It’s January 19, 2021, and welcome back to The Spencer Report. We’ve successfully lobbied for a presidential pardon. This week I’m joined by Edward Dutton. Main topic: QAnon and the End of the American Century The storm came. That’s for sure. But it wasn’t the Storm QAnon had in mind. Trump ended his presidency—not by arresting pedophiles in the Deep State and releasing the children from underground dungeons—but in utter disgrace. His enthusiastically deluded voters ransacked the Capitol and attempted the most buffoonish coup d’état in recorded history. But what does this all mean? Should we chalk up “Q” to mere delusion? Or might it represent the beginnings of a new religion. Moreover, is Trump’s fall from grace merely a colorful moment in American history? Or might it spell the downfall of a once dominate empire? 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 19th, and welcome back to The Spencer Report.
We've successfully lobbied for a presidential pardon.
This week, I'm joined by Edward Dutton.
Main topic, QAnon and the end of the American century.
The storm came, that's for sure.
But it wasn't the storm QAnon had in mind.
Trump ended his presidency not by arresting pedophiles in the deep state and releasing the children from underground dungeons, but in utter disgrace.
His enthusiastically deluded voters ransacked the Capitol and attempted the most buffoonish coup d 'etat in recorded history.
But what does this all mean?
Should we chalk up Q to mere delusion?
Or might it represent the beginnings of a new religion?
Moreover, is Trump's fall from grace merely a colorful moment in American history?
Or might it spell the downfall of a once-dominant empire?
Ed, how are you?
Yes, I'm okay.
How are you, living in a collapsing empire?
Well, I'm out here in the wilderness, and we're just skiing down the decline of the American empire.
That's what I'm doing.
You're going to get flooded with all the internal refugees, though.
Montana and Maine and whatever.
It's already happening.
I think I might have mentioned this on another podcast we did, but I heard this, that there were 30,000 car registrations from Texas alone in Flathead Valley, which is the county that includes a lot of towns around here.
It's a very beautiful place, Flathead Valley, and 30,000 Texans are fleeing.
All sorts of stuff.
Who knows what this is going to turn out into?
Well, I think you mentioned it on the podcast that we recorded on the 6th of January that was then rather overtaken.
So we recorded a podcast, but I'm glad we recorded this because this is evidence that we had nothing to do with the insurrection.
When the police come to pick us up, we just hand them the tape and be like, yeah.
So we were podcasting.
Literally while the rebellion had started, and we had this podcast kind of saying, oh, nothing's going to happen today, and this is the winter of civilization, and it's all going down.
And so basically it was just all overtaken by events rather quickly.
Oh, no, I'm not sure about that.
I was saying that it was hubris for you to think that the United States isn't going to break up and whatever and collapse into chaos.
I said that.
And then what did we see?
We saw a fairly...
Obvious symbol of increasing chaos, which is the capital being taken over by the mob.
But I do think it's very, very symbolically important that the degree of polarisation, which we've been talking about on here for so long, is now so extreme that something like that can happen.
And also that it showed up the weakness of the state, which is another one of the markers that Turkin looks at.
It was a weakness.
We were weak.
They made a mistake.
They ballsed up.
They didn't plan for this.
And so it just makes people lose faith in the authorities more.
And then this obviously ridiculous, hypocritical reaction that, you know, BLM, that's protest.
That's peaceful protest.
But a bunch of angry working class Americans breaking into a building when it's them that's threatened.
That's the thing.
BLM threatens ordinary people, but it's them, the legislators, that are threatened.
Then, oh, that's terrible.
Let's not defund the police.
The police are heroes.
Well, I think actually, I think you're being a little naive here too, Ed.
The fact is, the different, I agree with the hypocrisy in the sense of BLM is, they're looting and rioting and crazy, burning things down and so on.
And the level of freak out over this utterly buffoonish coup or mob scene or whatever.
I agree with there's massive hypocrisy there.
But I think it actually reveals the importance of politics as symbol in the sense that politics isn't just the art of the possible.
It is a deeply symbolic art that involves legitimacy and, you know, first and foremost, and proper use of force and so on.
So BLM as a ideology.
In its radical form of abolish the police and black nationalism or whatever, obviously the US government is not going to stand for that.
And I do not think the police are going to be abolished by any stretch.
I don't even think they're going to be defunded.
I think they're going to just have more social workers alongside them.
The state won't do that.
But BLM itself as kind of...
You know, goofy liberal identity politics and with a white guilt pathology thrown into the mix.
This is a governing ideology of the United States.
Remember, the United States has put BLM symbols outside their embassies in South Korea, elsewhere.
Various ambassadors have talked about BLM and gay pride and so on.
The embassies abroad will fly the...
Rainbow flag of gaiety.
So this is a governing ideology for them.
They do not see BLM as destabilizing.
Now, however buffoonish you might be, if you go into their holy of holies, the legislature itself where legitimacy is conveyed upon laws, you are Treading on the sacred.
You are debasing their symbols.
And even if the BLM was more violent and more dangerous and more destructive towards normal Americans, I obviously agree with that.
The fact is, symbols matter.
And they are going to take a, you know, treading your muddy boots on their, you know, cathedral.
They're going to take that more seriously than they're going to take some black riding.
Because that's just fine.
I'm not going to disagree on that.
I didn't think that's me being naive.
It's obvious that's what's happening.
I've heard all these right-wingers say this, but they don't follow it up with why.
They don't actually answer the question of why this is happening.
This will be taken infinitely more seriously than the burning down of a Wendy's in Milwaukee.
Because that's merely crime.
This is an attack on symbols, an attack on the state itself.
And that is not tolerated.
No, yes, it's akin to, yeah, if someone broke into Buckingham Palace, it's not just breaking into a house, it's breaking into Buckingham Palace.
So yeah, that's quite true.
But the point is that you've got to a level of radicalization and to a level of polarization in America where people are prepared to do that.
And this is, as well, in America, you have, I forget the name of the author many years ago, wrote a book arguing that you have a sort of a, a sort of, sort of ersatz religion in America in the form of the founding fathers and the blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff you're taught at school.
And it was a deliberate...
It's a conscious challenge to that, to go to the capital, break into the capital.
And also it's what happens in regimes that are unstable in Africa, as people have commented.
It's what happens in African tin pot dictatorships and whatever.
That's how you storm the parliament.
And so this has happened.
And so it seems to me they can clamp down as much as they like, and I'm sure they will, but that will just lead to the enemies becoming, I think, more radicalised, more feeling that they're under attack, which will make them get more, polarized and this will just continue.
And that's why I see it as a symbolism in terms of the symbolism of the state.
I see it as an important symbol in the cycle of I agree with that.
Let me add one thing before we move on.
There's an interesting aspect where every revolution cloaks itself.
In the past, in some way.
So the French Revolution obviously, you know, eventuated in terror and radical social leveling and so on, but it also would cloak itself in the garb of the Roman Republic.
You can see that a lot, actually, in the Founding Fathers, who were evoking Thomas Jefferson, evoking classical Greece, and building his academical village, where I was a student some 20 years ago.
You cloak in the past, but you kind of look towards the future.
There's this weird way with these people.
Now, granted, they were treading their muddy boots onto holy ground in the mind of the establishment.
But the way that they understood their revolution was also kind of fulfilling 1776.
I mean, Alex Jones said 1776 will commence, and all of his followers were echoing that.
You could hear in average people out there, I think it was actually the guy who had constructed the gallows where they were going to hang Mike Pence.
Which is something so unimaginable even like two weeks ago, but now it seems inevitable.
But he was saying, we're saving democracy by doing this.
So they were kind of in you see kind of a battle of the meaning of 1776 between two competing camps.
So it is a kind of civil war.
I don't think we're going to have a civil war, at least anytime soon, where there's just, you know, people going door to door and blood in the streets and so on.
But we are kind of in a civil war already in the sense that you have two competing forces battling for control of the symbol of America, because those people who raided the capital by no means thought of themselves as anti-American.
This wasn't like.
I mean, I'm being a little bit facetious here, but these were people who thought of themselves as the ultimate Americans, and they will be prosecuted by an establishment that thinks of themselves as the ultimate Americans.
And so it is a civil war that we're watching.
It's going to be different than previous civil wars because we're living in 2021 now.
But it is a civil war symbolically and ideologically.
Yes, true.
And as you say, it was the symbolism that was so important.
It's like 9-11.
And these very tall buildings, the two tallest buildings in America where they're coming down, the Freudian symbolism of that was what made it so, you know, obviously it was appalling, but it's what made it so stick in the mind.
With this, it's the same.
The symbolism of them doing it is so important because it's such an assertion of their power, such an assertion of their feelings, and such an assertion of the weakness and feebleness, ultimately, of these legislators, that they're ultimately just...
I think she was a congresswoman from Virginia.
I think her name was...
I write it down.
I can't remember.
And she was open about this.
She was hyperventilating.
I said, for God's sake, that is a clear marker of being highly mentally unstable hyperventilating.
I mean, that's a really strong marker on it.
And you're signalling about that to evoke sympathy.
So it shows you the kind of reverse of normal values.
We're meant to have confidence in you, yet you're a person that's so scared and frightened that you're hyperventilating.
I mean, heavens.
And then there's a black legislator praying in the background while that's how frightened she was.
It revealed their fragility.
There weren't many heroes on January 6th.
I'm not sure anyone really looked...
There weren't very many heroes on January 6th.
I'm not sure anyone really looked good.
No.
When you think about it.
I mean, I sympathize with the police officers who were dealing with this chaos.
But at the same time, the chief of the Capitol Hill or the Capitol Police has resigned.
I mean, they obviously were unprepared for this, even though there's also indication that they knew that this was gearing up.
And they looked like fools.
They might have overreached in shooting Ashley.
It was like a Black Lives Matter situation where they thought, look, let's just let them do this and hopefully they'll shut up and go away.
So you see some people are trying to use this to say that it was an inside job, but you see some police officers obviously think to themselves, look, they're not armed.
I mean, she was unarmed.
But you can completely see what she could have been armed.
Yeah, she could have been armed.
She was engaging in sedition by the letter of the law.
A split-second decision on what to do.
And that's what he did.
So I'm not going to say he's a hero, but he at least stood up and did something that he was supposed to do.
But awful that it was.
But yeah, they came across as just cowards who were frightened by this mob.
So I don't think it's...
A lot of people are black-pilled about this, so it's going to result in greater tyranny on the internet or in law.
Yes, it probably is.
But there will be a counter-reaction to it, and it's just a growing...
It's just a marker of an increasing slide down as I think America just falls apart.
I agree that, look, I think that we might see the end of the American Empire in my lifetime.
That's the level of, I guess you could say, pessimism.
Now, I think they're huge.
I am not blackpilled by what I saw on January 6th, particularly in relation to people like you and me and what we're doing.
We had absolutely nothing to do with this.
I was ignorant that this was happening.
I would have told people not to go if I had the chance, but I didn't.
Meet anyone who wanted to go.
And also, the types of people who are going to pay a very hard price for this are the types of people who are basically alt-light e-grifters.
And they kicked off all the people.
I'm still on Twitter, or I'm off YouTube.
They kind of did this purge of the far-right ideologues.
Over the past year and a half, I think they recognize now that we are not the ones bringing in hundreds of thousands, or if you look at the whole Stop the Steal movement, millions of dollars to doing this.
We are not the ones who are actually planning a kind of insurrection.
And they were planning a kind of insurrection.
They wanted to stop the vote with a mob.
Those are their own words.
And I think there's going to be a major crackdown on these kind of alt-right conservative grifters and people who are engaging in just idea and information pollution.
I would note that people like you and me and others that they talk about as being whatever alt-right, a lot of us, I'm perfectly happy to say that as far as I'm concerned, the evidence that Trump won that election is not there, clearly.
And it's people and others that I know.
We agree on this.
No, it's the griffers, as you call them, the ones that go on and on and on about how the vote was fraudulent and the election was stolen and whatever.
So they're the ones that encouraged this, this attitude that the election was stolen, which it clearly wasn't.
You know, there was a fight and you lost.
You didn't fight dirty enough.
I don't know, whatever, but you lost.
I mean, on the other hand, you could argue in terms of winning the fight, it is a positive to have this religion, this ersatz religion, because that's what the left have in BLM and whatever.
And so the right needs something like that.
It's a force of unity.
And this is...
I agree.
It's just delusional and increasingly disengaged from reality and it just doesn't lead anywhere.
Yeah, look, this is what I ultimately wanted to talk about because I think we've kind of set things up well.
A lot of people will just...
Everyone agrees that America, and increasingly the Western world, is polarized.
And, you know, you used to have different kinds of elections.
You could have an actual landslide, a 49 or 50-state landslide.
It's hard to imagine that happening, again, of a Nixon in 72 or Reagan in 84. You know, there are other examples.
It's hard to imagine the kind of churn in voting that we saw, where someone from Nebraska might split his ticket, vote Democrat.
Vote for a Republican president and then vote all Republican the next year and then all Democrat the next year because he likes the guy or whatever.
That was a very common occurrence throughout the 20th century.
That is now seemingly impossible.
I mean, it happened a little bit in Georgia, actually.
But on the scale that it used to happen, it is simply impossible.
The parties have come apart.
I mean, I talked about this in my...
This was actually Pew Research, but if you looked at the parties in 1994, a third of the Democrats were to the right of your average Republican.
On just some key issues, a third of Democrats were more conservative than your average Republican.
Now, the entire party, the Republican Party, is to the right of the Democrats, and the Democrats are far to the left of average Republicans, or indeed the whole grouping.
So again, these kinds of analyses are limited.
20 years ago, I remember watching on TV, you still had, they're dead now, that you still had some Southern Democrats that would vote Democrat because you can't vote Republican because they're evil.
Yeah.
That's still very, very right-wing conservative people, they would vote Democrat because that's just what you do because you're a Southern.
It's a pre-1950s mindset.
Yeah, my mother talked about all of that.
My maternal grandfather was a bit unusual.
He was a Republican before Goldwater.
So he was just a Republican type.
He was a physician and landowner.
Maybe that had a lot to do with it.
But yeah, she didn't want to tell people that they were Republicans at school.
It's kind of like living in the South now and saying, oh yeah, my whole family is Democrat.
You know, they would look at you funny.
That's split.
And that's the problem.
Once that kind of divide happens, once there's no floating voter, once there's no middle ground, then you just have total polarization.
You oddly have stability as well, which is one of the ironies, which is that nothing really changes and gets done because everyone hates each other and won't work together.
On the other hand, the fact of the polarization as itself means that everything is on edge and could blow up at any minute.
And so in that sense, there's total instability.
It's not stability at all.
Well, in terms of policy, there's a weird policy stability in the sense that in the mid-20th century, you had major paradigm-changing legislative events, like the civil rights...
the Hartz-Celler Immigration Act, the creation of the Great Society, Social Security and Medicare a little bit earlier, but Medicaid, all of this stuff.
I mean, there's maybe Obamacare, which he got through immediately, but that was...
You know, a Republican policy anyway, but because they are at loggerheads, they're unwilling to work together, and it becomes this just clashing, you know, that leads to nothing.
I mean, Obama, in his second term, Obama was just basically kind of sitting around doing some executive orders.
I mean, nothing big seems possible anymore.
That might change, but it's a weird kind of irony of it, that it's stable.
But I guess what I would say is that everyone agrees that we're polarized.
Every journalist in every paper agrees that we're hyper-polarized, and every American does, more or less.
And you see these same things happening in Britain with Brexit and so on.
This is a big trend.
But why is it happening on a deeper level?
And also, what are some of the background changes in belief system and so on that led to something like January 6th?
And I'm trying to bring us to QAnon, because QAnon was something that I recognized in 2017.
I heard about it, I was kind of thinking about it, and I dismissed it.
And I think a lot of people were between villainizing it and dismissing it.
So this is this crazy, stupid, obviously factually incorrect thing that a lot of people believe, but it won't have any impact.
It's just a bunch of Trump diehards and loons.
That, of course, isn't...
But the fact is, it does have a theological structure and system.
It is acting as an ersatz religion.
It is pro-Trump, unquestionably.
But also, it, like religions previously, can motivate people to take actions in the real world that they otherwise would not have taken.
And there's this famous quote that I remember Christopher Hitchens.
I would always cite, which is that religious people now say that religion can make a bad person good by reading the Bible or accepting Jesus.
But the issue is, only through religion can you make a good person do bad things.
And that is, only through religion can you give him the force of belief to...
To torture and kill a heretic, to invade the Capitol building, to starve himself to death or whip him.
And I agree with this sentiment, but I think it's coming out of the mouth of a liberal who's basically a last man who thinks...
Only about life being pleasant and comfortable.
They take that as a criticism of religion.
I take it as a deep understanding of religion.
That in order to get society to unify and to engage in collective action that can be violent and domineering, you need a religious impulse.
We're not going to be able to accomplish this through kind of secular...
No, you need to make big sacrifices like that.
You need to have a sense that your actions have eternal importance and that there is something greater than you and that you're acting for the greater good of your group or whatever it is that they have.
Or God himself.
Or God himself.
Some sort of eternal importance, monumentalist values, either couched in religious terms or couched in what might be called implicitly religious terms.
So, OK, the people on the far left don't actually believe in religion.
But if you would trace back the kind of things they say, it's as though they have some sort of belief in fate or something like that.
They don't quite articulate.
But it's the actual belief in eternity that seems to really, really motivate people to do things if they can be put under...
And the things that predict it are low IQ, people that have low IQ seem to be more susceptible to religiosity, high levels of stress, and feeling that you're under attack, feeling that you're marginalised.
And those things are the key environmental factors that seem to make, well, partly environmental in terms of the case of intelligence, which make people religious.
The QAnon thing does is it's developed a sort of a new, as we've discussed on here before, a developed new religion that has clear religious aspects.
You could argue it's almost like Gnosticism, you know, it's like an aspect of Christianity, Christian-based in some way.
And then brings in these issues that have become of concern of late paedophilia and the New World Order and all of this to create this mega conspiracy theory where you have this gnosis.
If you join it, it's like Gnosticism.
You have the real, true understanding of the world.
Or it's like some forms of Islam, you know, the Sufi Islam.
You really understand Muhammad.
And this is what you have.
And so these marginalized people feel that they are superior, even to those in power, who, by the way, are evil, of the devil.
And they have this gnosis.
And I don't think this is going to go away.
I think this is so attractive.
I think it's been building for a long time as well, with the belief in conspiracy theories.
9-11, an inside job.
Corona as well only helps us even more.
And you can't trust people on any...
I mean, the thing is that the levels of trust are now so low in society due to various factors, gender diversity, immigration, collapsing, religiousness, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You kind of feel you can't trust anybody.
I mean, I even find myself watching things that are from a right-wing perspective and thinking, well, I'll watch something now from a left-wing perspective because probably the people on the right are making something up.
Particularly with regard to this election fraud or whatever.
And so it's, yeah, what you end up with is a coming apart.
And that's what I suspect is going to happen.
There's nothing, there's no Cold War.
There's no external enemy to hold us together.
There's no Native Americans surrounding us, shooting at us.
There's nothing to hold us together.
And what happens in simple tribes, like the Yanomaba or whatever, when you don't like each other, you just split away.
Yeah.
And I think you split away with people that are basically going to be more genetically similar to you.
And that's what I think Americans are doing.
They're doing it.
And they're going to do it more.
They're going to pass each other out along genetic lines.
Racial lines, they were doing that.
But within whites.
And you'll be able to talk about, yeah, we're a Republican community.
And it will be.
And, yeah, so...
But let me mention a couple of things that are unique to Q. And I would definitely direct everyone to Ed's really great article called Trusting the Plan.
That's at Radix Journal.
And that goes into detail.
There are a couple of things I wanted to add that weren't quite in your article.
I'm actually rereading a genealogy of morality by Nietzsche for another thing I'm doing.
When I think about Q, and again, let's take Q seriously as a religion.
Let's not just treat it as a bunch of crazy people.
That's not actually scientific.
If something is this Powerful and widespread and motivates people in this way.
You have to take it seriously.
It is a resentment religion on a very basic level, and it actually adheres to Nietzsche's description of the resentment religion that eventuated into Judaism and Christianity.
First off, it is a resentment religion in the sense that All of the people on top, the people who think they're good, the people who are running society, they are not what they seem.
They aren't liberals.
They're, in fact, Satanists.
And they're bloodsuckers.
They're vile.
They're drenched in blood of all kinds.
They're lying to us endlessly.
Everything you see coming out of a mainstream source is not just...
Liberal but wrong and fake.
And the only authentic voices you can find are in your Facebook group and citizen journalists and things like this.
Now, we might have some sympathies with the idea that the mainstream liberal is kind of fake, but they obviously take that in a direction that's utterly bizarre.
But it's a resentment religion on a different level.
First off, it is resenting people who are in charge.
They assume that they're not in charge.
They have a few allies in the NSA, according to Q, but they are not the ones who are in charge.
They have Trump as their kind of messiah figure, but even that is now lost.
Trump is going to be crucified, perhaps, and the religion will expand even further.
But it's a resentment religion in the sense that it imagines a different world.
What Nietzsche was saying in the genealogy is that if you are on top, if you're the badass, if you're the blonde beast, you don't need to imagine a different world other than the one we live in.
You might very well want to.
Coated in gold and tell fairy tales about your awesomeness, but you're not going to imagine a different realm.
But there's this origin of both Judaism and Christianity and kind of Platonism in this resentment of imagining a pure world that's not this one.
That you are failing in this world.
You are losing control.
And I think there is a background, there is a racial background to this, or a demographic background to this, that white Americans feel like we're not in control.
This is increasingly not our country.
It's not about us anymore.
And that is white Protestant small town values.
We're out of step.
And so...
While they're losing in the real world, which they objectively are, and I have some sympathy for their plight, they imagine this kind of fantasy world where they're winning.
And so Q is about...
Exactly.
You would expect that, the religion of the dispossessed.
That's what this is.
It's the religion of the dispossessed.
And to a certain extent, BLM attracts similar kinds of...
Those kinds of ideas among non-white people and also I think among white people that are a bit excluded because it's a way of being unexcluded.
So these people, they imagine that the world, it's the traditional ruling class type white gentry who are actually in charge and evil and we are pure and good and it's a way of getting more power, a way of climbing up the hierarchy to imagine that.
Probably wrong thing, because actually they are highly influential.
But to imagine that they're not, and therefore to push even further in a woke direction is a way for them to attain status in that system against what they see as all these evil racists that are behind every tree that are actually running through.
And it's really the other way around.
It's like Christianity.
We are the pure.
We are the good.
The world has been taken over by our faults.
Anything intrinsically wrong with us, like we are, it's because we are good.
We don't do these evil things that you have to do to get into power because Satan gives you power.
And so we're going to rise to the top and create a godly world.
And that's what they've got on their side.
And that motivates them.
And if you are...
A lot of these people in the news...
Because we're not just polarised in terms of politics, we're polarised in terms of social class, as Charles Murray set out in Coming Apart.
People don't have that much to do with people of different social classes now, as all the clever people leave the towns and villages and rural states and whatever, and they all go to New York or Washington DC or whatever.
They have nothing to do with.
They don't have conversations with people in diners in rural Virginia.
They have no idea how these people think.
They would never speak to them, ever.
I have spoken to them.
I feel I have more than an idea how they think.
You can see how it's attractive.
You play basketball with them.
I mean, you are a man.
No, that was African-Americans.
I'm talking about the...
The white Americans, yeah.
I went to a wrestling match in London, Kentucky, for example, in 2013 and spoke to many of them.
I was an out-of-town celebrity.
They wanted selfies with me.
I'd never seen an English person before.
It was fascinating.
They wanted Euro coins, which I had as souvenirs.
I gave an Estonian euro to somebody, and then someone else heard about this and asked, well, can I have one, please?
And I said, Ed, what does British money look like?
And I said, well, I haven't got any of that, but I've got euro.
This is from Estonia.
Estonia?
Where's Estonia?
And anyway, so they have no idea how they take it.
You can see how this gives you something.
If you're a greeter in a Walmart, Rural North Carolina.
This gives you something.
This gives you a sense of importance and a sense that you'll pass something and whatever.
So it's very attractive.
And I think it's not going to go away.
And even though Trump has betrayed them, as far as I can see, with his second message, where he basically had a go at them all, even though they were...
Well, I wouldn't say they're following his instructions, but you can see how you've joined up the dots.
They kind of were.
Yeah, they might have had to connect a dot or two, but...
Kind of.
We're going to walk hand-in-hand down Pennsylvania Avenue and we're going to go encourage the good senators and, you know, shame the bad ones.
I mean, that's what he said.
The real, there was this, I can't remember her name, but this blonde-haired real estate, realtor, you know, estate agent, and she's going to be charged with something or other.
And she took a private jet to Washington.
To engage in this protest.
And she's asking Trump to pardon her.
And she's saying, look, I followed your orders, Mr. President.
I did what I thought you wanted me to do by breaking into the Capitol.
And that's true.
They did.
And I think if he has any integrity, which he doesn't, then he will pardon them, which he won't.
He won't.
He also...
Trump is a survivor in many ways.
And I feel like he thinks that he recognizes when something is really bad and he wants to hold out for 2024 or his presidential library or what have you.
And he's not just going to go all in.
He's not going to go all in on a coup and he's not going to go all in on pardoning the revelers, which might be the best word for them.
He's just not going to do it.
He's going to hold out and think that he'll survive and think that they'll still be loyal to him, which they will.
Yeah, I'll add this real quick.
I just noticed this last night.
I was watching some videos on it.
So there really is a divide between the true believers on the one hand and the Trump team on the other.
Because basically, according to Giuliani, who does this podcast that makes our podcast seem like...
Very professional.
But he does his own podcast.
And he was basically putting out the line that this was preplanned.
So perhaps the best thing to have said immediately after the event, if you had any involvement with it, or you were a Trump fan, is that they were out there to protest.
And due to the...
Intense emotions and maybe a little bit of drunkenness on the side.
It got out of control, but it was never a coup and so on.
Now, whether that will be believed, I don't know, but I think that is clearly the best thing to say.
You just kind of lessen the intensity of it and you allow for some leniency to be shown.
The problem is that there were people...
Directing others, making orders, ordering them to go places.
There was a guy who went into the Capitol with zip ties.
That is, like handcuffs.
And you don't just carry zip ties around for bagging up leftovers or something.
Even if it were a LARP, you're LARPing in a way that is going to really offend.
And so anyway, Rudy Giuliani was saying this was preplanned.
This was a bunch of loons who wanted to go sack the Capitol.
And therefore, because it was preplanned, Trump couldn't incite it.
And so he is absolutely throwing them under the bus.
I don't know.
I've already made this prediction, but I think that this is going to be taken seriously.
And those people involved who were planning, even if they weren't planning sacking the Capitol, and I think there were some people planning that, but even those who weren't planning sacking the Capitol but just wanted to shame the senators or what have you, I think they are going to be prosecuted to the hilt.
I think Trump will probably escape from this.
He might get impeached and might not be able to run again, but I don't think he'll be imprisoned for it.
But I think a lot of the organizers and all of this money was flowing around.
I mean, just hundreds of millions.
I mean, more than $250 million in the whole stop the steal.
You know, movement.
Trump raised $200 million.
There was tons of other money floating around.
I think the feds, this is just...
Imagine a riot like that, but with people who are hungry.
With people who are hungry.
Because that's what you would have got historically.
People that haven't got enough food.
And then they're more aggressive and they react more instinctively.
And then they wouldn't...
One of them being shot for trying to get in, that wouldn't have stopped them.
They would have carried on.
And, you know, gone in and nothing to lose.
And it's when it gets to that that then things are really, really difficult.
And I think it will start.
This is the start.
But they're not hungry.
I mean, there was a lot, you know, in the French Revolution, I mean, a great deal of it was about bread and, you know, perhaps even releasing prisoners from the Bastille, even though there weren't very many in there.
But these people aren't hungry.
You certainly have lower class Americans, but you also have the kind of Americans, like the person you were pointing out, a blonde woman from, where was she from, Georgia or somewhere?
But she is flying on her plane or jet, even, to this rally.
Someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's the new Georgia congresswoman, who is a QAnon believer of some kind.
Her husband has a big construction firm, and they probably make great money.
I mean, she had enough money to run for Congress.
That's different.
Their class isn't really about income in this sense.
Because Marjorie Taylor Greene, even if she might be wealthy and drive a Mercedes or whatever, I have no idea what she drives.
I'm just saying she might.
Or one of these equally expensive big pickup trucks.
She is not upper class.
You can look at her, to be honest, and listen to her speak for 30 seconds and place her in a class.
I'm just being frank.
You're saying that she's a working class person come good.
Culturally.
Yeah, I'm saying that class isn't necessarily about income.
I agree with you, yeah.
I mean, it's just that in America, it is income.
In a country that doesn't have proper health service, income is obviously very important.
But it is true, yeah.
Social classes in England, particularly we talk about this, you get people who are born working class, they become rich.
And as far as a lot of English people are concerned, there's a degree to which they're working class English people.
They have the values of working class people.
They have the accent.
They have the...
Word choice.
They have the culture, whatever.
You would get people like that, I agree.
Then you would get people born into the middle class.
They see it as a means of getting status.
You can try and get status through the BLM, through that system, or if you're a bit different from that, you can try and get it through the right.
That's what's in it for them.
Or the MyPillow guy who is a multi-millionaire.
He successfully made all these pillows that people like.
He's a total goofball.
I mean, this is at least the time, the moment of goofballs, where he's visiting the president on a regular basis and, from what we can tell, bringing in a notebook in which he suggests using martial law and so on to stay in power.
So this is their time.
What do you think is going to happen after this?
I won't say anything.
I'll let you...
Take this.
So we have this, you know, Joe Biden's going to be inaugurated on January 20th.
Let's be frank here.
That's happening.
So what happens after that?
Is there just radical demoralization after this event, particularly in the coming months?
Because they're not prosecuting anyone for sedition right now.
They're getting them on vandalism and breaking and entering.
That's the initial stage.
They will be prosecuting these people under seditious consent.
Do you think there's going to be radical demoralization?
Or do you think this actually won't end?
And that MAGA and even the Trump cult will kind of go on?
I hate making predictions like this because then you get them wrong and then it's thrown back in your face forever.
No, no, no.
When you get them right, you claim you're a genius.
And then when you get them wrong, you just don't talk about it.
My suspicion is that there will be a period of increased leftist tyranny.
But eventually, the polarisation is so strong, and based on what's happened in civilisations previously, you wouldn't expect this to go away.
Or get better.
We're not going to go back to being starry-eyed people in the 1960s going into space.
This is out.
It's going to get worse.
And I suspect that there'll be a period of left-wing celebrating and whatever, and there'll be a period of people being, as happens if you read Cognitive Dissonance by Leon Festinger, there'll be a period of them sort of regrouping.
They'll work out why it happened such that it's Congress with their theology, because I think this is strong enough that it's not going to just break down, and this will continue.
And there'll be this ongoing process, I think, of just...
Under the surface of breakup until America is a country in name only.
There isn't really much of an America.
And more and more distrust.
I think it's going to increase.
It will just go on.
Increase.
Because the things which are causing low trust and are causing polarization are increasing.
Corona has made it even worse.
You've got all these people that have...
A few people that have made money off this, basically, and lots and lots of people who are unemployed.
In America, that means you don't have health insurance, which is particularly awful.
And so the stress levels are very, very high.
You can't even be ill during a pandemic because you can't afford it.
So, yeah, I just think it'll continue to get worse.
I don't want to make any more specific predictions than that.
Yeah, I also agree.
I think Trump...
His goose is cooked.
I was actually thinking that he was going to have a second act, or maybe it's his sixth or seventh act at this point.
I'm beginning to think that his goose is cooked, but I think the...
A lot of the craziness that was unleashed under his watch.
I don't think he's actually a cause of any of this.
I think he's a symptom of it.
I think he was riding a wave and did not create it.
He catalyzed it, if anything.
But I think the kookiness will get kookier.
And there's going to be some real...
Powerful fault points in this.
Because, as I was saying, QAnon is a resentment religion.
It is a religion about being out of power and imagining this magical world where they are in power.
And that bespeaks a certain population that is not in control.
And I don't think they're going to get in control.
They weren't able to get in control at all with Trump.
And this grasping for martial law or sacking the Capitol or whatever is just spasmodic animals backed up against the wall.
But I think their religion will become goofier.
And it's a kind of ersatz Christianity.
I think it will kind of develop, maybe even with Trump as a kind of Jesus figure, a fallen hero, a god on a cross, and so on.
I don't think it's going to go away at all.
And facts never mattered to it.
So why would they matter to it now?
It's like...
I don't know.
So I think it's going to grow.
I think there will be...
And I predicted this in my election report.
I think there are going to be some problems in the left.
Because a lot of conservative commentators will just say this and it will be kind of like...
The left's so racist, basically.
The only thing that unites the left is that they hate white males or whatever.
You hear this from Ann Coulter or whatever.
Obviously, there's something to that.
But I think that the bigger fissure really is between a far-left BLM left, which genuinely wants to defund the police, which genuinely wants a form of black nationalism.
Not just identity politics and the kind of fake, woke manner of diversity and affirmative action and hiring an Indian transgender lesbian to your law firm or whatever.
Not that bullcrap.
But real identity politics, something that actually is going to fissure the country.
There are those forces on the left.
Then there's also the kind of Bloomberg-Biden forces that are pro-capitalism, pro-America, managerial elite, pro-police, to say the least.
I mean, look at Biden's career.
And I do think there is going to be a problem there.
And at least my sense...
Is that Biden might have kind of a short honeymoon period where they're all happy that Trump is gone.
And then these fissures kind of reassert themselves.
Because the left, due to demographics and due to Trump to a large extent, due to other factors, the left is poised to be a hegemonic party.
I mean, they are in charge.
They're barely in charge of the Senate.
By the skin of their teeth.
But they are in charge of Congress.
They have the White House.
And I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future.
I don't see another red wave coming.
And I certainly don't see Trump 2024 or Ivanka 2024 or whatever the hell they're going to burp out there.
So I think they are poised to have a kind of hegemony.
But I think they're going to be...
Tripped up by real strong divisions in their party.
But on the long term, I agree with you and Turchin.
I mean, look, I want a stable society.
I have children who live in this society.
I don't want chaos, but I do feel that within my lifetime, I'm probably going to see the end of the American empire.
Yes.
You will realise what I've said all along, which is that 1776 was one of the biggest mistakes you could possibly have made.
And that's that.
I mean, basically, get a load of fundamentalist Protestants that are fundamentalists even by the standards of the 1600s and are paranoid about devils and see devils everywhere and give them their own country.
