who share my kind of views, it turns out, are mostly concentrated in the upper… You've got more of a social democratic type of socially conservative.
You support social conservatism.
You support social democracy.
And so that's the difference between, I would say, where I'm at.
A lot of Bernie voters, even.
Where I'm at on the political spectrum is much further to the left.
I'm kind of like a left authoritarian, Huey Long type of populist, whereas Nick Fuentes is more into the – In other words, he's a lot more comfortable with economic liberalism than I am.
So when Trump was rising, I didn't just hear – I didn't – in the 2016 campaign, people like me, much more to the left than – more moderate people than people like Fuentes, who supported Cruz, of course, in the primary.
But what I heard Trump say was, okay, the Iraq war was a disaster.
We're going to protect Social Security and Medicare.
Conservatives are useless.
One of the huge biggest things that I came across that made me like Trump is Trump says, I'm self-financing my campaign.
I'm going to be independent of the Republican donors.
That's what he did throughout the entire primary process.
He also said that we're going to take on Wall Street.
Wall Street's backing Hillary Clinton.
They're making a killing.
We're going to tax hedge funds and all this.
Granted, it was clear at the time, and in fact, when the media would always call me to ask about Trump during this campaign, I'd be like, yeah, I generally like Trump, but I kind of have some reservations about him.
I see his tax plan is just this.
How would you put it?
Like Larry Kudlow, supply-side, traditional, conservative, neoliberal kind of thing, right?
But he didn't emphasize that so much in the campaign.
He just kind of put it out there, right?
So what I would say is that Trump won the Midwest not because he won right-wing populists, but because he resonated – his message, campaign message struck.
Swing vote, more moderate-leaning populist swing voters in states like Iowa, Minnesota, really all around the northern rim of the United States, which has always traditionally been like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan.
These places have always been traditionally anti-war and social democratic.
And that was the aspects of...
When those people saw Trump in 2016, they were like, okay, well, we're getting rid of the old kind of conservatism and we're going to move into a more anti-war, social democratic direction then.
Plus, we're going to have secure borders and all the stuff like you would hear on Tucker Carlson every night, right?
Well, he won the – well, two things.
He won a lot of these more moderate, social democratic, left-leaning populist types.
In the northern states, people who have been disaffected with politics because they hate the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and showed up to vote for him in 2016.
Now, at the same time, he lost a lot of the traditional conservative liberal types, right?
So in the suburbs of places like Texas, suburbs of places like Atlanta, Georgia, Trump underperformed.
Mitt Romney because those people did not like to hear about economic populism and stuff.
They are – or really social conservatism.
They are more – a lot more – the pro-free market types.
And of course there was people who were just – And Trump was talking about coal mining and things like this.
Yeah, this is not going to resonate with suburban, professional, traditional conservative voters in the suburbs of – yeah, so these people – well, it's not just that.
It's also his personality and his – the way he comes across is kind of like a buffoon.
Well, at the time, people were like, okay, it's either Trump or Hillary, so they hated – these same people hated Hillary Clinton.
With a passion.
That was a huge part of the thing that got them to the polls.
And so Trump, you know, the coalition that he came in and the coalition that Hillary had that lost, he found he snuck his way in through the Electoral College.
But then, of course, as we've talked about for years, immediately after the election, during the transition, Trump sold out to Cheryl Adelson, the big donors.
And then he started to – and I was following this at the time because I was already intensely skeptical of Trump after he won the election.
And he started – he's going to hire Gary Cohn as his chief economic advisor.
He's going to appoint Andy Puzder, his secretary of labor.
And you're looking at this and you're like, really?
This guy's an economic – Or Mnuchin.
Or Mnuchin.
This guy's an economic – Yeah.
He's decided that he's going to have a conventional Republican presidency.
Yeah.
And so over the course of 2017, and you can see this in the polls, Trump's image— Over the course of 2017, he completely changed, whereas previously he had been seen as a much more moderate candidate.
Over the course of 2017, he came to be seen as a much more right-wing conservative candidate in the polls, as his administration and priorities actually took shape.
So once he got in there in 2017 and 2018, what did they do?
They did judges, tax cuts, health care, deregulation, beefing up the military, you know, normal conservative stuff.
What Romney would have done.
Ironically, Romney installed Romneycare in Massachusetts.
That was one of his claims to fame.
But anyway, Romney might have been better.
But I agree with you.
I think...
So I actually think 2017 was key where, you know, it's like a chess match where if you really screw up...
At the beginning, like if you just give away pieces on your first three or four moves, like you just can't win.
And I feel like he did that to a degree, like to a very strong degree.
The health care was, I think, just as important as anything.
And it's just as important as not actualizing immigration reform, which he at least tried and was kind of putting forth a deal.
We can talk about that.
Going in and gutting Obamacare while not really replacing it, and then talking about how, like, oh, if you re-elect me, we're going to have the greatest health care in the world.
Okay, you had a Republican Congress, you had a Republican House and Senate.
Like, that was the time to just force your will and just install something.
And Trump, in his own books, I mean, he probably didn't write these books, they're ghostwritten, but...
Nevertheless, he put his name on them.
He says, I am for socialized medicine.
Like, he just says it.
And so to then pursue a Paul Ryan-like plan where it's like, well, you know, the mandate is unconstitutional.
And, you know, we need to cut down on these budgets.
This is getting too expensive or whatever.
To just talk like that, I think, was a disaster.
I'm skeptical of these things, and I think that there might have been other issues that were actually paramount, but at least according to the expressed view of voters, the people who voted Democrats were doing so on the basis of health care.
That was the number one issue in 2018.
And he just screwed it up.
And I can give him a little bit of leeway and sympathy in terms of immigration because I know how – and I don't mean just the wall.
I don't give a – I have less sympathy there.
But in terms of changing the legal immigration paradigm, I'll give him a little bit of leeway in the sense of like – Courts block stuff and don't have to go through.
Courts, it's a difficult deal.
Chuck and Nancy are oppositional to you.
Okay, and you were at least trying that, even though it was a failure, at least trying to change the paradigm in 2017 and even up to 2018.
In terms of the healthcare, that was just a totally unforced error where he went along with Paul Ryan.
Yeah, well, I mean, if you would describe the first, okay, 2015, 2016, Trump has more of this outsider.
populist image.
And the key thing is he's not just appealing to right-wing populists with culture war rhetoric about immigration, but like the trade thing, right?
He made a huge thing of how trade had destroyed the Midwest, how we're going to have the best health care We're not going to cut big government programs like Social Security and Medicare.
He was anti-war.
2015, 2016 resonated a lot more with the more moderate social democratic populist left-wing populist types in the upper Midwest.
And then what happens is after – during the transition, during 2017, 2018, he starts to move away from this image and the policies he talked about so heavily in the campaign.
He's just like – He's allowed Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to – he's like, OK, I'm just going to be the rubber stamp for you guys.
Just send me judges.
I will approve them.
Deliver your – because what Paul Ryan and McConnell had told them is that we'll give you the wall, but we've got to get all this other stuff done first.
We've got to get tax cuts and health care done first.
Now, what they know is in the Congress, Congress being as polarized.
As it is, the only way anything is done in Congress is you have to use budget reconciliation, right?
You can do that once a year, and they tried it with health care to get that through, and that nearly fell because McCain shot it down.
And then they did tax cuts, which all the Republicans in Congress was for.
And then I want to say in December of that year, McConnell intervened to kill Roy Moore.
Yeah.
And so they opened up 2018 without that extra senator, which gave those other senators even more leverage.
And so what basically happened is that Trump spent his political capital advancing the… Same old true cons agenda.
And not only that, but all through 2017 and 2018, Trumpism, as it becomes institutionalized in power, when it's not just him on the campaign trail, but all these other figures like Diamond and Silk and all these other buffoons.
It's effectively a stupider, more retarded, gayer version of mainstream conservatism.
It's how I put it.
It's mainstream conservatism, except now it's dumber, and it's gay, and it's, I guess you could say, a decline from— Well, it is gayer.
I think it's difficult to imagine the diamond and silk phenomenon occurring under Romney because he's just too white.
I mean, I get it.
I get it.
And Trump clearly does have an appeal to African Americans.
I mean, Trump is a— Almost like a meme in rap songs for the past 20 years.
It's just like the image of a rich guy who's smashing champagne bottles on limousines and has all these babes in the back and all that kind of stuff.
And so he got those people, which might be actually somewhat effective.
Just as I can't imagine Diamond and Silk under Romney, it's difficult to imagine all of the gay pride stuff that's come under Trump.
And it's omnipresent at this point.
These videos that come out, it's not just some group saying, oh, we're gays, we're Republican gays or whatever.
You've seen that for decades.
Whenever there is a big rally and these things really pop on social media and they're getting millions of views, it's this rainbow flag, transvestites.
It's just dancing to YMCA or something.
It is truly bizarre.
And you could say, okay, culture is just degenerating.
I get it.
But I don't think that would have occurred under Romney.
If he had ran again in 2016 or 2020 or something.
It was this new thing that Trump brought in.
And he was indispensable in bringing it in.
Look at our old friend Milo, right?
Milo was Steve Bannon's man.
And what they did is, you look back on it in hindsight, is they kind of – the gay faction or whatever.
The cultural libertarian faction, which was part of the alt-right, was kind of lifted up by everyone's votes and put in power.
And then during the transition when the donors made the call, oh, we're going to let all these cultural degenerates.
They had this strange vision that somehow people like Milo, PJW, Cernovich and stuff were going to take over everything.
And they were going to be the right-wing, populist, alt-right capos.
Keep everyone on the GOP plantation and just milk them.
Because people who share our views are totally going to be satisfied with the extreme social liberalism of people like Cernovich and Milo.
And they have.
I guess Cernovich has at least expressed criticism of Trump, but I presume that's gone now.
I don't really follow Cernovich.
But yeah, Milo is on the Trump train, if Milo has a platform.
But those people were harmed by deplatforming, as we all were, but I think they were harmed kind of more intensely in a way.
I look at myself and I'm like, I think of like, okay, I am the ultimate.
I'm a kind of swing voter here because, number one, I'm pro-white and racialist, so that kind of like swing, white nationalist, southern nationalist type.
So I got that going for me as a non-traditional Republican voter.
I'm also more of a moderate, anti-war, social democratic type of populist.
When you look at someone like, if I'm souring on Trump, giving my perspective and my views about this, that's a leading indicator.
Look at me!
He's losing people who, if I'm souring on Trump, which I started from the beginning, that is an indicator that people who share my kind of mindset or my place in the electorate, not just me, there's millions of people out there who are like...
Cynical about politics, socially conservative, social democratic, populist, and economics.
If I'm souring on Trump, that's an indicator that he has problems with that demographic.
So I'll put it that way.
Just from the beginning, I'm just seeing this guy like— And things that I found kind of funny or crazy in a good way in 2016, I now just find extremely distasteful and disheartening.
I don't want to hear any of this stuff anymore.
I would prefer to go back to basically neoliberal managers who are managing the decline of America, slowly but surely.
And I would just prefer that than this toxic...
False promise of Trumpism.
And yeah, I mean, like, I'm an unusual character, but like, in a way, I'm not like I am an expression of like, you know, white liberal suburban liberals professionals who are just sick of this crap.
Yeah, I mean you actually open up – you actually open up the Christmas present of Donald Trump in December of 20 – the Christmas present of Donald Trump, and what you open up and you find – what you find out to your disgust is that not only is it mainstream conservatism, but it's mainstream conservatism except now it's extremely dumb and crude and stupid, and it's also gay.
And meanwhile, you're the one who's being blamed.
Being blamed for having this guy in power who's totally thrown you under the bus, right?
So we absorbed the full brunt of the backlash for having this guy in power, and his view of how he's going to transform society is he's going to put Rick Grinnell in power,
and Rick Grinnell is going to get Julian Assange arrested and go promote homosexuality around the world, and you're like, That has absolutely nothing at all, zero, to do with what I was looking for when I supported Trump in the first place.
Yeah.
He's done absolutely nothing for me.
In fact, he's made my life worse.
Yes, I would not certainly be facing the kind of backlash.
Now, I got obviously my...
Profile promoted beyond imagination, but there's always a cost to everything, and the cost is high, and it's kind of like, you know, if I'm going to go walk this tightrope, then there has to be some kind of reward, or otherwise I'm going to just focus on other stuff that's more kind of intellectually fulfilling, and that is basically...
Yeah, my choice.
The other thing I would add to this is that you and I are close to being the same age.
I guess I'm like six years older than you are?
I'm turning 40 next month.
Oh, okay.
We're basically the same age.
Yeah, I was born in late 1980.
Yeah, okay.
I was born in 1978.
So I'm on the tail end of the Gen Xers, and I identify with Gen X. You're just some millennial...
No, no, no.
Actually, I think millennials begin in like...
1982?
1981.
No, 81. Oh, okay.
So you are officially part of the Gen X Forever Club.
I'm literally the last, technically the last, absolute last batch of Gen Xers.
Yeah.
I'm a proud Gen Xer.
And we're the most right-wing right now, by the way.
Polls are to believe.
We're actually the most right-wing.
The seniors are just like, oh, I want Biden.
And then the millennials and Zoomers are like, left is a mo.
So we are the most right-wing group.
But anyway, what I was saying is that you and I went through similar trajectories, and we kind of went our separate ways, but we kind of had a very similar path that we tread, and that was the anti-war movement of the turn of the century.
And, you know, when Bush W. Bush was promising a more humble foreign policy, interestingly, in 99 and 2000, but after 9-11 and, you know, after all these neocons are in his ear, he became a almost messianic global liberation president, at least in rhetoric and to a very large degree in policy.
And we were opposed to that, and I think we went over to libertarianism because that was kind of like a coherent way to be in opposition to the war movement.
And I voted for John Kerry in 2004, I'm proud to say, although he was a little bit suspect as an anti-war candidate, being that he voted for the thing.
That's kind of where we came from.
And I think at least my perspective on the anti-war thing is like, okay, I'll give...
Maybe one and a half cheers to Donald Trump for the fact that he has not created a new war.
Only because he's waiting to get through his re-election before he can deal with Iran.
Well, he might.
I mean, you might be right about that.
I'm extremely cynical.
Let's assume Trump wins.
I'm assuming that he will get much more.
That's why you have all these little shifting alliances going on that Kushner's negotiating.
They're trying to line up anti-Iran.
They are successfully isolating the Palestinians and Iran.
By basically getting all of the other Arab countries in good relations with Israel.
Getting all the ducks lined up so they can go after Iran in a second term after Trump doesn't have to worry about his election.
Yeah.
And John Kerry was kind of saying earlier, like, if you're going to have diplomatic relations with Israel in the Middle East, you have to solve the Palestinian question.
And basically, Kushner and others are like, no, we don't.
And again, there was another agreement of understanding that occurred on Thursday or something.
So they are successfully isolating Iran and the Palestinians and getting Arab countries to get on board with Israel.
And so all of that kind of anti-Islam, anti-Muslim stuff from 2015, that's out the window.
They're not going to do a Muslim ban now.
It's now good Muslims.
The Muslim ban they did was what banned mainly Iran.
The Shiites were the ones who weren't the terrorists.
I think Saudi Arabia was always exempt from it.
Oh, yeah.
Syria too.
And that's like the major source.
I think Syria was on the list.
But yeah, Saudi Arabia was the major source of this ideology and actors.
It was total just like – I mean like he never meant any of this.
He was just going with what – that's the thing you realize about Trump.
Like he's just constantly losing interest in – like he was this big immigration warrior or something in 2016.
Now he's talking mainly about the Platinum Plan.
Oh, remember all this?
The forgotten man will be forgotten no longer.
It's American – remember his speech?
Americans have dreams too was what he said about the rumors.
Americans have dreams and this American carnage is over.
He forgot every bit of that, right?
Yeah.
Now it's – and we were talking – We were talking about how Trump actually implemented the 2012 Republican autopsy, right?
They didn't need to appeal to white working class.
They wanted to move away from whites.
So in 2013, I believe is when they released it, but it was an autopsy of the 2012 election.
It was basically saying, we're the opportunity party.
We need to reach out to African Americans and rising immigrants.
And Trump...
Again, Trump was like the repudiation of that, but then he weirdly implemented it.
He has moved beyond whites.
And yeah, the immigration.
Remember, in 2018, I got all of this shit on Twitter because when Trump was engaging in these things, like bashing liberal journalists, and they were calling him racist or whatever, and Trump was like, no, I want more immigration than we've ever had because we have all these companies coming into America.
We're going to need more workers.
Like he was going.
Full-on, like, neocon immigration, you know, stuff.
But again, no one noticed it.
No one noticed it.
I noticed it, but then Richard was like the black-pilled, bitter, you know, bitter Gen Xer.
And all the kind of Zoomers or alt-right people, whatever, they were like, he's bashing Jim Acosta.
This is so awesome.
And it's like, listen to what he is saying.
Don't just look at the fact that he's being...
Like, rude to Jim Acosta.
I don't care about Jim Acosta.
The whole issue is that his idea, it is what it is.
His ideology is pro-immigration.
And, like, again, immigration's now just been kind of forgotten.
He's moved on.
I don't know what's going to happen after COVID lessons and COVID will lessen, like, what he would do if in office.
But to return to the anti-war thing, just to tie a bow on it, Again, as I said, I'll give Trump one and a half cheers for not starting a new war.
But I think there's a general...
A general trajectory that liberals will implement in which we are not going to have another Iraq.
And going after Iran and the killing of Soleimani and the bombing and so on, that was extremely provocative.
That got people worried about World War III.
I am not sure the liberals are really willing to do that.
Intervention into Libya was their last go at that humanitarian intervention.
And in 2014, Obama had all of his ducks in a row to go after Syria.
He had a Republican Congress, but he had all of his ducks in a row to go after Syria, and he couldn't do it.
He could easily have just said, I'm the president, they crossed the red line, we're going to do a humanitarian intervention, and Congress would have granted it.
But instead, he punted.
Congress didn't want to do it.
They sat on the issue, and it just died.
Basically willing to create that level of chaos.
Now, Trump...
Doing another miraculous victory with Kushner there and Bibi Netanyahu.
Bibi Netanyahu has been talking about Iran getting a bomb for the last 20 years.
I mean, he is deadly serious about intervention in Iran.
You might be right.
In terms of the liberals, they seem to just be, as I've said before, managing a slow decline of American empire, which is what it is.
It's not good.
It's not bad.
But with Trump, he might actually do it.
Right, yeah.
I mean, you look at his first term over the course of four years, his foreign policy in the Middle East has been give Israel everything it wants, short of war, and get all the Israelis and the Sunni Arabs together and isolate and crush Iran and its allies, right?
Yeah.
And now they're all boasting, Trump is the most pro-Jewish, the most Zionist president we've ever had, and Jared Kushner is getting credit for all these huge diplomatic triumphs.
That's probably because, in my view, that all these Sunni Arab states think that if Trump wins a second term, that Trump and Kushner are going to really go at it with Iran, and they've just been preparing for it.
But first he has to get through his election, right?
He's going to be like, I stopped a war.
But he's going to do it in his second term.
That's what I believe for years.
And everything I've seen out of the Middle East since then is that he's been getting all his ducks in order to really go after Iran in his second term.
And I don't see, like you said, I don't see Biden doing that.
I don't see Biden doing that, no.
If Biden wins, I think there's less of a chance.
They'll probably try to go back to the nuclear agreement and ease tensions on that front.
Oh, they've said as much.
That's what they would want to do.
I think it's very deceptive that Trump has been – it's like he's been steadily, systematically provoking Iran and has been getting all his diplomatic ducks in order to go after Iran.
That's my read on it, and he's just trying to get through his election.
And he might win.
I mean, I'm predicting a failure, but I would never say that I'm 100% certain.
I mean, who knows?
Crazy things might happen.
I don't trust the polls at all.
I haven't looked at that many polls at all, all year.
I don't trust the polls.
And it might be deadlocked and thrown to the Supreme Court.
But my main sense of it is that if the way I think about Trump probably reflects the swing voters who put him in office in the first place, if I'm this sour on Trump, he's probably lost all those millions of people who share my worldview.
They're not with him anymore.
So I just trust my gut instinct that he's going to lose this election and lose it pretty badly, and I don't see anything changing.
Over the next week or so, I think most people, something like 50-60 million have already voted.
Yeah.
People have made up their minds.
Of the 150 million that are going to vote, they've made up their minds.
Now, it'll be interesting to see how Trumpers respond to Trumpers respond to Trump.
This is a good question, because we could talk about where does the alt-right go from here or whatever.
Look, that's just kind of like...
What we make of it.
Like, I'm going to be pursuing certain things, and I'm not going to be under any illusions that we're going to reinvent 2015.
But I think it's a more kind of interesting analytical question is where conservatism can go from here.
And I'll just throw this out there.
I don't think they could ever, like, totally denounce Trump.
Like, even if he loses, and even if he loses in a landslide...
They must recognize on some level the personality cult that he created, the kind of power of nationalism, particularly vis-a-vis wokeism, you know, and just the left overreaching and seeming insane and irrational.
And I don't think they're going to fully—I don't think there's going to be—if he loses and loses bad, I still don't think there's going to be some repudiation of Trump.
I think that they kind of can't.
And much like the religious right, they're going to kind of try to corral that energy and those people.
And there's QAnon cultists who are in their coalition now.
They're going to have to kind of square the circle in some way.
And I don't think they're going to ever get rid of that Trumpian nationalism, whatever that means in terms of policy.
Yeah, I mean, I've been saying for like four or five years now, it'll be interesting to see what happens when...
All these people who went to sleep trusting the plan in 2016 wake up and they find out, you know, actually Trump didn't make America great again.
Actually, things are worse.
This will be a far bigger blow to them than Obama winning.
Oh, yeah.
After the last six months of, I mean, think about it.
If you're a traditional right-wing populist or ordinary conservative, you've seen BLM and Antifa.
Burn down the country in six months.
You've seen Trump being impeached on this Russia nonsense, right?
The media has thrown out any kind of restraint, right?
They're actually censoring the New York Post during an election.
It is incredible when you take a stand back.
Right, right, right.
I mean like the Democrats and the people, yeah, they've got rid of Trump, but like in order to get rid of Trump, they what?
Lie, they use violence, they threw out.
This can't, this can't, if he loses, this can't but like radicalize his supporters.
I think it's extremely, extremely radical in my view.
I think a lot, I mean because, I mean look, I mean.
The FBI has basically – I mean we've seen what's happened to it, right?
You've seen people like – to the point where they're not even – these Democrat cities aren't even enforcing the law.
They just allow anarchists to go – BLM to go get violent, and they blame it all on white supremacy and racism and systemic racism.
I think that his supporters are going to get far more radicalized.
And I think it might be like, what is it called?
Boogaloo?
Boogalitarians?
Is that what the word is?
Boogalitarians?
Yeah.
But it's going to be like Boogaloo in the name of Trump in this kind of weird way.
Like it won't be alt-right terror or something.
It will be like weirdly Trumpian.
And this kind of sticks with my forecast that Trumpism won't die even if he loses.
The people who are going to benefit the most from Trump going down, you're going to have a huge revival of the Patriot movement, in my view.
The Patriot movement is going to go through the roof like it did in the late 90s.
When Clinton was in office before Oklahoma City, and they're going to be thinking the patriots have got to save America.
Patriot groups are going to explode when Trump goes down, in my view.
As for the GOP, I don't know.
I think the GOP is going to be hard because, I mean, and I'll be posting this in the coming next two days, but I just see, like, I see at least the potential for pretty much long-term Democratic hegemony in Washington.
If they don't screw it up, and they might screw it up by going too woke or whatever, or overreacting to coronavirus and just never let the economy go back or whatever.
Yeah.
I mean, the Senate and Electoral College were kind of reactionary institutions in the sense that senators are two per state.
And so here in Montana, where we have one million people and like seven million cows, we have two senators.
California, which has 60 million, doesn't it?
It has two senators.
It's a weird...
Yeah.
And that was one of the ways why the GOP was able to win the Electoral College, A, and B, not just hold on to the Senate in 2018, but actually increase their lead.
And remember, 2018 was a wave election.
The Democrats had a higher percentage.
They were up by close to 10 points nationally.
And so that was greater than the Tea Party election, which was up by 7 points, and the 1994...
So-called revolution.
And so we're going to see long-term hegemony in the House.
And if the Democrats take the Senate, they will have kind of like overcome that inherent kind of reactionary element within the Senate structure.
And it's theirs to lose.
I mean, again, Republicans have won the popular vote once since 1992.
All right, that's pretty...
Like, this is not a center-right country.
I mean, like, Bush as a, you know, stay-the-course wartime president, he won in 2004.
He won the popular vote.
He beat John Kerry.
He won the Electoral College.
No question.
But other than that, they just – the Republicans are not a national party.
And I think we might – like, if you look back at the FDR coalition over the course of the 20th century, like, from – Like, the early 30s up until, like, realignment, which took a long time.
I mean, realignment was, like, very slow.
You know, from the 30s to, like, the 80s or 90s, you had, like, hegemony.
I mean, you just had one Democratic Congress after another.
And there were occasionally, like, two years of the GOP-controlled Congress, but, you know, they won it back two years later.
I – you know, the Democrats are kind of like it's – they are the hegemonic party, and it's theirs to lose at this point.
Like they could screw it up.
Believe me, they could screw it up.
Going full-on woke and all this kind of crap, all those suburbanites might very well go back to the GOP.
It would just be like, all right, no, you're not.
In my view, like we're in a very, very different place because in the early 20s – you ever heard of Robert Putnam?
Guy wrote Bowling Alone.
He's got a new book out.
It's called The Upswing.
It's basically about a lot of the stuff that I've been talking about.
Well, in the early 20th century, and I've been studying this era, when you had the Depression and World War II, what the Depression and World War II did is it brought the country together.
Social capital increased.
The country was...
Putting kind of individualistic concerns behind them.
There's more of a focus on the common good.
Economic inequality was drastically reduced by the New Deal and the war.
High levels of taxation.
Marginal tax rates at 90%.
Wasn't that the case under Eisenhower?
It was very high.
We're not anywhere.
We're going in the opposite direction.
Social capital is collapsing.
People are getting more violent.
There's absolute distrust and it's cratered in institutions.
In my view, looking at the trajectory of the country and anticipating the reaction it's going to have when Biden gets there on the right after using these methods, I think we're going to – I've publicly said I think we're going to tip over into violence at some point.
Within the next five years.
Well, we're already there.
Not because I advocate it, but just looking at historical trends and historical patterns.
We're already at violence.
I mean, the punching of me, not to be too narcissistic here, but the punching of me was actually really symbolic.
It shocked me.
I did not, I was Mr., you know.
Wear a suit, go talk to the press, get your name out there, riding high.
And that Antifa member, whoever he was, was just like, no, we are shutting this down through violence because the media won't do it.
The media loves Richard Spencer.
We're going to just shut it down.
And again, I think that was actually a really significant thing.
And at the very least, it kind of...
It was a token of what was going to come.
And where we are, like you say, there's going to be violence.
We have violence right now.
We have more violence.
It's unimaginable in 2012.
Right.
It's just like if we could use a historical analogy, we're sitting here watching the lead up to the war between the states.
When violence just spilled over, political violence became common.
I mean, you had people assaulting each other in Congress.
You had actually open fighting in Kansas.
And my view of it, I mean, it's not just the left.
In fact, you've seen those polls, right?
Where actually more Republicans support violence now than Democrats.
I haven't seen that poll.
Wow.
Yeah, no, no.
More conservatives and Republicans approve of political violence now than...
Democrats – and this is kind of flipped in the last six months as ever since the George Floyd BLM.
Republicans and conservatives are getting more and more – I mean they're saying like we're being pushed out of power because the opposition has thrown moral standards out to the wind.
They've used violence.
They've used the FBI.
They've censored the internet.
I mean … I don't think we're going back to David Frenchism.
In fact, I think we're going to go to an extremely dark place.
I think that the conservatives are going to get violent.
And Biden won't be able to handle this because this is the thing.
Biden, you know, what was his first television commercial when he announced his campaign?
It was about Charlottesville.
And then he actually, I believe he announced...
Kamala Harris on the third year anniversary of Charlottesville.
But what was he saying, basically?
Biden's promise, and again, I've said this a hundred times, and so have other people.
This is not...
Like a hot take.
Biden's promise is back to normalcy.
We're going back to the 20s.
We're going back to the Obama era, yeah.
Right.
But we're going back to the 20s in terms of rhetoric.
But he wants to bring us back to those wonderful days of 2013.
When, you know...
Inequality was high, but we were kind of handling it.
There was no alt-right.
There was no Charlottesville.
There was no Antifa.
There was no BLM.
We're just going to go back.
And everyone kind of liked Obama.
And if you didn't like Obama, you were a bit of a kook and all that kind of stuff.
Things were okay.
And he is basically promising to go back there.
But the thing is, you can't.
He's the right candidate for the right time, if I'm correct.
And he wins in a major victory that matches Obama's electoral college totals.
He is the right candidate because he's an old guy.
He's a white guy.
He has a history of being anti-socialism, being anti-crime, etc.
He's kind of the perfect person who can win.
But once these forces become fully unleashed...
They're going to send him out on a rail like they did LBJ.
Remember, LBJ in 1964, he defeated Goldwater, who was a, like, at least the way he was viewed, he was viewed as a force of fascism or extremism.
Like, he, there was this famous television commercial called the Daisy commercial, which I believe only aired once, but even...
Pre-social media, it was in everyone's mind.
It was this little girl picking a daisy, and then she looks up, and there's a nuclear blast.
It was totally outrageous.
But basically, LBJ was saying, this Goldwater guy is nuts.
And Goldwater cemented that conservative ideology of free markets on the home front.
You know, rollback communism, hot war abroad.
And LBJ kind of promised a certain type of back to normalcy.
And he kind of said, you know, we're not going to go there.
We're going to be diplomatic.
We're going to execute the war in Vietnam.
And it worked.
So he fought off fascism and, and, and, and, you know, a, a speech that was supposedly written by Harry Jaffa, um, basically, um, Goldwater said, you know, extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.
And so he was kind of owning the rough-and-tumble conservative, and LBJ was seen as normal.
But the thing is, by the late 60s, LBJ, when he was running for re-election in 1968, I believe he lost New Hampshire, if I'm correct, much like Biden.
Did.
And then he basically dropped out.
So he was this extremely impactful president.
I mean, he did the Civil Rights Act.
He did the Great Society.
He did the Immigration Reform Act of 1965.
He is an iconic president.
But then he got kind of...
He's destroyed by his own – the forces within the left.
And I think he died of a heart attack three years later or something on his ranch in Texas.
He was just this lost man.
I could see – and I don't wish any ill on Biden himself, but I could see Biden dying in a few years of depression.
I know people clip things.
I'm not wishing that on him.
I'm just saying that – He's – I kind of – I don't know.
I kind of weirdly like him.
Like I could see having a beer with him.
But these forces have been unleashed, and at one point they will turn on Biden.
Yeah, well, what I'm saying – and this is kind of interesting.
Now, me and you – like, OK, you got to think.
The left is, since 2015, 2016, is portrayed.
The alt-right is Nazism, is fascism, and Trump is a white supremacist and a racist and a fascist.
Their view of the man, the left's view of the man, in our view of the man, couldn't be more different, right?
We see Trump as this non-ideological...
Celebrity, reality TV show, narcissist.
He only cares about attention, being in the limelight and owning his enemies.
There's no real ideology behind the man.
His ideology is Donald Trump.
The man is absolutely – the man is – the last thing he is is a fascist.
He's not even a conservative.
I mean like George H.W. Bush – George H.W. Bush sent in the military to put down the L.A. riots, right?
Donald Trump is the least fascist.
It's kind of hilarious.
He's the least fascist president ever.
And George Herbert Walker Bush was this bastion of wasp America as well.
I went to Yale and played first base for the team.
Here's where the left has made a mistake.
First of all, the volcanic reaction to Trump's victory.
Donald Trump was never who they thought he was, right?
He wasn't even alt-right.
He wasn't a fascist.
He was just like a...
Celebrity reality TV host.
And they use every dirty trick, every means at their disposal to get rid of this guy.
And even us.
You know, Richard Spencer isn't like a violent fascist at all, right?
You enjoy sharing ideas and talking to people and baiting.
Almost like a classical liberal in the sense that you like engaging with other points of view.
And in fact, the alt-right was, of course, completely against war, right?
Yes.
Grew up hating war, grew up hating violence.
At least my alt-right, at least our Gen X alt-right emerged from the anti-war movement.
Right.
Our Gen X alt-right movement was never pro-violence, was never… Pro-war, was never fascist in any but an ironic maybe sense of the word.
No one was actually – if we were actually in power, we wouldn't be using violence against people.
But the left actually thought that Trump was a fascist and we were white supremacists.
Any means – they've used any means that they're supposed to.
So now what's going to happen is that when they've thrown off the gloves and have gone after – The ordinary conservative patriot type is the point where actually they're killing them in the streets.
Those people are going to get violent.
They're the ones who are going to be radicalized.
You're going to see the type of, I think, the emergence of the American patriot type who's actually willing to use violence.
Yes.
Because they've learned the only way that you can deal with violent anarchists and communists is...
Given what you've received.
Well, look at the Ritterhouse.
That's his last name, isn't it?
Ritterhouse.
So, like, let's...
It's a sign that the ride is becoming more...
Yeah, and let's be objective about this young man and not kind of, you know, valorize him in the way that he has been on large segments of the ride.
At the end of the day, he went across state lines with a weapon in order to protect property.
But let's be honest, he was itching for a fight.
And that doesn't mean that he is guilty or that he didn't act in self-defense.
But let's just also be honest, it's very different than a guy just at his own home and his home gets raided and he...
You know, waste them or something with his own weapon.
That's a totally different situation.
This guy really was going out there, and that, you know, however you feel about him, and, you know, that is a sign of vigilantism that is kind of brewing, you know, among these people.
And for what it's worth, this is kind of a funny anecdote that's personal, but do you remember the boomer bomber from Like 2018?
Yeah.
So this guy who was like a non...
He was like a whitish kind of male stripper who lived in a van.
Yeah.
And he incompetently tried to bomb people.
Uh, he, he, he was going to mail bombs to some of these big liberals.
So I was informed by the FBI that I was next on his list.
So when they raided his van and they found his like list of people, I was there.
So I, I, so I was like, I'm, I, I joked with them there and they kind of looked at me like this.
I go, well, I guess it's a thrill to be nominated because they said like, we have a duty to warn.
Um, if someone, and I've gotten these things kind of things before.
And so I was on his legal pad of like, you know, first we'll do the big wigs like Obama and whatever.
And then like, if we have time, then we'll bomb Richard Spencer.
So like, this is an amusing anecdote, but what I'm saying is that like, we are not connected to that.
Like, at least I'm not.
You know, they oppose us.
This is Spencer, racist, fascist who endorsed Joe Biden.
I mean this is almost like a wet dream for these people.
I kind of fear for my life in a way.
Yeah, yeah.
You're actually voting for Joe Biden.
You're not the guy who's actually going to go out there.
You're not Timothy McVeigh, right?
Right.
That's what Timothy McVeigh was.
Timothy McVeigh was one of these patriot types.
What he was offended by was what, Waco?
Yeah.
Those were absolutely terrible events.
I should say that.
You're going to see the rise, I think, of the violent conservative.
Because the GOP and the conservatives are going to lose control of their base.
Once they figure out that they're completely done.
We underestimate people like us have always realized that whites were in this predicament.
But most conservatives haven't realized yet.
The full implications of the demographic change and how they're going to be politically marginalized for all time.
And the Democrats are just going to be able to do anything and be as anti-white as they want to.
The left is assuming that conservatives accept this.
We're going to assume the demographics are going to change like that and the system is going to maintain its legitimacy.
The people aren't going to turn to violence.
No, we'll just be in power to do whatever they want.
That's a fatal miscalculation because they've thrown out everything that could possibly – every justification that could restrain their right from doing it, toss it to get rid of a blowhard like Donald Trump.
Yeah.
Was it worth it?
I don't think so.
What was he fucking doing that was so fascist in the first place?
What?
Cutting taxes?
A big tax?
Guys going around promoting homosexuality and it's just allowing anarchists to burn down cities?
That's your fascist.
Yeah.
I think they're actually going to get some kind of fascism after what they've done, but we'll see.
Yeah.
We will see.
Amazing conversation.
Thank you.
We'll see if I'm right.
I think we're going to look back on it.
We're going to look back on this year.
We did not realize in hindsight how close we were to the violence, even though all the signs of it were there at the time.
The change in approval of political violence, the instability of burning down cities, entire cities like Kenosha.
We did not realize how close to Ledge we were.
But I think we're going to find out soon enough.
And I say that not because I'm advocating.
I think it's terrible.
But I just see this country going into a disintegrative...
No, at the end of the day, it's funny because you're saying you're like a Midwestern populist or a Huey-Lung populist.
Yeah, I mean, I think as I get older, I don't know.
I seem to adopt a kind of platonic elitism.
I don't like the polarization either, and I don't think we benefit from it.
And ultimately, even if we benefit from it in the short term, I want a top-down, authoritative structure that will maintain order.
Go ahead.
Yeah, that's what I want.
And I want a top-down paternalistic structure that will maintain order.
And that is basically the conclusion I've come to.
And I feel like just endorsing and jumping on the bandwagon of these kind of energies that are symptomatic of polarization, like Trumpism, is actually the wrong move.
But I feel like also because I'm...
Being truthful about that, it's going to isolate me.
Yeah, it's going to isolate me because the alt-right, they want me to just bash the left and say Trump is badass and own the libtards.
I'm just not.
If you look at where we're at now and where we're going, is there any possible way it doesn't end in some kind of violent catastrophe?
I don't think it will end.
This is my...
Well, hold on, hold on.
This is my pushback, and I think you actually might agree with me.
So, during the Civil War I, which we have to call it now, Part 1, there were competing elites, and those competing elites stood for truly different ways of life.
And this is where...
I don't want to hear, and I think you actually kind of agree with me on this, I don't want to hear any more of this lost cause nonsense about how the Civil War was about, like, legal matters and the tariffs or whatever.
It was about, slavery was...
It was indispensable in creating that war.
It was overtly discussed by ideologues like Calhoun and South Carolina.
It was fanaticism that calls the war.
Yeah, and fanaticism about the election of Lincoln.
But the fact is, it had to come to a head at some point.
You have a totally different way of life.
Now, granted, the economies were interconnected.
You know, Northern textile manufacturer was benefiting from slavery in a way that a small farmer in Pennsylvania was not.
Yes, but it was a two different systems and slavery was the indispensable, not the only, but the indispensable component of the Southern way of life.
And we just need to kind of come to terms with this and stop the lost cause nonsense about they were fighting for the Constitution.
Please, Southerners, let's just be honest about stuff right now, okay?
And it was about race as well, not just slavery, because those were intertwined.
It wasn't just one thing, it was everything.
I agree, I agree.
It wasn't just one issue, but slavery and race were indispensable issues.
They were decisive issues in this.
But what I would say is you had competing elites, and so you had, with the notable exception of Stonewall Jackson, You had true elitist basically waging war against other elites.
And to a degree, it was even a battle over control of the country because the South wanted the expansion of slavery.
I mean, they wanted the expansion of slavery into territory.
So it actually was about a battle for control of the continent.
And again, I just I don't want to hear any more lost cause stuff about how they just wanted to go their own way and they would have ended slavery.
And they, you know, just know that wasn't like the liberal historians are correct.
And and so like that was a real civil war.
The thing what I see now, which is really fundamentally different.
Is that there is not a competing elite to the current one.
And so what we're going to have is just vile, terrible, street-level violence.
People literally getting their heads kicked in on a regular basis.
And yet it's kind of violence about nothing because in order to change a system, you need an elite structure that will overturn the other elite.
And that just doesn't exist.
I mean, you and I, we're like vloggers or something.
I mean, we don't have billions of dollars at our disposal.
I mean, if you guys want to send me $20 this month, that's great.
But I'm not doling out billions of dollars.
It's almost the worst of all possible worlds because we're going to have all this just heinous violence that I don't want to see that is just terrible, and it's going to come from both sides.
But then there's no actual conflict, like a state-level conflict.
If you said, oh, this is going to be like Civil War I, it's not going to be like anything at all like Civil War I once I think the violence does break out.
Think about it.
Those two people were both – those two sides in that conflict were both generally – They were both generally evangelical Protestants.
They pretty much agreed on the importance of the white race.
They shared a common culture.
They shared common – they had the same holidays.
If anything, the North was more racist.
Right, right.
They had the same holidays.
They had the same heroes.
They had the same Victorian – look, Lee was a Victorian gentleman, right?
So Stonewall was a little bit more bloodthirsty.
And Episcopalian.
Scots-Irish type, but they had a shared belief that the Confederate Constitution was pretty much a carbon copy of the American Constitution.
They both believed in republicanism.
What they were fighting over was the fanaticism that had been stirred up over slavery and a whole constellation of different issues.
The North was a more liberal-republican leaning section.
Open to an industrial-commercial economy.
The South was more agrarian, classical Republican, not hated liberalism.
And slave-owning.
Let's just not eat around the bush.
What do the two sides have in common today?
Well, not a common language in a lot of cases.
Not a common moral value.
Huh?
No common heroes.
No common saints.
No common holidays.
Shopping at the same – all they have is common.
Well, all they have in common was the sports ball teams.
Basically, what we have in common is we all eat at Applebee's.
And we watch NFL football, which has kind of replaced baseball and horse racing and boxing as a national pastime in the NFL.
We go watch athletes give each other concussions on Sunday.
And we all watch Marvel comic book films.
Right.
That's...
That's what I'm getting at here.
And we kind of like Christmas, weirdly.
We like shopping for presents at Target.
And Applebee's, Marvel, Target, NFL.
There's actually so little holding this country together.
And the left is determined to like, okay, let's completely obliterate anything we have in common with the other side in sports, in music, in...
Commercial, even commercial culture, you have commercial brands denouncing their own customers and shit.
I'm telling you.
We don't have common music.
And again, to go back to Plato, I think that's actually extremely important.
In the 80s and 90s, I think probably everyone liked some bands.
It was like Madonna or U2 or maybe even a more poppy type band.
Everyone kind of was listening to the same thing.
You can't say that now.
Musical taste.
And musical taste, like, again, if we're to take a platonic perspective, musical tastes are, like, extremely telling of who you are.
We don't—we're just totally fragmented.
Once the violence starts and it escalates, I'm telling you, I think it'll be worse.
Yeah.
It'll be far more—it'll be like—once slavery was gone last time, you know, that was a major issue, like, dividing.
I mean, everybody had the same holiday, same constitution.
It was a lot easier to reunify.
But the way things are going, I think it's going to end in some kind of conflict.
And whoever the winner emerges from the conflict is going to create a new culture.
But anyway, that's a long story.
So we'll see.
We'll see.
I'm extremely pessimistic.
I think we're right at the brink.
But it was a good conversation.
Yes.
Brad, you are the Schopenhauer of our age.
Just the pessimist pessimist.
I don't think if Biden thinks he's going to take things back to the happy dory days of the Obama era, it's not going to happen.
No, that is my prediction.
So I think Biden will win.
And I think there's going to be a lot of happiness on the left.
And I think that happiness will be short-lived.
And within a year, there is going to be – these tensions are so strong, and Biden won't be able to ease them.
That's kind of my – that's my outlook for the next five years.
So it's going to be a kind of Pyrrhic victory.
Yeah, the people will look back on it in hindsight because they're not exactly in the – But these people are really not in the best position to like – if it actually got down to like a slugfest, we're not really in the – this is a different kind of war if I think.
I'm not going to go down this right-wing assumption that the right would just inherently win the slugfest because there's gun ownership.
Yes, that's true.
First of all, there actually is gun ownership on some elements of Antifa.
But also, you own a gun and your house or store is surrounded by two dozen anti-fascists.
I mean, good luck with that six-shooter or shotgun.
I mean, their territories are so scattered in these cities.
It's going to be like a completely different – like when you saw the Trumpers invade Portland.
In those pickup trucks, imagine them with guns on the back.
I'm telling you, I'm kind of shocked that they've gone to push this so extreme because you can't govern a country where one side says, okay, the law doesn't apply to us.
Violence is legitimate.
This is not a sustainable...
I don't think the left has realized that yet.
The other side is going to embrace the same tactics, and we'll see.
But anyway, I'll talk to you later.
All right.
Thank you, Brad.
This was an awesome conversation.
Depressing, but look, we're serious, and we're looking at the issues, and we're not – we're not – We're not endorsing any of this, but we're simply looking at...
No, we think the roof is going to collapse on our heads.
And the left will, in hindsight, they'll wish, you know, Brad Griffith and Richard Spencer wasn't so bad.
Can we bring Richard Spencer back?
He would just say stupid shit on CNN.
Right.
I'll talk to you later.
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