RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Conservatism, Cancel Culture, and the Caducean

March 14, 2021 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:30:36

Conservatism, Cancel Culture, and the Caducean

Mark Brahmin and Richard Spencer discuss "cancel culture" and how conservatism function with a "Caducean dynamic," that is, the system's own internal opposition, 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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	In the DR, of course, there's many factors involved, including the deplatforming.
	We've been sort of fragmented.
	Much less people are going to be listening to this podcast than they would be at sort of the height of the DR, right?
	So your audience, for example, my audience, is a much more, is smaller, but is a much more, on the good side, I'd say is a much more kind of dedicated and committed, sort of ideologically dedicated and committed group.
	So they're more serious in a way, right?
	And they're either just getting here.
	Less noise, more signal.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And they're either just getting here.
	And if they're just getting here, they're getting here through a kind of more circuitous route.
	Like it was harder to find us than it would have been before, right?
	So they're seekers in that way, right?
	Or they're people that have abided, that have been our fans for a longer period of time.
	And, you know, you and I, we've been developing ideas the whole time.
	And I think that some people are interested in seeing where these ideas are going.
	And because I think that the ideas are starting now to crystallize in a lot of ways.
	And there's a lot less noise because we've kind of, the whole Trump thing is kind of dying down now.
	You know, and I think that part of, in the DR, you can kind of, you perceive a sort of demoralization based on the fact that the Trump thing, like Trump didn't just sweep into office and basically solve all our problems, which on some level, whether, you know, and I think that we're all kind of a victim to it on some level or the other, but whether that wasn't, you know, I don't think very few people had that sort of explicit expectation.
	But I think that there was a kind of subconscious and, in some cases, explicit hope that he would basically do exactly that.
	He would sort of kind of write the ship, as it were, but also just kind of create a new world for us, right?
	That he would sort of single-handedly.
	And you could argue that maybe he had an opportunity to do exactly that if he had the vision and will and if that's what he wanted to actually do.
	Maybe he did, but now it doesn't really matter whether he could have or could not have done it.
	He didn't do it.
	So whether he was able to or he wasn't, it's a kind of moot point.
	It's more like, well, okay, that's over.
	And I think a lot of the fair weather fans have disappeared as well from the DR. Again, there's been a lot of fragmentation as well.
	And I also, I think that too, that like a lot of the people, because you, Richard, were essentially the center of the movement.
	I mean, I think that's pretty clear, but there were a lot of people who were kind of like, you know, your sort of allies, or even if they were kind of rivals to you or whatever, we were all kind of part of the DR, you know, and it was kind of this, it was a movement that had many faces and different voices and different people.
	And, you know, in ostensibly, a lot of those people were like, well, you know, this thing didn't work, and we're going to go off in our own direction.
	But I think a lot of it is they basically got demoralized, right?
	I think they got demoralized.
	What I've seen is people repeating mistakes.
	Like, it's one thing to recognize.
	Something that didn't work.
	But it's another thing to actually learn something and go off in a different path.
	And I feel like the, quote, lessons learned, end quote, of 2016 and 2017 have been, like, you know, oh, you know, we were in fourth gear, but we should have been in third gear on that, like...
	The third turn coming around the bend, you know, or, you know, like, well, you know, we actually, you know, we use blue as our theme color, but actually it should have been a kind of purplish blue and not the sky blue that you got.
	You know, it's like these little tweaks that they do, but they're really just reinforcing, rehearsing.
	All of the things that failed.
	And I think it's like the easiest thing in the world is to say, I screwed up, but I've learned my lesson.
	You know, we all say that whenever we screw up.
	But, you know, it's another thing to actually learn your lesson and do something fundamentally different and kind of recognize your own failure.
	And that is really hard.
	And I would say that I do think that there's a lot of demoralization and people are scattered and going off and whatever.
	But I think one thing that I do see is this rehearsal of 2017 writ small by multiple people who think that they can do it right.
	And it's harder to kind of recognize that...
	It could not have been done right, you know, in the sense of we actually were on a wrong track.
	I mean, like, I don't have regrets, and I think it almost had to happen the way it did, and it was what it was.
	But, you know, we need to recognize that we need to take, like, a different path this time, and that you can't just tweak some little thing.
	And rehearse it after the fact.
	And think that you're going to end up anywhere than where the broad alt-right ended up.
	So that's basically my take from it.
	Sure, there are a lot of little things that need to be tweaked.
	And that's all fine and good.
	The main thing is to recognize the deeper failure and why it failed.
	And that's actually really hard.
	And you have to be self-critical, but you also have to be analytic.
	You have to really understand the problem.
	And I do feel like the alt-right persists.
	I mean, you can call it the DR. It's the alt-right.
	It's the same people.
	They have a new name or whatever, but it doesn't matter.
	But again, they are just going through the same playbook and using the same plays and expecting it to work this time because we recalibrated this three millimeters here and two and a half millimeters there, but it doesn't matter at some level.
	There are so many movements that have tremendous failures, like tactical failures, or missteps, or whatever.
	And they succeeded.
	And they succeeded for reasons.
	And that, I think, is the challenge.
	We cannot just rehearse everything that went wrong.
	That is what I see.
	And I think that kind of gets to a deeper problem that we're going to discuss, which is the nature of the Caduceum.
	Thank you.
	I thought a good jumping off point would be cancel culture.
	And this kind of thing was mentioned a number of years ago, and it might very well have originated, or at least the critique of it kind of originated on the alt-right, like a lot of things.
	There are many people...
	Usually on the left, who will actively say, you know, it's time to cancel this actor because, uh-oh, we saw screenshots of his DMs and he was harassing this woman.
	It's time to cancel this athlete or author who...
	A musician who used the N-word.
	There was actually a basketball player just yesterday, I believe, who used the K-word, the dreaded K-word, while playing a video game.
	So it's time to cancel him.
	And the critique of that, or the reaction to it, has gone mainstream to a point that...
	Just this past week, there are studies done, and 80% of Fox News is basically talking about Dr. Seuss or Gina Carano cancel culture writ large.
	And I agree with the basic notion of this critique, the gist of it, in the sense that, look...
	People make mistakes, people get emotional, people misspeak, or they are not as polite as they could be.
	And this idea of just removing someone from society because of some issue, or particularly when it's something that is defensible, is...
	It amounts to a kind of witch hunt, and it amounts to a kind of post-religiosity that's emerged in our secular world, where we want to burn this person at the stake for heresy.
	And it is, you know...
	I agree with that on some basic level.
	But you didn't come to this podcast, you dear listener, didn't come to this podcast to hear that because you can get that everywhere.
	You can get that at Fox Nation or National Review.
	I think we need to kind of...
	I think it's good just to look at the phenomenon just on its superficial level.
	I think there are a couple of things that are at play with cancel culture.
	The first is that we are enveloped by media and Everyone, to some degree, is living their life online.
	And digital lives leave tracks, so to speak.
	Whereas if Gina Carano, 30 years ago, had opined about the Holocaust or something at a bar or coffee shop.
	There wouldn't have been any definite record.
	Maybe someone would have reported it, but it could be dismissed as rumor.
	But in the age of the internet, there is this hard record, indelible record of statements.
	And it certainly, this is the kind of fodder that's used for it.
	Now, this is not the primary dynamic, but it is certainly like a background element that's...
	The other background element to this is polarization.
	And we talk a lot about, oh, America's fragmenting or so on.
	Well, okay, that is true.
	The broad trend is actually left-right polarization.
	So it's not even necessarily breaking down by race or ethnicity or region or neighborhood.
	It is actually breaking down on a left-right bias.
	And I take all polls with a grain of salt.
	Obviously, how the question is worded is important.
	Obviously, some people will tell a pollster one thing and believe another or act in another way.
	Granted.
	But polls are significant if you take them for what they are.
	And according to polls, the left-right polarization is actually stronger than race, at least as it's reported to pollsters.
	So conservatives will say things like, they'll be asked, would you worry if your daughter married an African-American?
	Five to 10% will say, well, I don't really like that.
	Is this an anonymous poll?
	Probably the next question they ask.
	But large percentages will say, I worry about my daughter marrying a Democrat or a liberal.
	And so not that race is an unimportant factor or that race doesn't kind of undergird polarization, but race...
	At least as these things are reported, is eclipsed by this hot polarization.
	I mean, the parties are splitting.
	And again, one of the weird things about this is that not a lot gets done.
	In terms of actual policy, but we're hotter than ever about these culture war disputes and minute differences.
	Throughout the 20th century, there's a lot of churn within the parties.
	Basically, if you said, I'm from Michigan and I voted for Nixon, what does that really mean?
	You might very well have voted for Democrats most of your life.
	Policy-wise, be more on board with the Democratic Party.
	There's a lot of wash, you could say, or churn in terms of voting.
	That is now gone, where party identification is an identity.
	And this is also a very important, indispensable background element to...
	Another element is this kind of weird decline of religion in general.
	I mean, religion is collapsing.
	I mean, I'm thinking mostly of Christianity here, but religion is collapsing institutionally.
	And it's collapsing really intensely among younger people as well.
	And yet, there do seem to be these kind of religious instincts, you could say, or tendencies that will start to spill out in other ways.
	So I'm not the first one to say this, but whereas misinterpreting scripture or being a Protestant in a Catholic land or vice versa could have gotten you burned at the stake at one period, now it's nothing.
	I mean, you can be in a predominantly Protestant state and say, oh yeah, I'm a Catholic, in fact.
	No one's going to really care.
	You can actually say, I'm an atheist, and I don't think you're likely to be fired due to that.
	I think you'll probably be tolerated.
	Those religious or doctrinal disputes have dissipated, and they've been replaced by intense culture war disputes.
	If you are at a major corporation and you say, oh, by the way, I'm actually a Protestant.
	No one's going to look twice.
	If you say something uncouth about the Holocaust or someone has a recording of you dropping an N-bomb, you are fired immediately.
	No questions asked.
	You probably won't be rehired anyway as well.
	You are cancelled and perhaps cancelled permanently.
	Whereas that holds in law firms, corporations, etc.
	It holds a thousand times like that in the media, in Hollywood, and these kind of the propaganda organs of...
	We're in academia as well, which again is just a media producing organ.
	It's about ideas and theology and morality and up and down, right and left, right and wrong.
	There these things are taken extremely intensely.
	We're this weird situation where we are ostensibly and measurably A less religious society.
	Atheism is growing.
	The unchurched are growing.
	Institutions of the old religion are slowly dying.
	Maybe in some cases precipitously dying.
	But that religiosity needs some place to go.
	It seems to be a kind of human trait, in fact, that...
	Expressed itself through religion in previous ages and is now expressing itself through ideology or politics.
	And so, you know, I'm not the first one to point this out.
	And it's that, you know, like getting rid of Gina Carano, that was a religious-like act.
	She was burned at the stake and so on.
	So I think these are kind of the backgrounds of...
	Cancel culture.
	Do you have anything to add to that?
	Or I think we can go a little bit deeper on that.
	But go ahead.
	Sure.
	Well, no, I don't really have much to add to it.
	I mean, I think that you laid it out pretty clearly.
	I don't have anything necessarily to disagree with either.
	But yeah, I mean, I think it's part of...
	We started to talk about this a little bit with Ed as well, is that it's...
	It's part of a kind of hive or collective mentality, right?
	So it's not people are conforming, but just in a different direction.
	So rather than people becoming atomized, per se, even though people do feel alienated and there is a kind of type of atomization happening.
	In the sense that people are no longer connecting with their neighbors in the same way.
	And there is a kind of general estrangement, it seems.
	Yet at the same time, there is a kind of conformity of thought where people are kind of going in the same.
	And I think it's kind of in a depressive direction as well.
	So people are becoming more withdrawn, but they're all conforming sort of in this direction.
	So we're all kind of going in a bad direction, as it were, in a kind of bad degenerate direction.
	And, you know, there are a number of factors for that.
	And chief among them is this sort of new religion, as you describe it, that is a little less sort of clearly articulated or defined, but it is generally a kind of, it is generally multiculturalism, but it's this, the organs of it are the media, right?
	And also the media, but also the other organs are people who have basically been brainwashed or indoctrinated by this media and they function as sort of the enforcers of these kind of new values or morals or this kind of new ethos that inhabits the society.
	Anyway, so what were you going to say then?
	Yeah, well, I think it's interesting that we're atomizing In a lot of the ways of traditional community of the past, I mean, this is the bowling alone scenario of people are not joining clubs in their towns, they don't know their neighbors, they're not going to church to a greater degree, etc.
	But they're intensely getting organized online.
	And I think this, you know, through the nature of the digital medium, the fact that it's infinitely reproducible, that, you know, some random person can tweet out something and for whatever reason, no one knows quite the algorithm, it takes off and it gets, you know, 10,000 retweets for some weird reason.
	And so there's this weird way that we've dropped the real world.
	We've created community in cyberspace.
	And this makes things all the more intense and accelerates them so that things that might have taken months or years in the past happen in hours.
	And all of these examples, like the speed at which the Dr. Seuss thing took off.
	I mean, I think we could even kind of like go into some of these things because I think it gets us to the nature of the Caducean.
	But, you know...
	The Dr. Seuss, I mean, he was taken off a presidential reading day list or something like that due to the fact that,
	quite accurately, he drew You can also find curious examples of him depicting Africans with bones to their noses and all this kind of thing that you can also find in Disney films and so on.
	It was just part of the...
	Dr. Seuss was also a kind of preachy liberal and was also depicting America First advocates as literally in bed with the Nazis in his cartoons and so on.
	He was a propagandist of This particular time.
	And there's this funny way that conservatives go about defending all of these people who are expressing kind of earlier myths that were ultimately undermining what they believe in.
	And I think this is a kind of a way to think of it.
	I remember when I would talk with Paul Gottfried.
	He's a retired professor.
	And an interesting historian of the conservative movement and intellectual history and a good guy.
	And he was always complaining.
	He was like, ah, the right, they're just the left 20 years too late or something like that.
	And I, of course, agree with that.
	But I think there's also this kind of deeper element to it where the right is constantly putting forth the left's myths.
	That undermined the right of a previous age and presenting them as conservative.
	And Dr. Seuss is an obvious example of this.
	I mean, yes, Dr. Seuss might have written racist cartoons or whatever, but Dr. Seuss was integral in his cartoons in establishing liberal hegemony throughout the 20th century.
	Gina Carano's evocation of the Holocaust is...
	Also very interesting, because she was, you know, absolutely thrown under the bus by Disney.
	Now, she had tweeted out some kind of mild pro-Trump stuff at a few times in her accounts.
	But it seemed to be, at least, this tweet about the Holocaust that kind of threw things over the edge.
	And she might have been on her way out anyway, but this is what did it.
	Let me actually just read what she wrote.
	This is what she said.
	She said, Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers, but by their neighbors, even by children.
	Because history is edited.
	Most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.
	How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?
	So what she's doing there is basically trying to appeal to Jews in many ways.
	She is not She's not denying the Holocaust or saying the Holocaust was good or anything like that by new stretch of the imagination.
	She's basically affirming the Holocaust as a moral paradigm and then applying it to the treatment of conservatives who can't get a break in Hollywood and so on, which is undeniably true.
	And so she's basically saying that the government made, you know, we don't know this because we don't know the true history of the Holocaust, which is kind of a weird thing to say.
	There actually are polls showing that people are less and less informed about the Holocaust.
	However, the Holocaust is like the center of education in America.
	I mean, it is, you learn about, I don't know, World War II, the founding fathers.
	Holocaust.
	That's what you are taught in history class as an American teenager.
	And the rest of world history is kind of, I don't know, just in dusty books or something.
	So it is kind of odd, like the Holocaust is being suppressed or something.
	But she's basically trying to evoke the Holocaust to say that, oh, the conservatives are like Jews.
	And so on.
	They're being treated horribly by the government, and that might lead to genocide.
	Now, this is, of course, overwrought, but that is what she's trying to do.
	And I think it kind of reveals something about the function of the Holocaust in academia in the sense that...
	It is unique.
	You cannot compare it to anything, even other genocides, even other genocides that might have killed more people.
	And that it is about the Jews.
	It's not just some bad thing that happened, like the fire of Chicago or something, that you could compare, you know, this is like, you know, my apartment's so messy, it's like the Chicago fire on here or something like that.
	No, it has to be a unique and sacred thing that is solely based on the promotion of the interest of Jews.
	And Gina is trying to appeal to Hollywood people.
	Many of them, most of them maybe, are Jews.
	So she is not really trying to undermine the myth, but she just doesn't get it.
	She doesn't know how to speak the language properly.
	She's not cued in in a way.
	She's oblivious.
	She's a bit of a doofus for doing this.
	And it certainly was, at least from a career standpoint, not worth it.
	But I think the main thing is that she's not questioning whether the Holocaust should be of preeminent importance in our moral landscape.
	She's not questioning that at all.
	She's actually reaffirming it.
	But she's not reaffirming it in the right way.
	And so you get to this almost false dynamic where conservatives are claiming, the right is claiming, we should be able to compare ourselves to Holocaust victims.
	And the left is claiming, no, you'll never compare yourself to Holocaust victims.
	The ultimate status of the Holocaust is never a question.
	And just for the record here, we are not engaging in any kind of revision of history or the numbers, nor are we...
	Claiming something that's obviously untrue, like that there wasn't immense suffering involved.
	We are speaking about the Holocaust as, not as history, but as a kind of myth.
	That is, as it functions as a mythos for Jewish people.
	And how it functions as the worst thing that ever happened in history.
	You know, immense crime that is incomparable to anything else.
	And that can ultimately justify a number of things in the real world politically.
	That's what we're talking about.
	But that issue is not touched upon.
	That remains in this, you know, moral center.
	But instead, we're kind of arguing about, you know, who gets to use it or what it can be compared to.
	And so it's this way where the opposition is no opposition at all.
	Conservatives are rallying around Gina Carano.
	She's become more popular than she ever was.
	When she first got the role, you had all these right-wing Star Wars fans on YouTube, and there are a lot of those who are like, ah, look.
	Here's another token woman in the Star Wars universe.
	They're like, look at this girl.
	She's a new Mary Sue.
	Oh, look, she's a thick woman.
	They did not like her.
	After she got canceled by Hollywood, she became more popular than she ever was or could have been.
	And she's now making conservative films with Ben Shapiro, literally.
	And so there's this kind of weird way where this polarization kind of creates this new, intense popularity.
	I mean, you can see this as something like the NRA of, you know, the NRA is attacked by liberals, therefore I need to donate money to it.
	Well, why are you donating money to it?
	What are you really getting out of it?
	Is this actually solving any problems that you care about?
	No, but liberals hate it.
	I mean, it's a very similar thing to Trump.
	And so on.
	And Gina Carano has kind of benefited from this cancellation in some way.
	Now, I imagine, you know, on some level, she wished she had not done this, and it probably would have been better for her career to remain in a Star Wars show.
	But nevertheless, she has become a conservative icon within this, you know, hyper-polarized Caducean realm.
	Yeah, you know, it is interesting, though, that, like, one of the things, or one dimension of it, I think, to which Jews became sensitive is that, you know, the Jewish identity really is on a final level, and this is a sort of imitable aspect of Judaism, is that it is ultimately a kind of religio-political identity, right?
	And so she was talking about politics.
	And they're like, well, no, you can't compare our religion or ethnicity to a political identity.
	But ultimately, Judaism does have a religio-political identity.
	Right?
	And that religio-political identity is, and now there are different approaches to kind of achieving the ends of Judaism, but Judaism understands itself as operating in the cosmos, in the real world, with real world objectives in, you know, securing the safety of Jews as a people, which ultimately means the power of Jews, right?
	So those two things are ultimately synonyms.
	If you have security as a people, you also have...
	They're interested in a collective will to power.
	That's a religious prerogative as well as a political prerogative because it's a real-world thing.
	Ultimately, their identity is a religio-political.
	They become sensitive to the idea of a religio-political development.
	Or another identity developing along religio-political lines, which is not really happening in this case.
	But she's comparing a political identity to what they consider a sacred identity, which is also ultimately a political identity.
	They just don't want a political competitor.
	They don't want a competitor in the cosmos, in the real world.
	You know, seeking power that they would otherwise have, right?
	So that formulation becomes threatening to them.
	Yeah, and I'll just point this out real quick, and then I'll let you go.
	I mentioned before the incomparable quality of the Holocaust, and you actually see this in academia where there's been a, you know...
	Explosion of Holocaust studies.
	And the German studies departments have kind of turned into Jewish studies departments.
	I remember when I was at University of Chicago, a Jewish professor told me this, in fact.
	But there's been this explosion of it.
	And there's also been an explosion of genocide studies, where people will look at issues like the...
	The Pol Pot and Stalin and the Rwandan genocide and so on.
	And the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey, etc.
	And they'll naturally, as historians want to do, compare and contrast them with the persecution of Jews under Hitler in Nazi Germany.
	And you touch on this third rail when you do that.
	It's like, well, we're all for history here, but not about this.
	This is sacred.
	This is unique.
	You cannot compare it.
	And there are many instances of thoughtful, philosophical, Jewish...
	Theorists and philosophers basically saying that there is no comparison.
	This is it.
	This is the worst.
	This is the negative moral center of our universe.
	Other people can't get in on this game.
	It is an interesting third rail where on one hand there's been a kind of like judification of Of a lot of other groups where it's like, well, this is our Holocaust.
	This was our terrible event that is part of our lacrimose history or whatever.
	But that can only go so far because only the Jews can be Jews, as it were.
	Yeah.
	No, I mean, I think that that's very well established and evident that that is an event that nothing can be compared to.
	What I would say, and it obviously is a kind of a banner and a rallying point for Jews as a, you know, a religio-political group, effectively.
	But what I would say, though, yeah, I mean, Shapiro basically came to her side and he rallied to her side, which was...
	In a way, it was kind of remarkable, but in a way, it was not.
	In a way, maybe we could have anticipated something like this developing, ultimately.
	But it does show that sort of the two Caducean serpents, as it were, or the two sides, are more polarized now, in the sense that I don't know that like five or six years ago, Shapiro would have come running to the aid of Gina in that environment when things were...
	Ultimately, less politically polarized, right?
	So in other words, I think that there is a kind of, and I think that Jews in general are much better at this than we are, but they have a good antenna for how things are developing in the society and how...
	Attitudes are changing and manners are changing effectively.
	And so they're more sensitive to, and it makes sense kind of from an evolutionary perspective, is they're more sensitive to these sort of societal changes.
	And when, you know, potentially danger is starting to appear, for example, or threats to their power might actually be a better way of articulating it, right?
	So they...
	And this, I think, would be an example.
	I think that Shapiro, we're seeing a kind of polarization, so the serpents are moving apart, as it were.
	And so it becomes necessary for Shapiro to, or something like this to develop, or it becomes possible, would be another way of looking at it, for Shapiro to be like, oh, okay, well, I'm going to rally to her side, because, yeah, I think that the PC police have gone too far this time.
	But, you know, inside...
	And, you know, maybe it's not even a kind of, you know, probably it's not even necessarily, or maybe it is a conscious thing, but he, that instinct arises from, like, well, conditions have changed now, and we have to, we can't be, you know, we need to keep our allies, and we need to keep our allies among sort of politically and culturally powerful people.
	And Gina may not be that, I mean, she's not that significant.
	He can read the room and say people online like her and we want to keep her on the plantation as it were.
	You understand what I'm saying, though, right?
	So there is a kind of tactical aspect to this, right?
	Unquestionably.
	And I think it's...
	I was simply adding to it.
	I think it's interesting what he did because he came out and said something that was totally reasonable, obviously.
	There's so much hysteria in the room that...
	Ben Shapiro could seem reasonable.
	But he basically said, you should not do this.
	I mean, he did say that.
	You should not make Holocaust comparisons.
	And I disagree, and this is wrong.
	But this is certainly not a firing offense.
	And she was like, you know...
	Good-natured, well-intentioned, but misguided and so on.
	So he kind of got a little bit of a dig in, you could say, but then has ultimately embraced her.
	And I think a lot of that is another kind of instinct to control the momentum where it's like, okay, you know...
	You know, this flood is coming.
	Like, what do we want to do?
	Do we want to run from it?
	Do we want to yell at it?
	Do we want to try to dam it up?
	Or do we want to kind of channel it in this way that it misses the village, you know?
	And that is, you know, that's one tactic and it might be the smart one.
	But, you know, someone like Shapiro reads the room and understands all of this energy and kind of pent up frustration and...
	Angst, even racial angst.
	It's kind of under the surface of this kind of stuff.
	And he wants to be the one who's the captain of the ship directing it.
	And he is very effective, and he is very smart.
	He's certainly not one of the top guys on this matter.
	He's kind of like, you know, doing...
	But he's doing a duty.
	He's not the NFL football coach.
	He's kind of like the junior varsity squad.
	But he'll run the JV squad and run it well and make sure that they're running the right plays, if you catch my drift.
	Yeah, yeah, I know.
	In some ways, he's got sort of the...
	The shit detail, as it were.
	The Jews that are assigned to the right, right?
	The rebel media guy might be the most classic example, but they tend to be more of the kind of...
	More sort of obviously sort of deceptive types are the kind of car salesman, the like type, you know, like the lower one Jews, right?
	You know, maybe that's meant as a compliment to the leftist Jews, right?
	So like the Noam Chomsky's would be the sort of the more noble class of Jews, as it were.
	Well, they had Harvard writing, you know, books on...
	Linguistics, or they're making Star Wars.
	You know, I mean, and it's like Ben Shapiro is making some, you know, B direct video drama starring Gina Carano, who, although I do like her, she seems like a nice person.
	I have nothing against her, but she's kind of a terrible actress.
	I mean, just saying.
	Well, that's actually showing a shocking amount of cultural sophistication for the right.
	I mean, like a guy on the right making a film, it's almost unheard of, right?
	I mean, why would you want to make a film?
	It's just stupid.
	It doesn't have any effect.
	Just run a small business.
	Yeah, exactly.
	But what I would say, though, is...
	I was getting to another point.
	Let me try and remember it.
	But I may have forgot it.
	That train may have left the station, as it were.
	That train of thought may have left the station.
	I'll stop interrupting you.
	I take responsibility for this.
	It'll come back to me, though.
	Yeah, it'll come back to me.
	Yeah, it'll come back to us throughout the conversation.
	I think I told this joke to you when we were talking about doing this.
	When I was a kid in Dallas, Texas, I would go to Dairy Queen.
	And there were two options on ice cream or frozen yogurt or whatever the hell it was we were actually eating.
	Who knows?
	There was chocolate and vanilla.
	But then there was another option, which was swirl.
	And so they would just basically pull down both levers and give you chocolate and vanilla.
	And I mean, this is a...
	Little funny thing from my childhood, obviously, and probably most of your childhoods.
	But it's a useful metaphor in terms of left and right and Caducean.
	It's like, there's this and there's that.
	Look, you can have anything.
	And we might even put them together.
	So, I mean, we were joking about this.
	There's something coming up on The Blaze, which is Glenn Beck's...
	Uh, network where it's like tranny or it's LBGT or Christianity.
	And, you know, there, there was like Blair White, um, who's, uh, a transsexual person representing LGBT, you know, conservatism.
	And then on the other side, there was Lauren Witzke and this guy who's like, um, a, uh, Fuentes clone, um, John Doyle, I believe is his name.
	They're representing Christianity.
	And it's like you get one or the other.
	It's like Christianity, LBGT.
	That's what it is.
	Those are your choices, chocolate or vanilla.
	Maybe we might give you swirl and we'll have LGBT Christianity.
	And that's kind of like the Hegelian synthesis involved here, which is not really a synthesis.
	But the whole point is to define the options.
	And once those options are defined, they...
	People will gravitate to them and they'll become more intense.
	Much like the woke hysteria creates this intensified interest in Donald Trump or something.
	It's like anything but that.
	And as it happens, Donald Trump put up no opposition to much of the woke hysteria, which got more intense.
	As his administration went on.
	And in fact, he seemed to be a unique figure in actually promoting transsexuality and homosexuality within the GOP.
	So maybe he shouldn't be given total blame for this because these are macro trends.
	It was under Trump that we have Lady Maga or Richard Grinnell, who makes promoting homosexual rights a foreign policy agenda.
	It actually is under Trump that we get these figures.
	And they're kind of like Milo, who's recently gone straight, I hear.
	Gone through therapy or something.
	It's under Trumpism that you actually got these swirls, basically.
	This kind of lib-owning new conservatism, which basically says the same thing that conservatives have been saying for a while, but now it's said from the mouth of a drag queen.
	And these things can become more intense once you define options.
	So it's like either you like Hillary or you like Trump and Milo.
	It's one or the other.
	And because as one becomes more intense, so does the other in the sense that it kind of needs its own opposition.
	And as one becomes more shrill and unbearable.
	The so-called opposition becomes more intense, where all of these conservatives who had no idea who Gina Carano was a month ago will now flock to a Ben Shapiro-led film starring Gina Carano.
	And they'll do it as a kind of polarized political act, as a way of saying no, or I hate this.
	To the left.
	But again, it's like you have to understand the way in which those options are defined, in which they kind of feed off one another and need one another and reinforce one another.
	Yeah, so I remembered what I was going to say, by the way.
	So I'm going to interrupt you here.
	All right, I've already forgot.
	It was in and it's out.
	It was in and out.
	Thanks, Matt.
	It's a very delicate ecosystem up there.
	Just one little jar and I'll forget it all.
	No, no.
	What I was going to say is that I think that the Caducean is very much connected also to cycles, is what I'm realizing as well.
	So, you know, and we understand civilizations is kind of operating in both big and small cycles, right?
	In much of the way that the year operates in big and small cycles.
	You have days and you have months.
	You know, there are many cycles within major cycles, right?
	And I mean, I actually think right now we're at the end of a...
	Very big cycle, is my feeling.
	I think Christianity is kind of coming to an end.
	So we're at the beginning of a new thing.
	And maybe we can find a way to put things in a better direction in a lot of ways.
	But within the kind of cycle that we're in now, I think that I'm speaking particularly in sort of...
	We can sort of loosely define it as sort of the American Empire cycle.
	But it's also part of the larger sort of cycle of the West, certainly, as it were.
	I think that, you know, things are coming to a close, but it's within the West, within America in particular.
	So an instinct for like a Ben Shapiro, like I think that as things become...
	I think that the instinct you see for a Shapiro to basically ride this sort of Caducean serpent that's moving to the right now.
	And, you know, part of it is to try to also to kind of try to keep, you know, culturally potent forces like Gina as minor as she is.
	She still represents something that could become a larger cultural force.
	As you said, her popularity increased.
	People started to notice who she was, you know, in a political way.
	People in the sort of political landscape started to pay attention to her.
	So there was some danger there that she could become.
	Like a third element, as it were.
	Obviously not a third party, but a third element.
	And so they wanted to keep her as part of, you know, on one side of this kind of right-left caducean.
	But part of what's going on, too, is that there is a kind of real...
	When you study, I mean, Jewish history to some extent, but also the mythology in particular, and you look at it on a kind of esoteric level, there is very much...
	This idea of cycles.
	Let's take the most salient example of Eden.
	Maybe you and I have discussed this on the show as well.
	The metaphor of Eden represents an error or an epoch.
	In fact, the word Eden means error or epoch.
	Interestingly enough, this is something that never has been pointed out to us.
	It's something that you only discover by looking at the Hebrew, for example.
	The whole metaphor of Eden is describing a kind of the creation of a world and its end and the fall of Eden, right?
	You know, Adam and the serpent being kicked out of Eden and this sort of thing.
	So I think that Jews are very sensitive, but that's just one example, and it's the most salient example.
	But this is encoded throughout Jewish esoteric moralization or throughout Jem.
	Awareness of cycles.
	It's civilization.
	And it's something that we don't think of Jews being aware of.
	We think of Aryans or pagans being sensitive to cycles, but not Jews.
	But the reason that we have that impression is because their understanding is esoteric in the sense that they're not sort of, in a way, they're not acknowledging the cycles because to acknowledge the cycles is to be like, well, why should we?
	Why should things be going into decline?
	We should try to rectify the decline.
	We should try to rejuvenate the civilization and not go into decline.
	But those are questions that Jews don't want the society to address because they benefit from the decline.
	So there's a kind of understanding there that this is part of the process, the kind of harvesting of the civilization, as it were.
	Things are loosening up now.
	You know, Aryans are going into decline and there are opportunities for success and wealth.
	There's genetic opportunities to have access to Aryans.
	So it's a time of opportunity for them.
	So they are not interested in making us aware of the fact that we're going into this decline, obviously.
	Before we go into this more, I want to...
	Dilate on this because sometimes you skate past something.
	Let's talk about Eden as the salient example.
	Let me just because I went way big and let me go small again.
	To go small again is I think that an instinct like Shapiro is it's sort of like they know that the civilization or they know that America I'm not saying that necessarily they'll be kicked out, but that this thing is going away.
	And so in the way that a person, they can think about it practically with this knowledge that the thing's coming to a close in the way that, you know, you'll have a business, a person will have a business and the business also has a kind of, What's the word?
	It has a lifespan, right?
	A business has a lifespan.
	Most businesses are not going to be relevant forever.
	They're going to die at some point of a kind of natural death because people no longer have the need for whatever that business is offering, for example, one example, right?
	So this is a kind of late endgame thing where they're just, in a way, they're kind of riding the tiger, as it were, right?
	In the sense that they're trying to extract as much They're just trying to keep this sort of thing going, even as it becomes more apparent that this is not working.
	This civilization is not working.
	Multiculturalism is not working.
	The thing is going down.
	Rather than them saying, well, okay, people are starting to realize it's not going to work.
	They're going to ride it as long as they can until they can no longer ride it.
	Because in the way that you would write a business into the ground, you would make as much profit as you could from a business before you finally had to give it up, right?
	I mean, it's just a kind of practical decision.
	So I think that that's what's going on.
	And we're going to see more of this stuff where as the kind of Caducean comes apart or the serpents of the Caducean come apart, we'll start seeing more stuff where Shapiro or guys like Shapiro, you know, and maybe at some point they're backing apparent Nazis or, you know.
	Or whatever the case may be, because they're just going to ride it for as long as they can ride it, even though the thing is obviously terminally done at this point.
	Yeah, well, I think we can even, before we go back to Eden, returning to Eden, so to speak, I think it's worth talking about this.
	Yeah, well, I just want to soften my statements a little bit.
	I think that there's a kind of terrible sort of tragedy to the whole thing.
	From our perspective and their perspective, in the sense that there is this very, like, cynical understanding that, like, well, this is just the process.
	This is just how it goes.
	Like, there's no wondering or idealism.
	Like, couldn't it go any different?
	Like, couldn't we figure another way, right?
	So it wouldn't have to kind of go in this direction.
	And, you know, and maybe that ultimately this is part of our project is that we are looking for another way.
	You know, that may also involve, you know, other people who are not us finding a way to, like, sort of adapt into a new ecosystem that we will develop effectively.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Yeah.
	Anyways.
	Yeah, well, no, I'll bring it kind of back down to earth.
	You said something provocative where you said something like, well, you know.
	At one point, maybe the Shapiros of the world will want to go and promote Nazis.
	That sounds unbelievable or totally counterintuitive or whatever, but it's actually happening to a very large extent.
	One of the ways that the alt-right was so successful for a time between, say, 2015 and 2017 was that The conservative movement had not gone in for Trump.
	They had actually opposed Trump pretty vehemently, calling him a liberal or calling him a white nationalist or what have you.
	And we were the ones who were Trump's early cheerleading squad.
	Now, we weren't the only ones.
	He had a lot of organic support online.
	But we were the ones who were kind of creating content, creating edgy articles or memes or fun stuff or talking about it at a higher level or a lower level, you could say.
	And so we kind of became his cheerleading squad.
	And I think the...
	Conservative movement and the Republicans recognized that, and they correctly recognized it, and they recognized that there is actually a lot of energy there.
	And they wanted to co-opt that to some degree.
	There was a lot of denunciations, of course, but they also wanted to co-opt it to some degree.
	And I think they want to reproduce that energy, though in a form that fits the Caducean dynamic.
	And, you know, I don't want to, you know, harp on this and I don't want to get into infighting or whatever, but I think Nick Fuentes is an excellent example of this.
	And the way that he's kind of being managed by conservatives and the system, you know, is actually an excellent example of this.
	You know, Fuentes' edginess is a feature, not a bug, in the sense that Fuentes gets more popular when he, you know, tells a joke about the Holocaust or some edgy subject like this or says that, you know...
	You know, white people built this nation and we're not going to be bullied or some line like this.
	That's a feature, not a bug.
	That isn't a misspeak.
	That's what kind of gives him cred, so to speak, with a lot of with a fan, a young fan base and maybe even an older fan base to a large extent.
	And but what's kind of key about Fuentes is that and what was not.
	We were Trump fans at the time, but that was a different time.
	He ultimately is promoting conservatism and Donald Trump.
	He has extreme loyalty to Donald Trump.
	He advertises himself as a conservative.
	When you actually listen to What his platform proposals are, when the rubber hits the road, it's actually remarkably not different from conservative rhetoric.
	talk about that.
	I remember listening to a bit of his speeches or interviews recently, and it's like, well, this is what we're about.
	It's the great crusade of 2024 or 2022.
	We're going to end those.
	And we also want to talk about deplatforming and offer some kind of non-solution.
	Section 230.
	But those were his ways.
	And he talks about, oh, we're about true family values and Christianity and so on.
	So it's all conservative rhetoric.
	But there's also a little sideshow here where they get into alt-right stuff or white nationalism or race or whatever.
	But it's all ultimately channeled back into the Caducean dynamic.
	And that's, again, that's why he is a powerful force.
	That's why he is kind of managed to a certain degree.
	So, you know, the main players are going to either ignore him or denounce him.
	But to his credit, to a certain degree, he has attracted kind of these other, you know, bit players.
	So you'll get like Steve King or Congressman Gozener or Michelle Malkin or whatever to kind of see We need to touch on this power.
	Now, we're always going to deny the things that are genuinely radical about it.
	Paul Gosner will speak at the conference, but then...
	A day later, be like, well, I think white nationalism is terrible.
	This is not appropriate.
	He said something to this.
	So he'll denounce the kind of radical aspects of it, that he'll kind of touch on it.
	He'll get energized by it.
	And you can see very similar things with Michelle Malkin.
	Michelle Malkin vehemently opposed Donald Trump in 2015 as a liberal and nationalist.
	She now has adopted it.
	It's because it's all kind of flowing in her direction.
	So I think saying something like the Jews will support the Nazis is not as crazy as it might sound.
	And there's actually other examples of this.
	You could go into the 2014 Maidan situation where you had actual oligarchs, some of whom were Jewish, who were funding Nazi groups that were opposing Russia.
	So these things aren't as crazy as they might sound.
	But key is...
	Is that that Caducean opposition is maintained.
	And they might need to go to weird places in order to maintain it.
	And they will be, maybe increasingly, willing to go there desperate times, desperate measures, as it were.
	Yeah.
	Look, I think that Nick is part of the Caducean.
	I think he's a kind of unwitting part of it.
	I actually don't know what Nick thinks, honestly, but I think that there is some level of consciousness there, but I think that he is probably unconscious on some level in the sense that he does believe essentially what he's saying.
	Does he think he's a Catholic?
	Does he believe in Christianity, for example?
	Yeah, probably does.
	I don't know.
	You know what I mean?
	But there's always that question of how conscious someone is and how unconscious they are.
	And it's hard to speculate or know.
	And usually the answer is somewhere in between, right?
	But he is part of the Caducean.
	But Christianity itself is part of the Caducean.
	And I think that one of the valuable things that we can do is define...
	What is caducene and what is not, right?
	Because theoretically, like, so someone could, like, you know, someone, you could tweet something and then some guy will, like, tweet under you, like, in your replies, like, oh, Richard Spencer's false opposition, right?
	So, right, so, but in...
	That's every other reply, basically.
	Yeah, sure, sure, but, you know, but essentially, I don't think that we're kind of accusing...
	Nick, of being false opposition so much as we are...
	No, I do not think he's a fed, just for the record.
	No, no, no.
	I'm not even saying that.
	I'm saying, is he effectively false opposition?
	He is effectively false opposition, right?
	So we're not accusing him of it.
	We're identifying him as it, right?
	So it's stronger than accusing him, and accusing has some moral thing.
	We're kind of looking at it as a zoological reality, that he is a kind of false opposition.
	Perhaps unwittingly, I mean, right?
	So what is then the Caducean?
	What defines the Caducean?
	In Christianity, I would say, is part of the Caducean.
	In fact, and there is this remarkable thing that's in my article on the Caducean, where the Caduceus itself is sort of esoterically referenced in both Numbers and in John.
	It first appears in the Hebrew Bible where essentially the situation is, I may get some details wrong, but Yahweh sends serpents among the Israelites and the serpents poison them.
	But then he commands Moses to set up another serpent, a bronze serpent, on a pole.
	The way that the Israelites healed themselves, and I'm looking at it right now, and anyone who was bitten by one of the fiery serpents, if he looked in faith upon the bronze serpent, he lived.
	In a way, it's a reference also to the medicine cults of the ancient world.
	I'm sure this is something you're familiar with as well.
	In these ancient Greek medicine cults, one of the pain relievers or painkillers was using Limited doses of snakes' venom, right?
	And that was part of the medicinal cults in the ancient world, is that they would use serpents, the venom of serpents, as a painkiller, right?
	But the idea there, and this is also part of the idea with the Caducean, is that too much poison, you kill someone, but enough poison, a certain amount of poison is a way of healing them.
	It's a vaccination.
	Well, it's also a way of like, it's also a kind of opiate, right?
	So we, you know, in the way that Marx described Christianity as the opiate of the people.
	So it's also a way of like, it's a drug as well.
	So it's not necessarily...
	Healthy to take the medicine, but the medicine can relieve pain, at least in the short term, as it were.
	But maybe it amounts to a kind of slower poisoning of the body, as it were, as opposed to a more sudden and rapid poisoning of the body.
	And if we look at the right-left dichotomy, the left would represent the kind of more sudden poisoning of the body, and the right would represent the slower poisoning.
	And I think that's also true if we look at the Caducean dichotomy between the bacchanal, like Hollywood and pornography, and Christianity, which would be the other serpent, we see the same thing, right?
	We see a slower poison versus a more kind of rapid poison, as it were, right?
	But the point actually in John is, so John in John 3.14, he actually references.
	In John 3.14, now we're talking about the New Testament as opposed to the Old Testament.
	But as it occurs in the New Testament throughout, it's referencing the Hebrew Bible.
	I mean, they're very much kind of connected, the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, in this way.
	But he makes a reference and he says, and as Moses lifted up the bronze snake on a pole in the wilderness, so the Son of Man, which Son of Man is Jesus Christ, must be lifted up, right?
	So he's making that reference saying that Jesus Christ becomes the cure to the poison that God has sent among the Israelites, right?
	So Jews, Yahweh, we understand ultimately as a kind of reference to Jewry.
	Is sending serpents among the Israelites in the way, and serpents are kind of metaphorical serpents in the way, you know, it was also a symbol of Bacchus.
	So we're talking about degeneracy, right?
	So degeneracy is being sent among the Israelites.
	And the cure to it is this other serpent that you put up on the pole, the Son of Man.
	So it's explicitly laid out.
	The idea that Christianity is part of the Caducean is something that is indicated in the details.
	In sort of the esotericism as the Bible, as I just articulated them to you.
	So this is one of the reasons the Caducean becomes such a useful, good term for us, because it's actually the symbol that they use or this idea.
	So what lies outside of the Caducean?
	What lies outside of it is our race and our family in a kind of robust, protected...
	And, you know, form that's kind of defending for itself and vying for power and its existence and amelioration in the world.
	And that's the Apollonian, because that's what the Apollonian describes.
	And the reason that we know it's outside of the Caducean is because the Caducean, and this is why myth becomes such a useful, it helps us, you know, why it helps us, why myth becomes more useful in a lot of ways than...
	Ultimately, then political ideology, for example, is that it helps us sort of visualize and understand, you know, these different forces in the world, as it were.
	And that's what the gods represent.
	They represent these different forces in the world.
	But the Caducean is a staff that's held by Hermes or Mercury, who is this Semitic figure.
	He's a serpent god akin to Bacchus or Dionysus, as it were, right?
	That, you know, that's a profound thing.
	So we, by, you know, now, obviously, a cult of Apollo could become corrupt.
	And there's actually myths that kind of describe this.
	But that, as an ideal, becomes something that's outside of the Caducean.
	And right now, every sort of political option, as it were, is within the Caducean.
	Especially since the, you know, and again, we need a religio-political solution.
	Because...
	Without a religio-political solution, we're sort of a weaker competitor on the field.
	Whereas Jews have a religio-political solution, so they're, I mean, they're kind of more put together, as it were.
	They're more like kind of battle-ready to win a political struggle because their political struggle is understood as a sacred struggle in the cosmos, in the here and now, in the real world.
	Whereas Christians...
	Their political struggle is not really a serious thing.
	It's, you know, compared to their spiritual struggle.
	So you see the division between the religion and the political.
	Ultimately, they will see the battlefield.
	Yeah, well, I can take this.
	Go ahead.
	I can take this in a couple of different ways.
	I mean, first off, just on a...
	You know, smaller level, you have this, like, Americanism as the opposition to an intense version of Americanism.
	So it's kind of like, you know, all of the wokeness.
	You know, the transsexuality trend, you know, the homosexual rights, all of these things, or like the disintegration of the family, the disintegration of the middle class, all of these things are emanating from America.
	And the rights opposition to that is we need more America.
	We need to go back to an earlier stage of this clear trajectory, unavoidable trajectory of an Americanism.
	Yeah, more of the lethal cure, as it were, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	The lethal cure.
	Yeah, that's an excellent way of describing it.
	And so you kind of see that.
	The other aspect is that For Christians, you always do kind of have a cop-out.
	And I noticed this just through my kind of casual glancing at a lot of these conservatives on Twitter, whatever social media, after the Stop the Steal fiasco failed, which it was born to fail.
	Well, we don't have to go into that.
	But after it failed, in the days leading up to...
	January 6th and January 20th.
	January 6th being the riot or...
	Buffoonish coup or whatever you want to call it.
	And then January 20th, when Biden was inaugurated, you had all of these, you know, all of this tough talk amongst conservatives, like, you know, well, you know, this isn't a democracy.
	This is a republic.
	And, you know, we need to use power to, you know, promote the family and our ends and all this kind of stuff.
	And then after January 6th or after January 20th especially, you had this retreat into, well, we're all, you know, the real thing is that we have to adopt Jesus Christ to be saved in the afterlife.
	And, you know, actually we're going to all kind of become homeschoolers and, you know, our children will inherit the earth, as it were, because we're going to homeschool them so hard that they're going to be...
	God-fearing, Christ-loving Americans in a hundred years or whatever.
	And then we'll take over or something.
	But it's just this kind of immediate cop-out from politics that they always have in their back pocket.
	And so all of the tough talk about using power just becomes merely that.
	It just becomes tough talk.
	Because I think one of the...
	Fascinating things about conservatives who actually have had a lot of success, electorally speaking, over the past 30 years.
	These past 30 years in Congress have been, as I called it, the red era.
	They have mostly held Congress, and they have had hugely popular and impactful politicians and celebrities and personalities, etc.
	They have no idea what to do with power once they get a hold of it.
	I think the Trump phenomenon might have been an example of this in the sense that I think Trump had a lot of good instincts in 2015 from what I heard.
	I mean, there was a reason that you and I were Trump fans and we thought this is great and hilarious and inspiring, etc.
	Is that, you know, he seemed to be, if you just listen to him, he seemed to be kind of a nationalist.
	He wanted to take care of people.
	He wanted to change the paradigm.
	He wanted to get all the bad people out.
	He wanted to have a new foreign policy, etc., But whether that was all a grift or a con, or whether he was opposed just so vehemently from within his own cabinet and party.
	Or whether he just had no earthly idea what to do with power once he got it.
	I think it's probably in between those things.
	I think all of those were factors.
	But the fact is, he had no fucking clue what to do once he got in office.
	And you saw that immediately after being inaugurated, where...
	Before long, we were doing things like, oh, a Muslim travel ban.
	Even building the wall is this great symbol of American nationalism that is ultimately kind of meaningless.
	It's not really addressing the issue, which is racial and demographic.
	Again, in that first year, what did he accomplish?
	Incoherent health care policy that no one likes, tax cuts.
	Blah, blah, blah.
	It was almost just over because he's like the dog chasing after the mailman's truck.
	He wouldn't know what to do if he actually got a hold of it.
	And conservatives are like that.
	They don't have a mythic, ideological, religious, you could say, basis to the point that even if Donald Trump had succeeded with Stop the Steal.
	Let's say they had literally stopped the steal and they had gone outside of Congress and made a big show or even gone into Congress and just stopped the senators from certifying the vote.
	What would have happened?
	We would have gotten 2019 all over again.
	It would be 2019, but maybe even worse if Donald Trump had dictatorial powers.
	It would have been a big, You have to have a religious ideological basis in order to pursue power.
	You're not just reacting to some other people with that basis.
	You are the ones on the offensive changing matters.
	And if you lack that, then it's just like putting a kid in office.
	And saying, oh, I decree as president that everyone gets two cheeseburgers on Thursday.
	It's just meaningless nonsense.
	And even if Trump had established a dictatorship, that's what we would have gotten.
	Yeah, no, I agree.
	It's sort of like Nick now, but on a much larger scale, where...
	You know, again, I mean, it's the two parties in this country are of the same body, two heads of the same body, as it were.
	And ultimately, but then, you know, within that, you have individuals who are kind of exercising a sort of individual will to power and backing people like Trump.
	And, you know, but, you know, ultimately, I mean, one thing that we can say, That is both, I don't know if it's bad, but I guess it's kind of encouraging in a way that we definitely have seen things, you know, that would have been unthinkable when we were in college, for example, right?
	So it's, I'll give you an example.
	Like, it used to be, back in the day, like, being like a devotee of...
	Ayn Rand or libertarianism was an edgy thing.
	That was where the edge of the Overton window was, essentially.
	That's changed in our lifetime, definitely.
	We've seen the mainstreaming to a greater extent of libertarianism.
	One might say, well, libertarianism became paused.
	No, it actually became what it was, ultimately.
	Right?
	I mean, it kind of sort of reached its sort of logical conclusion.
	It became, yeah, it is kind of something that is kind of gay.
	And it's sort of towards, it is kind of toward, it is liberalism.
	It is libertarianism.
	It's actually in the word libertarianism.
	So we've seen kind of a remarkable political shift in our lifetime.
	And we've seen a great polarization of things.
	You know, back then, and this would be kind of, you know, and it was more on a kind of esoteric level, but libertarianism used to be a thing, a kind of thing that, like, you know, mainstream Jews would be, you know, warned people of or be irritated with or wary of.
	Like, libertarianism was kind of a demon.
	And it's because, you know, it's something that they sort of had an intuition or sense of that we lacked in the sense that we ultimately would realize, well, libertarianism was like, you know, this became one of the cliches of the alt-right is that it was… a road to the alt-right.
	Libertarianism was one of the tracks to the alt-right.
	Yeah.
	So in a way, there are usually a couple of steps ahead of us in the sense that they understand that that kind of goes towards...
	You know, fascism or whatever that goes towards nationalism.
	Because it's, even though it's very distinct from nationalism in a lot of ways, you know what I mean?
	I mean, the Ayn Rand sort of propaganda has these sort of fascistic aesthetic aspects to it that are, you know, which were also things that were kind of irritating to the left.
	But ultimately, the ideology itself represents a decollectivizing that...
	Ultimately, they understand can only result in a recollectivizing, which, you know, is nationalism or racialism.
	And so there we see that they are a couple of steps ahead of us, realizing the danger.
	Because libertarianism itself is not the danger.
	It's where libertarianism goes.
	Yeah.
	So it is remarkable that we have seen a lot of shifting.
	And so that was ultimately the reason.
	It's not Trump, ultimately, that they feared or Trumpism or MAGA.
	It's what inevitably MAGA sort of gives way to.
	What's coming after MAGA is what they fear, ultimately.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I think that's true.
	And I think different Jews in some ways...
	And here, you can even talk about Gentiles who are intensely aligned with them as well, or kind of part of the same camp.
	But you can see this even with the religious right.
	Different Jews kind of perceive it on different levels and have different reactions to it.
	And you can see this with something like the phenomenon of the religious right and Christian Zionism in particular.
	I mean, on one hand, very important Jews, you could say the kind of hardline nationalistic Jews like Bibi Netanyahu and so on, they have absolutely embraced this thing.
	They fund...
	They're fundamentalist preachers.
	They bring them on tours of Israel.
	They blow them up.
	They treat them as equals, seemingly, and so on.
	And then you have this other brand, the New York Times reading Jews, who are completely freaked out by the phenomenon of the religious right.
	And the religious right...
	Or Christian Zionism in particular, if you look into their ideology and say the immediate implications of their ideology, it is by no means threatening to Jews.
	I mean, these are the chosen peoples, God's chosen people.
	This is how the covenants make sense, is through the Jewish people.
	Pro-Israel, to say the least.
	They have no sympathy for Palestinian Christians.
	Christianity in general is not threatening the Jews.
	Let's be honest.
	I know.
	I'm getting there.
	It's a complicated thing, though.
	They are pro-Jewish just objectively, the religious right.
	But I think some of those, there's another, there's a certain type of Jew that perceives the danger in it.
	And the religious right historically, and I think still to a very large extent.
	Is about white people gathering together in rooms and giving big bombastic speeches and feeling nationalistic and feeling a sense of togetherness.
	And they read that as fascism, as maybe even Nazism.
	And you can kind of see this, again, with Donald Trump, where Donald Trump is the most pro-Israeli...
	Donald Trump is not anti-Semitic.
	I mean, he has Jews within his family.
	Donald Trump has not done things that are anti-Jewish.
	But just this, the kind of like outward appearance of...
	Trumpian nationalism does get their antenna up in the sense that it's about talking about, oh, there's an evil elite out there that's taken all the money and power.
	We need to give it back to the people.
	Ooh, look where that leads.
	There's these Trump rallies where it's 90%, 95% white people from small towns, from the middle of the country, getting together, hooting and hollering, getting a little bit drunk and getting excited about a leader who they're behind.
	That kind of stuff really freaks them out.
	And I think it's the kind of power of the Caducean that you and I perceive, which is that, okay, I can kind of see both sides of this, but none of these things are for us.
	None of these things are actually anti-system.
	None of these things are going to bring about a...
	True flourishing of our extended family.
	And both of them kind of have certain appealing aspects to them.
	The left has certain appealing aspects to it.
	It's more theoretical.
	It's smarter.
	It's more willing to criticize the American system or say...
	Have a foreign policy that's a little more even-handed, etc.
	Obviously, the right has certain...
	We have a certain empathy towards it.
	It's like, ah, these are white guys getting together, being proud of themselves.
	But all of it is focused within this chocolate-vanilla swirl dynamic.
	None of it is about us at the end of the day.
	It's all about...
	Things that don't fundamentally matter and things that are supporting other people.
	and both sides are kind of have their temptations, but both sides are ultimately wrong.
	Yeah, no, I agree.
	I mean, you know, another metaphor or another way maybe of thinking about it is that the conservative side or the Christian or right side, even though they're kind of moving in a direction that's ultimately kind of directionless and mindless, you know, As far as, like, deeper existential questions of, like, whether or not, you know, for example, as a white race, whether Christian or otherwise, are they going to exist in, you know, 400 years, or whatever the question may be, right?
	But so they, it's, but they are, they represent a still kind of living part of the body, a sort of poisoned and blinded and confused, but still living part of the body, whereas the left represents a kind of Dead or something that has become basically completely compliant or servile, right, to Jews effectively.
	But the right, it's not so much that they're going against the interests of Jews, it's that they're still showing some kind of life or vigor, as it were, right?
	The body is not yet dead.
	So, you know, it's like you have an animal in a net, for example.
	It's still kicking, right?
	So it's still dangerous.
	But it's not necessarily...
	Empowered to save itself.
	You know what I mean?
	But it still represents a danger at some time.

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