It’s January 6, 2021, and welcome back to The Spencer Report. The name has slightly changed; the commentary is still cringe. Main topic: The 18th Bro-maire If Donald Trump’s failures in office were once tragic. It’s all now become a farce. Both genres were on display today in the nation’s capital, as Trump’s most hardcore fans were whipped up into a frenzy and stormed the Capitol building. Maybe they were doing it for the fun; maybe they actually wanted to stop the election certification; or maybe they were just drunk. It doesn’t matter. They were engaged in an armed insurrection. And it would seem better to have actually attempted a coup d’état then to have embarrassed everyone with this half-ass b******t. Mark Brahmin joins me to discuss the coming fallout. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
It's January 6th, 2021, and welcome back to The Spencer Report.
The name has slightly changed.
The commentaries still cringe.
Main topic, the 18th Bromare.
If Donald Trump's failures in office were once tragic, it's all now become a farce.
Both genres were on display today in the nation's capital, as Trump's most hardcore fans were whipped up into a frenzy and stormed the Capitol building.
Maybe they were doing it for fun.
Maybe they actually wanted to stop the election certification.
Or maybe they were just It doesn't matter.
They were engaged in an armed insurrection.
And it would seem better to have actually attempted a coup d 'etat than to have embarrassed everyone with their half-assed bullshit.
Mark Brahman joins me to discuss the coming fallout.
What a day, huh?
*sad music* I can't believe it.
Did you expect this to happen today, Mark, when you woke up?
Did you expect it to be an armed insurrection?
I knew there would be a protest, of course.
Yeah.
And that it would get relatively wild and it would probably produce some good clips.
I actually didn't think that there would necessarily be violence, though, certainly.
And I thought that...
You know, but I thought there would be good clips of, like, Fuentes and, you know, chanting Christ is king and that sort of thing, right?
I mean, so I thought that there was going to be some good footage.
But, yeah, of course, I didn't really expect it to go this crazy.
Though I guess in the back of my mind, I thought it was...
I think we all, in the back of our mind...
Thought something like this might happen.
Well, it is kind of inevitable.
I mean, it's easy to say something is inevitable after it happened.
But when you look at it, it was leading towards this.
And, you know, I tweeted this at Don Jr. this afternoon.
It's like you can't use this type of rhetoric of these are communist.
We won by a landslide.
It wasn't even close, like 2016.
We won by millions of votes.
We won California, in fact, and they just took it from us.
You cannot say that and not expect that your followers are going to take your word seriously and act on it.
I don't know what to say.
At the end of the day, this is just a logical, A culmination of this massive grift that's been going on that kind of got real.
And it spilled over from the internet into real life, like we've seen a few times.
I mean, we saw back in 2016, I mean, this is something that's largely forgotten.
We saw a guy who was into Pizzagate, which is a kind of...
Proto-QAnon-type conspiracy that I remember well from those crazy days of 2016, when we were kind of overlooking a lot of this lunacy because we felt like we were winning.
But who took a rifle into Comet Pizza and demanded to investigate the basement of the restaurant.
I mean, there is no basement, but demanded to investigate the basement of the restaurant to uncover child sex trafficking rings.
And if you use this type of rhetoric, there are going to be some consequences.
And so, yeah, it does seem kind of inevitable.
And these people who were doing this, I mean, the meme that I've seen from a lot of conservatives is that Antifa infiltrated the peaceful protest or whatever.
And I mean...
Maybe there are a few examples of that, but I just don't buy that at all.
I mean, you see this type of person who engages in this kind of stuff, and they are, you know, like deluded fuckwits.
I mean, let's be honest.
Let's be brutally honest here.
But they are the type of person that has been cultivated by the Trump movement.
And that is actually listening to them and acting on their words in a fashion that can be expected and that now seems inevitable.
Yeah, you know, I mean, it's a populist movement, of course, as we know.
But I think that populist movements require intelligent leadership.
And this one lacks intelligent leadership.
So it's both, it has neither a brain, it has only a body, effectively.
And even the body could be a better, like they could be a kind of a better class of people that follow Trump, as it were.
You know, it's populist, but it's also like...
I mean, they are, on some level, they are the deplorables.
I mean, they, you know, a lot of that might just be a function of where we are as a society and where people are as a society, that we live in degraded conditions.
Part of that is a function of living in America in particular.
You know what I mean?
So that might even be kind of emphasized in some ways versus Europe.
You know, I think that there's kind of a...
Maybe a kind of broader bell curve in a way in America in the sense that we do have...
I think we do have these sort of deplorable types.
They shouldn't really be the face of movements, effectively.
They're not, you know what I mean?
But also they lack leadership.
And that's one thing you realize is how important leadership is.
I mean, it's just...
Really, in every political context, how important leadership is.
And it's something that I think that sometimes it strikes intelligent people who are kind of like, let's say, for lack of better terms, sort of autonomous thinkers, free thinkers, intelligent people.
I think that they often miss this point.
Leadership is required because they don't themselves require leadership in their lives, right?
But leadership actually is required.
A large group of people...
Partially, maybe it's an IQ thing, but there are other factors, of course, involved as well, that people do require leadership and movements require leadership.
And often I would say probably the best leaders are in some cases the last to sort of realize that, that people require leadership because they've never required leadership in their own lives.
You know, there's another issue to this, and I'll dilate on this for a little bit, that whether these people actually want leadership.
And, you know, so let me start with this issue, because this was the most bizarre coup attempt ever, perhaps you could say.
Look, on some level, it was a coup attempt, because don't tell me this is a protest when you enter a Capitol building.
When you go to that level, you are going into Congress, you're evading or overwhelming the police, you are saying that the election is illegitimate, and so on.
You are engaging in insurrection, however symbolic it might be, and however farcical it might be.
You are engaging in insurrection.
It's funny, I'm actually...
Listening to Will and Ariel Durant's book, The Age of Napoleon, which is a really good listen, by the way.
It's kind of an old-fashioned great man history.
But he's telling the story of the French Revolution, and they would have these mobs that would go to Versailles or to go to other major places.
Dozens would be dead.
The ones who made it through would go in and drink themselves silly in the wine cellars.
What we saw today is a fact of life.
It's a fact of history.
In some ways, the fact that apparently only one person has died is remarkable.
I mean, it's much safer than it was in previous eras.
But they are engaging effectively I mean, there was big talk that I saw on Twitter about, you know, this next 48 hours are going to change everything in terms of the Georgia vote and then...
The January 6th rally.
And there was talk about Trump leading a march to the Capitol.
So, you know, quasi-march on Rome type thing.
You know, that Trump would actually be out there, you know, arm in arm with his supporters going to Washington.
I mean, that would have been quite dramatic.
This, you know, the Stop the Steal slogan.
Actually traces itself back to 2016.
And that's when Roger Stone kind of coined this term and was developing it under the assumption that Trump would lose in 2016.
Then in 2020, there was a concerted effort to delegitimize mail-in voting for months on cable news, Fox in particular.
And then, you know, from there on, they were kind of pushing towards this, pushing towards some way of delegitimizing the vote by talking about the mail-in ballots, talking about vote dumping and all this kind of stuff that we've been hearing for the last three months.
So they were kind of pushing towards this, but it was the most bizarre coup attempt ever in the sense that, you know, if you're going to actually do a coup, you need to just Go through with it.
You can't do a half coup.
It's a bit like being half pregnant.
You are engaging in treason.
Your own sanity and legality is measured by your success.
Brutally honest about it.
You have to be willing to go all the way.
You cannot go halfway.
You look like a complete idiot.
You basically get all the fallout of an attempted coup, but then there's nothing to build on and there's certainly no success from it.
It is utterly moronic.
But at the same time, I don't think that this was just some spasmatic...
You know, craziness of the crowd.
They were clearly led in this direction.
And the people who were using the hot rhetoric, Lin Wood, Trump himself, Trump's allies, using this hot rhetoric for months, had no real willingness or intention to back it up.
And so you basically let a bunch of fools enter the Capitol building.
Have some fun.
Live stream the event.
One of them got killed.
The fact is, we have not seen the end of it.
I think there are going to be major arrests.
I think all of the people involved in this movement are going to, you know, at the very least, some of them might be on probation, but there are going to be serious arrests for this.
This is not fun and games.
When you walk into a Capitol building, invade a senator's office, and live stream yourself acting like a jackass, you're going to jail for that.
You know, Baked Alaska and company, whoever else was there, the America First movement.
You're going to jail for this.
This will be prosecuted as if it were treason.
It doesn't matter if you were engaging in some, you know, hyper real hijinks.
You will be treated as if you were engaging in prison.
And so we have this bizarre situation.
Where we have all of these people listening to their leaders.
Their leaders have no intention of backing them up, nor do they ultimately have some plan to bring off a coup.
It just becomes this clusterfuck.
And that's what we've seen today.
But I would ask this.
It is important to talk about intelligence and leadership and planning and patience and so on.
I mean, that is a really important element of any kind of political movement, particularly an insurgent one.
But do they want leadership?
I think my experience with the alt-right is that they generally don't want to hear.
critical views about themselves or critical challenging views about the world.
They want to be led by people who are like them.
One of the really major innovations that's taken place on the internet over the past 10 to 15 years has been the development of the alternative media and the development of these Kind of utter mediocrity,
utterly mediocre just guys who are either kind of entertaining like Alex Jones or who just reflect back at you your own mediocrity and your own stupidity.
I mean, I'm thinking of Tim Pool might be the ultimate example of this, just the essence of mediocrity.
Someone who has these delusional takes, who's kind of, you know...
Anxious about the current political divide but won't actually take a side.
Someone who's just not even an Asian nerd who's somehow halfway between everything.
He's not charismatic.
He's not good-looking.
He's not intelligent.
He's just nothing.
But he just puts up a bunch.
of garbage on a daily basis that reflects back at his listeners what they're feeling at the moment.
And we've moved away from a situation that has its benefits and has its downsides, and that is a carefully curated and managed hegemonic discourse through institutions like the nightly news, through institutions like The New Republic and National Review through the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
You basically have a managed left-right spectrum, an establishment viewpoint, and you can manage opinions of people.
And that is the 20th century.
It's what Jacques Ellul called propaganda in his sense of the word, which is managing people's thoughts, but also managing their actions in daily life.
Where we are now, the nightly news, who watches that anymore?
I can't even name a news anchor.
Whereas someone like Walter Cronkite used to be one of the most important people in the country.
I can't even name who the news anchors are anymore.
They're not even watching cable news so much as they're watching, so to speak, their Facebook group and their Twitter feed and their forum or whatever their discord or whatever they're on.
We've just had this fragmenting and kind of siloing off of people where they can talk to themselves.
And this is where they drive authenticity.
And the mainstream media, what used to manage opinion, is considered garbage.
It's considered lies.
It's evil, maybe.
It's massively politically biased and fake news, effectively.
And we've just entered a new stage of media consumption.
And I think the inability of...
The establishment to, again, curate and manage opinion.
And you need to do that to maintain stability.
I mean, I say this as someone who has, you could say, alternative viewpoints.
You too.
We aren't mainstream.
You could say we're dissidents.
You could say whatever.
But I get that, and I also get the need.
To manage opinions for maintaining a stable society.
And so we've reached this new point where you have this fragmented, though kind of authentic nutjobbery that is replacing the mainstream media.
And it's going to lead to, you know...
60% of Republicans thinking that the election was stolen.
50% of Republicans being effectively queuing on fellow travelers.
There was a recent poll that I actually mentioned in an article by Ed Dutton recently, but 50% of Republicans think that the Democrats are engaged in sex trafficking and are in Satan worship and so on.
You just have these bizarre opinions that are weirdly mainstream.
And this is happening with this kind of technological breakdown of what used to be the mainstream media.
And with that, you're going to end up in these situations of no real leadership.
Because leadership is top-down.
Leadership is hierarchical.
Leadership is about the most intelligent guiding the body.
And I mean, it's going to be difficult.
It was difficult to do that in the era of the mainstream media.
It is going to be difficult to do that in this area of the network society or the fragmented society, the Facebook era.
It's going to be equally hard to guide these people because they don't really want that type of leadership.
And you can kind of see this among them.
There is an anti-intellectual bias, but there's just a reaction against intelligence.
That you find among, say, the alt-right or these Trump groups or whatever.
There's just a sense of that's not authentic.
That's not us.
And Alex Jones is real.
He's true.
He's authentic.
And from there on down, all these people, they're real.
They're authentic.
This is what it's about.
And I don't know how we can really get ourselves out of this type of situation.
Yeah, I mean, I'm ultimately optimistic, but I think that, geez, you said a lot there.
I mean, I think that, I think that, so what you're saying is true, that the audience has become fragmented, and you do have, like, large numbers of people following all these essentially weird nut jobs with conspiracy theories in some cases, or just, You know, just unsophisticated people with bad takes or whatever, people who are like themselves, as it were.
So I think that that is a real phenomenon.
At the same time, Trump was adored as a leader.
So if Trump had leadership skills and any political savvy, he would have been able to kind of like use these conditions in a very positive way, I would argue.
Or certainly in a much more positive way than he managed to use this sort of situation he was given.
Because as much as the audience is fragmenting, as much as people are kind of looking for a mirror of themselves in these online worlds, they are also very impressed by someone like Trump, who has a kind of establishment pedigree and has You know, has this sort of, it's a kind of legacy pedigree in the sense that, I mean, the establishment no longer likes Trump, but Trump was part of Hollywood, effectively.
He was one of the most famous people in the world, right?
And so that is part of his credibility with this MAGA crowd.
So he's still the reality TV star, and, you know, he could have effectively had, and he did in a way, I mean, just through kind of innuendo, he caused this problem.
But had he actually been sort of commanding people in a direct and clear way, the guy would have had tremendous power to wield, and he could have wielded it in a good, positive direction if he was sort of politically savvy, and if he actually had a vision of what he wanted to do.
This is another problem, though, with MAGA.
And I think that this also kind of infects the DR, the alt-right, in the sense that...
People, you know, anything that's kind of implicitly white, this is a term that, you know, Kevin MacDonald, I think, maybe made popular.
But the MAGA movement is obviously an implicitly white movement, as is the GOP and as is the right wing generally, the Republican Party.
As is NASCAR, as is.
Yeah, yeah.
So there is this real tendency for the kind of the racialist element in the DR to get excited about things that are implicitly white.
Oh, there is kind of a fascism, a nascent fascism lying under there that's going to emerge at some point.
But the problem is it never emerges because the movement actually requires a kind of coherence.
And it requires leaders who are kind of articulating a vision.
And otherwise, these people are exactly what you get.
I mean, they're honest in their way.
It's a kind of sincere type.
Necessarily the most intelligent type, in the case of the Magus, but it's a sincere type.
So they believe that it's about the Constitution, or it's about democracy, or it's about, you know, it's about 1776 again.
And so there is no...
So that's what it's going to be, right?
So what you see is what you get.
Because, I mean, there's a couple of...
There are two factors.
They lack...
So they wouldn't be able to veil any sort of secret agenda as it were anyways.
And they lack leadership, which is the leadership is not articulating a desirable vision.
It's just this sort of, you know, it's just this kind of vague thing that Trump has done.
And he's created the problem that he's created the whole time.
And this has a lot of similarities to Charlottesville, in fact.
And this will have a lot of the same consequences.
It's like Charlottesville times a thousand.
I mean, potentially, this is Fuentes' Charlottesville, right?
You know what I mean?
If we're comparing him to you.
It's like Charlottesville times a thousand.
Because the thing is, Charlottesville is ultimately defensible.
And not that there weren't some very bad things that occurred.
Obviously, the car incident with Heather Heyer.
Was terrible, as was the police helicopter accident, which, of course, was no one's fault.
That was simply a pilot error.
But those are very bad things.
But that was defensible in the sense that that was how you engage in the public square.
If you want to stand up for something, stand up for a symbol like the Robert E. Lee statue, you go and hold.
Protest and go out and give speeches.
I mean, that's what you're supposed to do.
It's defensible.
This is just totally indefensible.
I mean, on all levels.
I mean, I get it.
It was a farce and it was crazy, but they are engaging in insurrection and treason and they will be treated like that.
But beyond that, they are engaging in this on behalf of this man who will not support them and will denounce them immediately.
So it's just indefensible, and it's going to be worse.
It's not just about street fights and whether you use too much force against someone who shoved you or something.
Those are like a lot of the issues of Charlottesville.
If you enter the Capitol building, you've engaged in insurrection.
It doesn't matter if you're there to livestream and it's all for the lulls.
You are guilty of this, period.
End of statement.
In any other era, you would have been shot on sight.
Yeah, and I think that we'll...
This is so much worse.
Sure, and I think we'll both hasten to add that, you know, hopefully there aren't, like, severe jail sentences, and there is leniency, right?
I mean, I certainly hope for that, right?
I don't hope for that.
Why would I hope for that?
I don't know.
Just...
In any case, I think that, moving on, but I think that you're right, but I think the problem is that they don't realize how serious it was, right?
So I think they're going in with this kind of groper attitude, but they are basically storming the Bastille.
I mean, that's effectively what's happening, and there are legal consequences to it.
So that is unfortunate.
Because they live in this hyper-real world.
It's just so bizarre.
They live in this world where a D-live stream or someone's Twitter feed or whatever, this is the real thing.
They're taking part in politics by donating a lemon to Baked Alaska on his crazy stream.
They're in this weird, hyper-real realm where that is real.
That's more real than the real.
Well, yeah, it's sort of like they just finished playing Grand Theft Auto.
Right, but then you're like, oh, wait a second, I actually just murdered a prostitute.
Right?
So they just finished playing a game.
Illegal, actually.
And then they went to the protest, and then there was no real sort of, the behavior didn't change in any way.
Exactly.
So, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of unfortunate things happened.
And, you know, I hope for the best for everyone involved in humanity in general.
But it is, I think that they are up Schitt's Creek without a paddle, unfortunately.
You know, the other thing, too, the other interesting aspect of this as well is that a very tragic and unfortunate aspect of this was the woman that was killed.
And, you know, and so here's the other dimension of, It's not just what they did.
It's the political climate in which they did it.
In Charlottesville, it definitely was not what you guys did.
It was entirely the political environment.
You guys were 100% legally and constitutionally correct.
But because of the political environment, your rights were violated.
They're in the same, they're in worse.
Politically, even more sort of rabid leftist environment.
And they're violating the law and the Constitution, right?
So, yeah, I think it's a problem.
It's definitely a problem.
But the other thing, too, though, which I think is...
So this woman was killed.
And, you know, that is something that I think she's going to become...
On some level a martyr for the right, I would have to predict.
I'm not sure I agree.
Okay, maybe it won't happen.
But what will happen is because the contrast of her death versus like the death of George Floyd, for example.
I were police used, ostensibly used unnecessary force and killed him.
Though there, it's, you know, it's much less clear, ostensibly.
I mean, they actually shot her with an assault rifle, it sounds like, right?
She was killed.
Which seems like, it seems a little excessive.
So, I think if it's...
I'm sorry to push back on this, but I mean, look, I obviously don't wish anything to happen to her.
But at the same time, if we were in a different century, there would have been dozens of deaths.
They would have, you know, the palace guard would have just opened fire on the protesters.
And because what they did was so symbolically insulting.
It's one thing to go out to a public space, and there are many of them in Washington, D.C., and wave flags or hold signs or protest, sing songs.
You know, any use of force against anything like that is just indefensible, and you would create martyrs.
I'm sorry.
If you storm the Bastille like this, if you just...
Go in to not just public property, but government sovereignty.
You cannot expect to come out alive.
I mean, I'm sorry.
I think you're making your point, and it's a good point.
All I'm saying is the perspective from the right, from this crazy, like, magtard.
Like, group that we have now that is basically a significant factor now in the political right.
They're going to have a different perspective.
I think he dropped from the stream.
Richard.
Richard.
Thank you.
There we go.
Okay, I'm back.
Let's cut this out.
Yeah, 30 minutes in.
Okay.
So this isn't actually live, then?
It's not live?
It's not live, no.
Okay.
It says live up in the corner, but I guess it's recording, yeah.
You know, so I'm actually talking more to the perspective on the right.
In the perspective on the right, she could develop as a martyr, given the figures that she can be contrasted with, including George Floyd.
But I take your point.
I mean, I think it is.
It's correct.
I mean, they were defending the Capitol building, which was being invaded.
She was the only death, right?
And then it seems like at some point, the resistance faltered with the cops, and they just kind of allowed these people to kind of wander around the various chambers in the Capitol building.
And, you know, I don't want to get too conspiratorial on this, but...
In Charlottesville, we had a very difficult situation where the most peaceful people were cleared off the field, and then the most violent people were allowed to run wild.
So we were all there.
We were waiting, and I think it was noon when people were supposed to speak.
A state of emergency was called before any major violence took place.
There were certainly pushing and shoving.
I got maced by an Antifa person.
The state of emergency was called almost immediately and certainly before the worst acts of violence were acted upon.
The people who were there to protest were shoved off the What was Lee Park, now Emancipation Park, and pushed into Market Street.
And I can remember, after being cleared off the field by militarized police, making this run for it with Gregory Conti, where it was like running through Mogadishu or something.
The people were launching rocks or who knows what at us and yelling at us and throwing things.
I mean, it was...
Total disaster.
I got out mostly unscathed.
And then afterward, I actually went back to my hotel, but afterward, basically downtown Charlottesville, where the protest was not taking place, just became chaotic.
And that chaos eventuated in the death of Heather Heyer.
We seem to have a kind of...
It's not quite a reversal, but it's a little bit of a different situation.
So you had all these people outside the Capitol, and they were there at the president's request.
And there was talk.
I don't know if you saw this on Twitter.
There were a few clips that I saw of people talking about entering the Capitol.
There's one clip with Baked Alaska, where he was with this big, older gentleman.
And they're saying, we've got to enter the Capitol and tell them.
This is what's happening.
We're not going to allow you to do this.
And I don't think it's being...
I don't want to tread into Alex Jones' territory here, but it does seem like they were allowed to tread onto sovereign territory a little too freely.
And you could say that maybe that was simply because the D.C. police didn't want a bloodbath.
Fair enough.
Maybe that simple explanation might be the true one.
But I don't know.
Maybe there was sympathy among the DC police.
Maybe there was a bit of a setup going on.
I don't know.
But it was weird, and it's at least worth speculating upon.
I don't have any evidence for this.
I assume if there is evidence for this, we're going to start to see it trickle out.
In the coming weeks.
But just the fact that this was allowed to happen.
I mean, talk about embarrassment.
I mean, a guy wearing a coonskin cap and Viking horns is in the chamber of the Senate.
You know, I mean, that's really shocking.
And I mean, that's not even like third world behavior.
That's just like podunk.
It's the difference between Odinism and Apolloism, actually.
You think so?
Yeah, he did seem to be an Odinist.
I think he had a big Thor's hammer tattoo.
He's representing, yeah.
Yeah, he's not too different from pretty much every other Odinist I've met.
With the exception...
Of Stephen McNallan, who I've always enjoyed.
He's a gentleman and a scholar.
I've always enjoyed him.
There are some others, but there are a lot of wild guys.
The least we can say, even if he's facing a decade in jail, I will guarantee you that guy is getting laid tonight.
The world works in funny ways, but I think you're probably correct.
Front page of the Washington Post, dressed like a Viking.
Like, in the center of the Senate.
Sure.
And criminal activity.
If he's a famous criminal.
He's getting checks.
That all adds up.
I would agree.
But, yeah, I mean, one of the things, too, that's just kind of like, I mean, Trump, his decline is just so striking and amazing.
And I think that also, we gave him so much credit.
In the beginning, we believed him to be much more sophisticated than he turned out to be, where he's just kind of not that politically savvy.
I mean, look, obviously, probably the guy has a fairly high IQ, and he's obviously gifted as a businessman, and he's intelligent on some level.
There's no question about it.
Sure.
But he's political savvy.
It's very low.
It's very weird.
That's how I would describe it.
What's that?
It's very weird, his political savvy.
Look, this is a guy who did develop real estate.
You can say he's an idiot.
There's one fairly strong argument that if he had simply invested the money that he got from his dad, he would be much better off now than he is.
True.
But, you know, he did develop property in Manhattan.
And you don't just do that as an idiot.
You know, you have to have some level of savvy and even taste and vision to accomplish that.
Now, whether he's lost a lot, I don't know.
But you also can't become president without having a political instinct.
But what is that political instinct?
I think it's a weird political instinct.
And at least in his, you know, 70s, This political instinct is towards chaos.
And this intense ambiguity like what we saw today, where he both inspires these people to go to bat for him, but then denounces them and doesn't back them up.
And he has a weird political savvy of trying to make in-runs around things.
And I think this is why we thought that he was our guy and why he was effectively using the alt-right and pumping us up and so on.
He grasped that the establishment hated him and he needed to find another way.
And he found these kind of wild banshees that were on his side.
And he was like, well, these guys will fight in my army.
If the regular army won't do it, then I'm going to bring in these wild men from the hinterlands.
And so I think that did show some political savvy.
And I think he continued to do that.
But he does also have a savvy for...
Kind of like intense ambiguity and chaos where he'll kind of like support something but never actually implement it.
I mean, we all talk about how he betrayed us and he doesn't have a policy vision on immigration, etc.
That's all true.
But he kind of like brings up these issues, these hot buttons, and realizes how intense they are and how kind of toxic they can be.
And then he kind of brings them up there and...
He gains victory for them, at least temporary victory, and then just kind of dispenses with them.
And he did this with the birther issue, the Obama birth certificate controversy from 10 years ago.
He did this with the alt-right.
He did this with immigration.
He did this with race, of just tweeting about black crime and kind of pushing everyone's button and kind of...
Getting this intense energy from that in a way that other politicians aren't able to evoke that energy.
He was.
But then not following through on anything and just getting kind of crushed by the opposition.
He has a weird political instinct.
And it can carry you far, but it also kind of hoists you by your own petard in the end.
Yeah.
And also the people he chose to surround himself with.
You know, including Pence, right?
That's a very kind of dramatic betrayal at the end.
But we all, you know, the whole, his rhetoric about draining the swamp, and then he surrounds himself, you know, in the beginning with all these guys from like Goldman Sachs.
And, you know, he basically refills the swamp with different swamp creatures, as it were.
And he...
And also some GOP shills like Pence.
I mean, no one liked Pence in the alt-right when he originally was chosen.
So, I mean, these were things where it seemed like he had some sort of faith in his ability to kind of negotiate and bring people to his side.
And it seems like it was not correct for that particular arena.
So, in other words...
His skills as a businessman did not transfer well in many ways to his abilities as a politician.
And that's one example.
I mean, he should have effectively surrounded himself with loyalists, right?
rather than trying to make connections into the mainstream establishment by surrounding himself with smart loyalists who would have pushed back on him because he, he did surround himself by loyalists to a degree, but he didn't surround himself with, with anyone who has a vision for something and could push him in a certain direction and push back on him.
I mean, Kellyanne Conway is a loyalist in some level, but Lewandowski are all these morons.
But you can't do that.
You actually need people who are smarter than you in the room and who can push back and tell you the truth.
And I don't think he had anyone like that.
Yeah, so that's a good point.
Mike Pence was probably...
Stroking his ego up until like 24 hours ago.
Sure, yeah.
He's a professional ass kisser.
But yeah, I think you make a good point.
So he surrounded himself basically with traitors and fools is essentially what he did.
But a lot of those fools were basically removed.
And replaced by more traders, effectively.
So I don't know what to say.
It's just really disappointing.
It was just a disaster.
The whole thing is just a fucking disaster.
Because it's like...
We gained a little something from it.
I mean, the alt-right is out there.
I mean, just speaking, to be honest, Richard Spencer as a meme is out there.
The ethnostate is out there.
We gained a certain amount of notoriety.
Now, we paid a huge price for that, but we did gain that.
But at the same time, the whole thing is just a colossal disaster.
Because look, I am not a right-wing populist, but if I were...
I could only conclude that this was a catastrophe.
Because, I mean, immigration reform or whatever, I mean, that issue is now tainted.
Because it's not just an issue that's already difficult and there's already, like, business interest against it.
You now, it's now...
Maybe not permanently, but long-term tainted by buffoonery and silliness and racism and all this kind of stuff with Trump.
A right-wing nationalist party or whatever, that is tainted.
For the next decade, that is not happening.
And it's just not happening.
Trump did this.
Trump shat the bed.
And you guys, because I'm not a part of that world, but you guys are going to have to deal with this because you guys backed him up until the end.
I don't know if they're now turning on him or apologizing or equivocating or whatever, but you guys supported this buffoon until the very end and you're going to have to sleep in that chat bed.
I mean, you just are going to have to.
And all of that stuff that was presented as pragmatic is not pragmatic at all because it is now tainted for the long term by Trump.
And what happened today?
It's just the cherry on the shit Sunday.
Yeah, and returning to the point you made...
Because I think there's another aspect, maybe in which you're kind of like alluding to now, is that, so yeah, Trump made all these, he had all this kind of bold rhetoric.
He was a lot of bark and no bite, effectively.
But what that did was, it was kind of the worst of both worlds, because it made the left militant, it militarized the left and made them rabid against us, effectively.
And this is no exception.
Because it emboldened us foolishly, thinking that he had our back.
He didn't have our back.
So that happened again today.
He emboldened these fools, effectively.
Because really, I think his supporters have gotten less intelligent, let's be honest.
Because at the beginning, he had our support, right?
Yeah.
His supporters got increasingly less intelligent and more foolish.
And so his strategy of all bark and no bite, he basically led the lambs to the slaughter, effectively, right?
Yeah, by the end, by 2020, you had a lot of smart people and kind of interesting people who were independent who were getting behind Trump in 2016.
By 2020, you had...
Evangelical preachers speaking in tongues on behalf of Trump.
I mean, you know, I don't know.
I mean, that Paula White, you know, situation.
You know, like, they're coming from Africa.
They're coming from Mexico.
They're voting for Trump.
Yeah, that was Trumpism in 2020.
That's what you guys got.
That's where it ended up.
And, you know, the religious right was on kind of the Cruz and Rubio plantation.
They were now totally on the Trump plantation.
I don't know what's going to happen after today.
But...
It's also got more religious, too.
Right?
It's much more religious.
Let's just do it better.
More religious.
I wonder why.
What's the connection there, right?
I think Dutton has done some studies on this, right?
I know.
So...
That's what you get.
And I mean, it's sort of like Gibbon talks about the decline of Rome where superstition becomes rife as things start to, you know, and just all these sort of crazy cults start popping up because people, you know, the leadership is gone, right?
Conditions are becoming more degenerate and dysgenic.
You know, the influences that people have are worse influences.
There's no leadership.
You know, the leadership, the establishment is corrupt.
They don't care about the people anymore.
You know, they don't care about the demos.
There's a complete disconnect.
The elites are, you know, they're all set and they're not worried.
But the consequence is basically the deplorables.
It's the Magatars.
But the deplorables now are of a much lower quality than they were in 2016 when we effectively were among the deplorables.
It looked like we might have had a serious candidate on our heads.
As it turns out, we didn't.
So he lost all the support of the intelligent people.
I'm glad that we were hated for this long time to only be proven right.
It is kind of vindicating in a way.
It is kind of vindicating.
Also, I'm just glad that I'm not...
The spotlight is not worth supporting lies and bullshit.
And I am glad that I am not apologizing for this man.
And that means that I'm out of the spotlight.
But that's okay.
Because the spotlight was sometimes a little too bright.
And we kind of needed to get out.
I needed to get out of the spotlight a little bit.
And I am...
I'm deeply thankful that that Biden vote was a little bit of a troll, but I think it was absolutely justified in just basically to separate us from this and say, we are going on a different path.
We are not fooled by this nonsense.
We're moving upward and onward.
Our success and future success is not contingent upon this man.
And I think that was entirely necessary, and I think I will, yes, be justified.
But I am very thankful that I really, you know, pulled the escape, whatever the metaphor is, jumped out of the plane with a parachute.
Yeah, Bane-style jumped out of the plane.
Some must die in the wreckage, brother.
Sorry, MNATS.
Yeah, buh-bye.
But, you know, I mean, honestly, there are...
We're now in a new phase, and I think there are obviously many questions, and we don't know exactly what we're looking at now.
In terms of, you know, the one big question is deplatforming.
Now, are we just wiped off the web?
We actually don't know the answer to that question.
Or are they going to be like, well, okay, we got Trump out, and are they going to relax, and they're not going to have, like, sort of the...
They're going to have a little less juice.
Like, the ADL and these groups are...
there's going to be less sort of kind of justification for their fear, as it were.
Right.
So it might be more difficult for them to mobilize all the people they need to mobilize to actually get this sort of legislation passed and that sort of thing.
Like maybe people start to relax on the left.
We don't know.
We don't know.
And I don't think there's going to be good legislation that would be really helpful that could have been done in like 2018 or something when we knew full well it was happening.
And in fact, Trump had You know, deplatforming conferences and so on at the White House.
Like, he could have done something.
I don't think we're going to see that, which could have been very helpful.
But I agree with you, just like the juice is not there on the opposition side.
I think we might enter a kind of more ambiguous phase.
Now, I don't think Trump will.
I mean, as of today, from what I understand, Trump's account has been locked.
Because even though he was calling for peace today...
In his video, he was still saying the same stuff.
He was basically saying, come down, go home, let's leave in peace.
At the same time, he was like, they stole the election.
It wasn't right.
We will remember this day.
He just can't help himself.
This intense ambiguity.
He just has an instinct for it.
It's weird.
It's like...
I don't know.
It's like he could never...
I know he's been divorced a number of times, but he's like the woman who can't break up with you, but then hates you, but then sends you loving messages.
And it's just worse.
You're pulling your hair out.
He's like that.
He just creates this unbearable ambivalence and ambiguity.
That's what his instinct is.
And he did it again today.
I don't know what's going to happen.
I mentioned this on Twitter.
I think something might happen.
Whether Pence might take over, I'm forgetting which amendment that was.
Which amendment was that?
I can't remember the number, but it was some amendment that was basically in there.
If the president is rendered incompetent, then you can pass this on to Pence.
I would not be at all surprised if he is impeached and removed.
And yes, that's mostly ceremonial at this point, but...
I could see it happening in a kind of emergency fashion.
And I think he might be impeached and removed from Twitter.
Yeah, so the other thing, so there are two dimensions to this.
And the one is, you know, what is going to happen with platforming?
You know, are we going to be more kind of significantly deplatformed in the wake of his presidency?
Or is there going to be an instinct to relax?
So we don't know the answer to that.
The other element, too, is that Trump is still a political player, and he has always only been a mouth, as it were, right?
So in a lot of ways, he's more effective out of office, because when he's in office, he doesn't do anything anyways, right?
So when he's out of office, if he still is saying, and he still has a platform, I don't know how much of a platform he's going to have.
In the years to come, I'm not sure, but he still has a very huge and strong following, and he'll still be able to talk somehow to his following.
So the rhetoric, there will still be this kind of inflammatory rhetoric, and that's not a bad thing, I guess, especially if Biden and the Democrats are in power.
So the next four years could be years of opportunity, but it's really hard to say.
I don't think there's anything to be gained by his bloviating.
And I do think that the next four years are going to be one of opportunity when we can build to something better.
Because the big issues are not going away.
I think that Biden might actually believe that he just has to come and give the country a big hug and be like, alright, it's okay, pal.
Like, you know, it's going to be 1984 again, you know, now that I'm in office, and everyone's going to be rich and happy, and there's no division or polarization or whatever.
Like, I think you might actually...
It's 1984 in some ways, right?
1984 in the Wonder Woman 1984 way.
I think he might actually believe that.
Obviously, he can't do that.
So all of the problems are going to be there.
And I think this is an opportunity for us to rebuild and build.
And then also find new ways of articulating our message.
Because the articulation of our message via right-wing populism is fucking over, guys.
It is fucking over.
I am telling you this.
I am not saying this out of bitterness.
I am just telling you the truth.
This is Trumpian stuff.
America first is inevitable.
We're going to take over the GOP.
The GOP is the right-wing workers party.
Guys, this is not happening in the next decade or two.
This is a challenge.
You have to recognize reality if you're going to transform reality.
Our challenge is to begin articulating things in a very new way and a different way than we have in the past.
And I think in some ways we're doing this now.
We did this 10 years ago, even.
But the challenge is now set for us.
And that is what we need to be focused on.
Because all of this proxy...
Our movement's ultimately about Trump and Trumpism and right-wing populism.
