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Nov. 23, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
31:30
The "Rigged" Delusion

Mark Brahmin, Tyler Hamilton, and Richard Spencer discuss the conservatives' fantasy of a "rigged" election. 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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Hello, everyone.
We are doing an impromptu podcast on the state of things.
Tyler Hamilton, Mark Brahma, and myself hanging out.
We wanted to talk a little bit about the news of the day.
I think we're all kind of abstracting ourselves from a lot of the Trump happenings, but I thought it was worth talking about.
So let me throw out some news items.
And I kind of want to get at something deeper, which is an inner dynamic of the right that I've noticed for some time.
But I'll just throw out some news items to get the conversation chaser started.
So, Nick Fuentes.
What can I say?
The guy has put himself into a position that he is a public figure and he's...
Maybe an indelible one at that.
I have not been following him intensely, but every time I'll...
You know, going by Twitter feed, there'll be an image of him riding around on a Hummer with Alex Jones and giving speeches and a microphone, talking to a bunch of, in a way, like, you know, normie conservatives, I guess, in Outlook, but certainly not normies in terms of political engagement, doing a good job in what he is attempting to accomplish.
And I think he's...
I mean, I'm not sure I would have said that a couple years ago, but he is making a name for himself, and he's certainly latched on to this thing, which is the rigged narrative and the recount and the rhinos betraying Trump and so on.
What's recently just happening is...
What is her name?
Sydney Powell, is that her name?
That is her name.
Yes.
So, a woman I had never heard of previously, although she was the legal representative of General Michael Flynn.
She has been in these circles for a long time.
She has been making increasingly bold claims.
Of voter interference.
These voting machines were developed in Venezuela and they're here changing votes and all of the swing states are frauds and all this kind of stuff.
She was endorsed by the GOP itself three days ago.
She is not backing up this stuff with anything that would resemble evidence in a court.
She is making bold claims of like this has Chinese communist parts and the software is developed in Venezuela.
Even if that is true, that proves literally nothing.
She's not being able to back it up.
She was pushed back on by Tucker Carlson yesterday or the day before, and the right freaked out.
All of these former Tucker fans decided that he had cocked.
He was betraying Trump.
Why is it?
What happened?
Who's gotten to him?
And now Trump himself has thrown her under the bus, distanced himself.
He said she's not his lawyer operating on his behalf, despite the fact that she was giving a press conference with his own personal lawyer in front of Trump 2020 paraphernalia speaking for the president, let's be honest.
So he is clearly distinctions himself.
This might mean a concession is imminent.
I don't know.
It's hard to predict Trump.
But what I've noticed is a couple of things worth pointing out.
Let me get the big ideas out here.
So first off, there's an inner dynamic to the Republican Party where you have Nick Fuentes and company sounding like Wignats in a way.
Going out there with the megaphone saying, we will destroy the Republican Party.
This is what it's about.
This isn't even about the Democrats anymore.
It's about the GOP and their weak and betrayal.
They are saying things that at least resemble things that their hated Wignats might say of, you know, not getting along, not going with the flow, but instead, you know, opposing the conservatives.
Now they are doing it.
Now they're obviously doing it in a different way.
They're doing it on behalf of Trump as opposed to opposing it to Trump.
They aren't actually attacking the leader of the Republican Party or the President of the United States.
They're attacking a kind of vaguely defined cuck, rhino in the party.
And I think that's been a long-term inner dynamic.
The other aspect of this that's kind of fascinating psychologically speaking is that These people will change their mind on a daily basis and blissfully forget their position from a couple days ago.
So, you know, I was, again, we've been doing other stuff today.
I haven't really been engaged, but just scanning Twitter, you'll see these people, you know, saying, well, it's good that Trump got rid of Sidney Powell because she was making us all look bad.
And no one believed her bold claims, but, you know, voter fraud is a real thing and Trump still won the election.
This is not what they were saying two days ago when she had her press conference that was a total disaster.
They were backing her up.
The GOP was backing her up.
I didn't hear any mention of the fact that her claims are unsubstantiated and absurd.
They're now saying this because Trump says it.
And there's this way in which they're always spinning and always kind of changing their line.
And they'll probably now be back on the Tucker fan plantation because Tucker was right.
He wants to help Trump and he pushed Sidney Powell out earlier and so on.
So it's just this, you know, mercurial, flowing, contradictory mindset that is the stuff of cults and not serious people, let's be honest here.
So we can talk about that.
I also wanted to talk about this kind of dynamic, inner dynamic within conservatism of opposing the rhinos, which is not anything new, and which, granted, this is being sounded with really bold notes and declarations and denunciations.
It's much bolder than I've seen in the past, but it's actually a really...
The consistent internal dynamic of conservatism.
Do you guys want to pick up on anything, or should I keep going?
Well, I mean, just to pick up on that, where you're going with it right away, like, one thing I find particularly interesting within the history of the conservative party and the right in America in general is just the way in which there already seems to be a missing perpetrator in all of this.
It's never the real conservatives, right?
We are on the side of real conservatives.
So when you look at this crowd, the America First crowd and the like that have been gathering the past few days, they seem to be saying things like, the GOP has given up on Trump, so we're going to give up on the GOP.
So this is very different than what a lot of us have been saying for the last two or three years, even though in rhetoric it might sound like what we were saying.
What we were saying was that we can't trust the GOP establishment whatsoever because this same dynamic keeps playing over and over again.
We can't trust Trump.
Exactly.
Well, he would be a part of that in our view, right?
He's the leader of the party.
And so then you end up in this situation where we are saying that this is something that has played itself out in the American right for decades and it continues to do this.
Yeah.
It plays this role where the populists imagine themselves as some community that's standing with a true conservative.
Yeah.
And some of them being like Tucker and the like, and others who have simply seemed to jump ship from Trump or have the foresight to know that these aren't serious directions to take these great allegations of voter fraud, which are very unfulfilled.
And they seem to have the foresight to jump ship on that.
And they're saying, no, we're going to take over.
We're going to be the serious Republicans.
So you end up with this intra-Republican conflict going on.
And the populists, they seem to be, we're on the side of the real.
Trump is really on their side.
But they are a pawn for one step within the Republican Party against another.
And so it seems to me that in playing this game that they believe themselves to be critical and that they see the power game of what it really is, they're actually the biggest dupes of one mere player in that game.
In this case, Trump, who, as you said, is a leader of the party.
He is complacent.
He is a part of all of this.
And quite frankly, he is the one they should be directing their...
Hatred against and protest against.
He is the one failing them.
He's the one as a leader with the responsibility and he's not acting as the sovereign.
And really that's what it all boils down to is the American right is always looking for some great betrayer within an otherwise good party or good system that we can restore and instead of looking to the fact that there's a sickness already within it and it's a part of how it functions.
So it's not a problem of fixing the corruption, but it's rather rethinking.
Right.
I mean, I think a lot of the dynamic was, you know, what is the phrase, if only the Pope knew about the treachery of his bishops or something?
Right.
Is that the right cliché?
I mean, it's this notion that, you know, you have the leader of the Catholic Church, but he's apparently not in control of, you know, he's not an autocrat in control of a major institution.
He doesn't know what's going on.
It's this way of kind of defending the emperor against...
And it's a weird move, but again, it's actually not a new one.
And I can remember attending CPACs 10 years ago when Mitt Romney was winning the nomination of the primaries.
I guess this was spring of 2008.
And there were these revolts against...
You know, McCain, who worked with the liberals and was going to betray us and wasn't good on immigration and all this kind of stuff.
Then the Tea Party was really about this to a large extent.
It was about new Tea Party activists coming to the fore.
You know, we need Rand Paul in there.
We need Nikki Haley.
We need Pompeo.
We need all these, you know, kind of creatures.
Ted Cruz was another one, although I think he won in 2012.
We need all these kind of new people to come in and restore conservatism.
And Paul Ryan is an interesting one because he was a Tea Party hero who then got the ire of the party.
So it's just this long-term internal dynamic which you can only, you know, you could say it's Caducean in that sense.
And you can only see it as actually building stability within the party.
I mean, I agree that their declarations are bolder than I've heard recently and certainly bolder than what they were saying.
You know, two weeks ago.
But it's actually not something new.
And, you know, I've often thought about that comparison between rhino and cock.
And who was the rhino?
Like, rhino means Republican in name only.
So you're not a real Republican.
You're a squish.
Or whatever.
Well, a lot of those people, you know, including Michelle Malkin, including other people, they're saying that about Trump.
That he was a liberal, which he was to a large extent.
He wasn't a true conservative.
And they were reacting against this kind of takeover of the party.
I think if Cuck had any kind of real resonance or traction in 2015 and 2016, it was directed at these true conservatives.
It was basically saying, listen, buddy.
We're not going to worry about the fact that he doesn't want to lower taxes, and he wants to have a steel industrial policy, and that's violating free market principles.
We're going to save Western civilization, whether you like it or not, and you're just a cuck who's going to roll over and not fight the big fight.
And I think the cuck really had very strong resonance.
I think now, whenever I hear it, I just roll my eyes.
But even that, I think, was also kind of part of that internal dynamic within the right where you keep wanting churn among conservatism.
You keep wanting a new, harder-core Trumpian person.
And that includes getting rid of people who you thought were hardcore, like Kemp and Georgia and others, just a couple days ago.
Or Tucker is now not hardcore enough.
You keep wanting that more of the real thing.
We need Ted Cruz, but even more Ted Cruz.
As opposed to rethinking things and deciding that you actually want something different.
Or you want to understand something in a different way.
I think there's a tremendous amount of delusion involved with the rigged narrative.
Now, look, are there some irregularities in an election?
Well, when 150 million people vote, I imagine that there are going to be some problems along the way.
that's just endemic to this system.
Do they really know what they're talking about when they say, This election is clearly a fraud.
No, they don't know what they're talking about at all.
And they have no insight into this.
They just are guessing and saying this without real evidence.
Their evidence is that Trump was ahead on the day before they counted mail-in ballots or everyone loves Trump or his rallies were big.
That's their evidence.
I have not seen anything compelling beyond that.
And I think there's this kind of delusion of the rigged narrative where you don't want to actually look at why Trump lost.
And why Trump lost is a complicated phenomenon, why he lost.
There are major demographic reasons why it's becoming more and more difficult for a Republican to win due to the changing demography.
Trump is also losing because he's losing the white vote.
He won less of the white vote.
In 2016, Mitt Romney did.
He won even less of it in 2020.
There is a significant drop-off of these former Obama voters, the 5%, these former Obama voters in the Midwest who voted for Obama once or twice and then voted for Trump because they were taking a flyer on him.
They hated Hillary.
They thought he stood for them and their industrial jobs and so on.
There's also a reason why he lost because he is just an unbearable person who is utterly chaotic and doesn't actually accomplish anything.
Through all of these endless fights that he gets into, I think there's just an exhaustion that takes place among average voters that they want to not think about their president every day.
They want to just live their life and not have this endless scandal machine in the White House.
Now, that's not entirely his fault, but it is his fault to agree.
There are a number of reasons, and it's a complicated story, but there actually are reasons why he lost this election.
And if you want to just tell yourself that this is all rigged...
And the liberals did this, and they're evil, and Venezuelan programmers made Michigan flip or whatever.
You can tell yourself that story, but all that means is that you're never going to examine reality.
You're never going to examine the problems of conservatism.
You're never going to examine the problems of the GOP.
You're never going to examine the problems of the two-party system.
You're never going to really think about doing something bigger in the future if you keep telling yourself this rigged narrative.
And I think that's the fundamental problem.
I mean, with a rigged narrative, the GOP and MAGA and Trump and Trump himself, they can tell themselves this, you know, ridiculous story, but one that they believe, which is that he didn't actually lose, that everything he did was right, that his response to coronavirus was perfect and everyone loved it.
He's your favorite president in these rallies.
And they can just keep telling themselves and never really face the reality of the situation, their own failings, of their own problems, of the bigger problems within the system.
And so I would say, you know, even if the rigged narrative has a kernel of truth to it, and I'm dubious about that, but even if it has a kernel of truth, it's still a false narrative.
because it leads you to believe bigger untruths about yourself and your role in the GOP and the GOP's role Yeah, no, I mean, I think the problem is that democracy as a phenomenon is rigged.
It's just that democracy is always rigged, right?
Nietzsche has this...
He makes this remark that every civilization is effectively an oligarchy, right?
So whether that's a monarchy or it's a civilization that calls itself a republic or a democracy, they're all ultimately oligarchies, right?
So wealth and elite actually control the society in every instance.
So we lived in a rigged system regardless, but if you look closer...
If you look at the details, like how could Trump have won?
I mean, we know that Trump is not really a valuable president for us anyways because he's betrayed us.
He hasn't fulfilled his promises.
So we know that he's actually not our ally anyways.
And in a lot of ways, Trump is more dangerous to us in a lot of ways in the way that the GOP was before Trump came.
And Trump effectively was assimilated by the GOP.
Terribly distinct from the GOP because he kind of adopted to it.
But he is a more dangerous president for us because whites believe that just by looking at the guy, just because of some of his rhetoric and some of his race fading, they think that the guy is actually working for their interests.
But the reality of it is that he's not working for our interests and he hasn't been his whole presidency.
So he becomes more dangerous in that regard.
Whereas someone like Biden, Biden actually ends up being a very intelligent decision for the Democrats.
He ends up sort of mollifying.
The situation, as it were, whereas Obama was a, you know, an Obama now would be very dangerous for the left, right?
So in other words, if Obama was the president we had now, that would activate the right in a, because, I mean, that's really what we're doing.
Just by his physical presence.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because Obama in office actually wasn't that radical.
I mean, not to say he was great or anything, but it's not like he...
You know, came in and forced intermarriage on anyone or something like that.
He was a vaguely conservative president in office.
But just the presence itself activated something.
Like, the fact that the Tea Party just emerged, like, organically in 2008 and 2009 due to his election is remarkable.
And I think the liberals are always correct when they're like, this is ultimately about race, guys.
You know, like, they talk about the Constitution and tax cuts, but, like, this is about a black president.
I think the liberals were right about that.
Yeah, no, I think that they are absolutely.
In a lot of ways, they're more sober on the race question, as it were.
Or they're just more sober on the race question.
The difference there is perspective, right?
So the kind of subtext or the understanding from the left is that, you know, the...
The white man basically has to lose this racial struggle, or that's the assumption from the left.
But they speak in a kind of clearer way about race, because that premise is essentially kind of accepted in our society on some level, right?
So we understand that whites have to kind of cede their dominant position to non-whites.
That's sort of the kind of moral narrative of our society.
And the left has that moral narrative, whereas the right doesn't really have a moral narrative.
Because the problem with the right is that it can't identify itself, to the extent that it's the white party, right?
And that's why we'll continue to have these ultimately fruitless sort of cycles.
You know, I mean, you could argue that things are getting more radical and more polarized, and I think that's certainly the case.
But so long as, like...
So long as the real agenda or the real interest can not speak its name, we'll never make real progress.
I mean, we have to be explicit on this racial topic.
And that doesn't mean that we have to be scary or vulgar or uncivilized or barbaric, but it means that we have to start speaking in a clear manner and support candidates.
At some point, this just has to happen.
Support candidates that are explicitly...
I'm talking in the interests of whites, that are talking about white interests and advancing white interests.
This is all going to be this kind of like...
Both parties are ultimately going to be these kind of mystery religions, as it were, where they can't actually talk about what's going on.
And again, the left can kind of talk about it in a more explicit way.
The right can't talk about it.
It's not about race.
They're equally supportive of transgender people and homosexuals.
Now, at this point, that's what it's come to, where it's about...
So basically...
We're back into a corner where we just basically have to tell the truth at some point.
I think you said something maybe over dinner or something.
It's almost like everyone's talking around the race issue and using various metaphors.
And pronouncements and so on.
But no one can...
It's all about how are you going to talk your way around this issue.
And that's really what the two parties do.
And so the liberals have...
One part of them wants to be truly antagonistic and domineering about this.
And that is a certain kind of...
You know, antifa element.
A BLM in most of its moods.
Not all of them.
Sometimes it's softer.
But in a lot of its moods, it's a hardcore, we're taking back the streets.
This is about us.
This is about moralizing us and demoralizing you.
And so on.
But then you have the kind of Joe Biden, you know, hokey, smiley face version of the same thing, which is like, well, you know, things are going tough right now and things are got to change.
But, you know, we're going to do this together because we're all Americans.
We're going to lower the temperature a little bit is a line that he would, you know, refrain.
And he would use his refrain.
And I do think that he was brilliant.
I mean, the choice of Joe Biden, it's not something that I can't.
And we're going back to someone.
Putting aside Kamala Harris as vice president, who's an ambiguous figure herself, but we are going back in time to maybe George W. Bush, but not even George W. Bush.
I think we're going back a number of decades in terms of what this president represents for the American people.
Joe Biden is from the 80s.
He's from the Cold War.
He's from a time when...
The boating population is 90% white.
He's from a different era.
And we're kind of going back to that aesthetic now in order to allow for this transition to happen more smoothly.
And it's a kind of brilliant move on their part.
But again, even the hardest core, hardest core of the GOP is at the same time kind of just still talking around this issue and never really addressing it.
And always kind of addressing it in some abstract way that doesn't even necessarily support it.
So I think all of this obsession with voter fraud or something, it reminds me of...
We're not going to say outright that we want a Christian society.
We're instead going to say that we want religious freedom for everyone.
And so religion becomes this like...
It's not actually a dominant force in society.
It doesn't inform how we make decisions.
But you just have the right to be a Buddhist or a Catholic or a Jew or a Muslim in the privacy of your home.
They just talk around.
Well, the source of their angst is always the fact that they feel like they're living in an increasingly de-Christianized society.
That's the source of their angst.
They can't really address it.
They can't address the real.
And you see this again with the delusion of a rigged election, where it's like, let's not talk about the demographic reality which really affected this.
Let's not talk about Trump's...
Problems with white people, in fact, why he can't win.
Let's not talk about the fact that he either had no policy vision, was a total failure, or is a figurehead up in there who can't accomplish anything as president.
Let's not actually address these really serious issues that are worth discussing.
And dissecting and examining that can actually change the way we do things, can put us on a new path.
Let's instead claim that we, in fact, won this election and that we don't have to change anything.
Trump was great.
We just need more of it.
That's what it means when they're saying we want a hardcore conservative.
It's like, let's become more delusional.
Let's become more retarded about this issue.
That is all that they are saying by saying there was voter fraud.
So, you know, again, and none of these people are seriously concerned about voter fraud.
I don't know of a single person who mentioned the possibility of voting machines and so on being bad two weeks ago.
This is something that came up after the election and that is entirely a way of justifying this just continued dream world.
That conservatives want to exist in.
You know, I think that there's an inability, or rather, a want or desire to grasp reality in this case, or the truth of the situation they're in.
In many ways, it's actually like a sexual fetish.
And we talked about this a lot when we did the EBL shows on the con and psychoanalysis and sexual fetishes, right?
And we talked about how, for example, rape fantasies.
What breaks them down is the actual rape occurring because you fantasize something because it protects you from the traumatic real of something.
It turns it into an object of desire basically by shielding you from the trauma of the real.
And there seems to be a very similar dynamic at play here because one thing I was thinking about...
If these conservatives, the populist conservatives, or the average working conservative, actually got what they wanted, this true conservative, that would completely mentally destroy them and their sense of reality.
Because, think about it, really, they've always had it.
That is simply what it is.
And so, I've made this point a few times about like...
The classical American conspiracy techno-thriller.
Those kinds of spy novels and geopolitical novels where some analyst in the CIA discovers some corrupt plot within the bureau or something.
And then it goes all the way to the president.
And then he solves this case.
And then they get rid of the bad apples and all of a sudden the greatness of the system is restored.
So the phantasmic...
The appeal of the system, the kind of fantasy of it, is maintained by just removing these corrupt actors that are somehow disturbing that fantasy right.
And this is what's interesting to me, is in the same way this is really a dynamic that's at play with the American right in all of its history.
I see this recurring pattern that if they actually recognize that the conservatism that they want, the conservatism that they're pining for...
In America, the actual traumatic seed, the kernel, the real of what it is, is actually what they're saying is the corrupt thing.
And so they have this fantasy of there's always another explanation for why their preferred leader can't get something done.
There's always another explanation.
And it creates this fantasy.
But what that fantasy of corruption is actually doing is protecting them from the reality of the fact that the conservatism in America was built on a foundation.
That is utterly at odds and eroding of that Christian society that they desperately believed in, right?
They never want to recognize that very much in the founding of America.
And American liberalism is, as you were saying, Richard, this privatized interior removal of essentially aspects of your being that make you who you are and making it something interior and having some separate.
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