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Aug. 23, 2021 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
43:20
The Graveyard of Empire

Ed Dutton and Richard Spencer discuss Afghanistan. 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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Time Text
Kandahar!
Gee golly wow boy, we got 'em now!
Kandahar!
Kandahar!
Say Taliban, move your minivans kinda hard.
He lives for danger.
*gunshot*
He lives for the moment.
He lives on the edge.
James Bond 007.
There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred.
and resentment and exposed the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant and that is the force of human freedom.
We are led by events and common sense to one conclusion: the survival of liberty in our land The Taliban also has to make an
assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community.
...is not plausible, and I think it's increasingly unable to engage in the kind of expansionism that was announced at George W. Bush's second inaugural.
Our strategic interest and our most holy ideals are one.
We must spread democracy across the globe, and he did say we will end tyranny in our time.
It's just a trite, the impossible remark, isn't it?
It's like saying a war on...
No!
He actually meant it, and it had effect on foreign policy.
Did he invade every single tiny Amazonian tribe?
Obviously, it's absurd, but did he actually believe that as a born-again Christian?
Yes!
Did that have effect on American policy?
Yes.
There was a dream of a unipolar American order that infected the minds of think tankers and military industrial complex people and the media.
And it still has.
They're the ones who won't give up on the dream.
Okay.
So, Ed.
It's a bit of a cliché to say this.
It's banal, maybe, but we seem to be living through history.
I don't think that's right.
Frequently the case, that people do live through history.
History has certain patterns, and unfortunately our Judeo-Christian mindset makes us think that those patterns don't apply to us, but I'm afraid they do.
We are.
And they give us the hubris to think we'll somehow be different, but we won't.
And Afghanistan has long been called the graveyard of empires for a very good reason, and that is that it seems to be impossible to create a functioning state there, even if you're Afghan, and it seems to be impossible to bring peace to the place.
Well, we can talk about this first, why modernity is...
Difficult, to say the least, if not impossible, in Afghanistan and also the graveyard of empire.
Was it 1842, the Afghan disaster?
1839 to 1842.
You've got a column of British, including women, being evacuated from Kabul through high passes in which they're just being shot at and massacred.
Absolutely infamous.
And the Greeks, the ancient Greeks, had trouble in Afghanistan.
They wouldn't, for example, the Great Sali was so knackered by Afghanistan they wouldn't follow him to India.
The Turks had problems in Afghanistan.
The Mongols had problems in Afghanistan.
A combination of factors.
The terrain is probably the main thing.
It's so mountainous that any insurgents can just escape.
It's absolutely impossible to attain them.
Right.
The parallel that most people are mentioning is the Soviet experience, which lasted around a decade.
And I think this is very interesting.
I don't think America is going to therefore collapse in the next three years.
know, history is prologue, but it is worthwhile looking into that experience.
There was a socialist government of some kind in Kabul that was seemingly trending westward.
And there was an invasion, an invasion by invitation to some degree, and a kind of coup.
And then there was a nine-year period that really resembles what we went through.
And this was also the period in the Carter and Reagan administrations where we were just funneling money.
And I don't mean giving them, you know, giving some Mouarjadeen.
I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars funneled into Islamic extremist organizations, for lack of a better word.
Actually, the two Hollywood films were pretty interesting on this.
If you rewatch the James Bond film, The Living Daylights, which is a good film starring Timothy Dalton or Rambo three, I believe you have all of the you have kind of Hollywood picking up on current events.
And it's all about the Mujahideen being these Oxford educated, you know, kind of freedom fighters against the evil Russians.
We saw how that turned out.
I mean, there is no question that the United States government funded Osama bin Laden, funded...
All of these movements that would ultimately kind of come back to bite us.
The idea with these kinds of podcasts is that you have a hot tape or whatever, but there's no real hot tape you can have about Afghanistan.
Anybody could have told George Bush when he went in there.
First of all, he had absolutely no business going in there.
It was a complete fake lie.
It was just that there had been 9-11, and so somebody needed to pay a price.
There had to be consequences for somebody.
And so it can't be Pakistan, because Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and it can't be Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia is too important and rich.
Let's go into Afghanistan, even though the hijackers were mainly Saudis, and even though Saba was in Pakistan.
So let's go into Afghanistan, and while we're at it, let's just go into Iraq for a laugh.
The result is that over 400 British people were killed, soldiers.
I don't know how many Americans were killed in Afghanistan.
Thousands.
I think 2,500 or so.
That's in terms of the...
Just damage to human life of Americans.
It's much higher than that.
I think I actually heard an estimate that it's half a trillion or even a trillion of liabilities that they're going to have to pay for in terms of injured Americans.
And then you've got that fascinating woman, Jennifer Capparelli.
Saying, please don't, on Twitter, saying, please, she works for the Institute of War Studies or something in D.C. And she said, please don't share tweets with Saigon-like images in case it causes us to get post-traumatic stress.
Oh, I think I tweeted that out, yeah.
The men that fought there got their legs blown off.
Not their post-traumatic stress, but post-traumatic stress of seeing an image that isn't very nice.
Right, for a think tank.
A chick with a master's degree working at a think tank who wants to believe that we can build democracy in Afghanistan.
We don't want to trigger this.
We can build a better world.
It's all just about democracy and kindness.
It's so awful that Kabul's not going to be having a pride march this year.
They might be having a pride march just of a different kind of pride.
Pride in religion and blood.
And please don't do that because it won't help us.
If we have PST, it might cause us to self-harm.
I thought that was absolutely wonderful.
It was just such an embodiment of the reason why the Taliban have won.
Because they don't have values like that and they don't have anybody in their society or tolerate anybody in their society that has views like that.
Also, when we think about You have to take into account things like terrain.
You certainly have to take into account things like climate.
You have to take into account things like race, obviously, and not to mention history.
But I think, again, those...
Those girls with master's degrees, they don't take anything of those things in account.
They have a kind of platonic ideal of democracy, which basically, yes, means gays and parades and women getting undergraduate degrees and working in academia are becoming like themselves.
Maybe females becoming think tank white paper generators.
If you want to engage in something like regime change, maybe that would be necessary at some point.
You have to take these factors into account.
The fact that the Taliban was there, 20 years later the Taliban is back.
It's a modern organization.
I think it was founded in the...
In the aftermath of the Soviet period, I think it was founded in 1993 or 1994.
So it is a modern, postmodern organization.
But at least in terms of the way that it governs, it is calling back to something that is legitimately Afghani.
And that is the kind of system you need.
There is a reason why democracy can...
Arise in certain geographic reasons.
And I'm actually putting race aside here.
I don't quite like arguments about IQ and democracy.
You have to have a certain level of IQ because you have to have a certain level of trust.
You have to have a certain level of trust.
And trust correlates with IQ.
And also you have to be future-oriented and that kind of thing to sustain democracy.
Tatum Van Nen did a lot of research into this.
I just don't buy the democracy.
There's no argument?
Don't give up.
That's kind of what E. Michael Jones would say.
I just don't buy it.
Democracy is not a civilized system.
It's taking a post-modern value of the contemporary...
It's taking a fun word from contemporary society and claiming that only smart people can do this.
No, it's not saying that at all.
It's saying that there's a correlation between the intelligence of a community and its ability to and its desire to sustain democratic systems.
It's saying that when trust falls too low because IQ falls too low, then you don't tend to get democracy.
And similarly, actually, when trust is too high, that can be a problem for democracy as well.
Define democracy.
I mean...
Well, I don't even know.
That's sort of a left-wing defied intelligence.
No, it's not.
Whereby people vote for their representatives in some kind of capacity.
Democracy means rule by the people.
That's what it means.
It doesn't actually mean voting.
That's what it means.
That's literally what the word means.
It does not mean voting, and it does not mean representative government.
Those are very different things.
The fact that the etymology of the word democracy means rule of the mall does not mean that that is how we commonly use it.
Now, in Iceland, they have this idea that power derives from the people.
That is not the idea in Britain.
Power derives from the parliament and the crown.
Both would be regarded as democracies because of the way in which you transfer power is via some sort of system of elections.
So that's what I see as a democracy.
The point is that you have to have a certain level of trust.
It seems to sustain a democracy.
And in order to have that level of trust, you do have to have a certain level of intelligence.
That's one thing.
But it's not the only thing.
Another thing that's very important is that you have basically unity.
So kind of one ethnic group.
And once you get ethnic diversity, then democracy starts to become debased.
So what cousin marriage does is it canalises.
The polity into lots of separate communities that are very strongly related to each other, internally related I mean, and are very distantly related to those.
That are not part of that community.
And that's been suggested to be one of the problems that you have in these low-trust societies.
The way that they sustain some sort of trust and investment and whatever is by cousin marriage, on the one hand, and then by broader clans and so on, and then tribes, and then ethnic groups.
And there is distrust.
At every level.
And so that's what you have in Afghanistan.
First of all, you have various different ethnic groups.
I mean, the Pashtun is the largest.
They're only about 35% of the population.
Then you've got the Tajiks in the north, who are very different.
They're much more sort of East Asian influence, but they speak kind of Persian.
And then you've got various other groups, a lot of other groups.
And then within these, you have...
You have tribes, and then within that you have clans, and you cooperate accordingly.
And the fact, as you were saying about the geography, that's really important to this.
We've got these mountains and whatever, and so it separates peoples.
And so you get these very distinct people that don't cooperate, and you can't have centralised government.
I mean, basically every Afghan head of state since about 1700 has been deposed or assassinated.
Right.
Every single one.
Well, do you think that the Taliban is a...
And I don't know enough about the Taliban, but the Taliban will offer a kind of solution to this, that there's a unifying Islamic fundamentalism, but then in their primitiveness, they're kind of offering a certain decentralization, which fits the country better.
And thus offers democracy in the sense that it's ruled by the people.
Even within Pakistan, you have these border areas with Afghanistan that are lawless, basically.
And in India as well.
And the central government does not have control over these areas and doesn't even try to bother.
Because it's pointless.
So they're just lawless and they're left alone.
So you're going to get areas like that, right up in the mountains, where you still get white people that are descended from Alexander the Great, that practice wacky religions, not even Islam, and things like that.
They'll just be left alone.
But you do at least what they seem to be offering is some kind of stability.
We're all Muslims, we're fellow Muslims.
The problem is that, and interestingly, last time when the Taliban were in power, it was an overwhelmingly Pashtun movement.
But there's evidence now that there's quite senior people now in the Taliban that are not Pashtun, that are Tajik.
It's almost become more popular among the non-passionants.
So it's almost more of a unifying source now than it was.
Well, it's surprising, but maybe it shouldn't be surprising, because the last 20 years of American rule have been absolutely devastating.
It's coincided with tremendous loss of life, tremendous depression.
Now, a poll in Afghanistan, maybe take that with a grain of salt.
Very important polling that reveals that these people are depressed.
They don't have any hope for the future.
They feel ruled by a foreign power.
They view their leaders as American puppets, I mean, correctly.
And I can see a certain nostalgia coming in where the Taliban, okay.
What was the phrase from Africa?
You know, Charles Taylor, he killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I'll vote for him anyway.
I mean, that's a bit grotesque, but I think it might be a bit like that in the sense that we know what we're getting with the Taliban.
They offer stability.
You know, cousin marriage notwithstanding.
They are us on some level.
And also, FU America!
Yeah, I mean...
Remember that when you had this king, the Shah, this was named Muhammad Zahir, the last Shah that was deposed in the 70s, and he tried to modernise Afghanistan in the same way that the Shah of Iran tried to modernise Iran, and throw it into the 20th century, and you had women wearing Western clothes and whatever, and that's just so repellent to a backward, undeveloped, extremely religious, extremely patriarchal culture like that.
It's utterly repellent.
And the result was a backlash in which...
You have then eventually the rise of the Taliban, or the original rise of the Taliban, and so on.
And now you're just seeing it again.
These people, and also you've got to remember, it's the people that are the more religious, the more fundamentalist to have more children as well than the liberal types.
The liberal types are more likely to flee Afghanistan and go abroad and get out of the country and go to America, like that chap who drove our taxi in Chicago at that time, you may recall, doing whistling noises.
And they, so it's a very good thing.
So you'd expect it to become a more fundamentalist society, and this is what they're offering.
It's a bit like...
Bhutan, they're offering an evolutionary match.
They're offering what these people have been evolved for over a long time, which is an extremely patriarchal society in which, because levels of trust developed below, men want their women to be covered up so they can guarantee against cuckoldry.
The women will be selected to be submissive to this and want to be covered up.
And yes, they'll be outliers, but that's mainly what's going on.
These people have popular support.
And that's why, not democratic, of course, but they have popular support.
And they have...
Sorry to be autistic about the word democratic.
This is democracy.
This is what it looks like.
It's ruled by the people.
It's legitimate.
It makes sense.
And that's what they have.
They are literally the desert tribesmen that are very high in ethnocentrism, that are up against the decadent people in the towns that are low in ethnocentrism.
Rich and whatever.
And have lost their martial values.
And who's going to win?
These people who are fighting for their own ethnic group, for the Pashtuns, but also more broadly for Islam, and have a sense of eternity, and a sense that God's on their side, and a sense that their ancestors have always done this, and they're preserving it for the glory of God.
Or a bunch of people who, what would you call them, shills, who are prepared, mercenaries basically, who for money are prepared to work for the occupied regime in the army.
And when the money dries up, they run.
The speed of the collapse is tremendous.
Is it going to be the ACBR type people or the people who are literally mercenaries?
I don't know why Joe Biden even bothered to feign surprise that they didn't bother to fight.
Why would they bother to fight?
Why are they going to lay down their lives for the American government when it's just about to leave when they have no popular support?
So what he's then left them with by leaving so quickly and suddenly is a rogue state run by religious fundamentalists that's got probably among the best arms of any country in the Middle East now.
It's got all America's arms.
Yeah, and that is just, you know, an expression of disaster.
And it's, again, a continuation of these kind of chess moves or 3D chess games.
Like, oh, let's fund, let's give a billion dollars to the Mujahideen.
What could go wrong?
You know, let's own the Soviets by funding Osama bin Laden.
You know, what could go wrong?
A lot can go wrong.
I'd like to turn to kind of like bigger trajectory, not in Afghanistan, but in the United States.
So, um, I, speaking as an American citizen, was actually extremely proud of Joe Biden.
Yes, was this perfect?
Of course it wasn't.
Could it have been better?
Maybe, but I'm not sure.
I think sometimes you just got to rip the Band-Aid off.
And all of these people claiming, oh, who lost Afghanistan?
This happened too quick or whatever.
Well, it was going to happen anyway.
Might as well have let it happen quick.
Rip off the Band-Aid.
Could it have been done better?
Sure.
But would the outcome be different?
No.
So I was actually quite proud that he went before the cameras and basically said, I'm going to pursue our strategic interests.
We cannot guarantee democracy and feminism around the world.
He didn't use quite those words, but that's what he was saying.
We need to pursue our strategic objectives.
He kind of declared victory, I think, in an understandable face-saving manner, which he said, we achieved our goals when we went in in 2002.
To kick al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan and prevent the Taliban from being a safe haven for terrorists, basically.
I think it's a bit of a face-saving, but when someone's admitting defeat...
I think he should probably let them save a little face.
That's only civilized.
So I was proud that he faced down the critics.
There's a major disconnect in the United States where, for at least 10 years, the public has been either wary, ignorant, or hostile towards the Afghanistan situation.
It does not have popular support.
It certainly did when it first happened at that post 9/11 period of hyper patriotism and terrorism.
I believe 9 out of 10 Americans supported the Afghanistan war.
We are responsible to some degree, but certainly over the past decade, it's just, what are we doing there?
I don't want to even think about it.
Let's get out.
So Biden made the right decision, and he opposed the mainstream media, he opposed the military-industrial complex, and he did what the vast majority of the public, including the vast majority of Republicans, ultimately wanted.
So he kind of overcame.
And I think that's actually something you should be given credit for.
Yes, wrote to me and noted that, that it is, as you say, it is pulling out of a ridiculous situation.
And as long as the Americans don't have to suffer with the Afghan asylum seekers coming in and raping their daughters as a consequence of this, then fair enough.
But on the other hand, it is a total, a big part of politics and being a significant player on the world stage is...
powerful and important and it is a total national humiliation to have for you to go into a country supposedly establish a regime to outlast you and within no time at all of you withdrawing the president of the country has fled and the country has been taken over by I agree, but I don't want to sound like a cuck here, but sometimes you have to admit defeat and move on.
I'm sorry.
I think that is more manly than this nonsense coming from conservatives about who lost Afghanistan?
Why is this so bad?
The liberals did this.
Give me a break.
Just face up to the fact that we failed.
It's okay to fail.
Everyone fails.
You have to move on.
Yes, it's humiliating.
Obviously grant you that.
But if you continue the humiliation, it's going to get a lot worse.
And I think in many ways, Biden, who is not a America first nationalist or whatever.
He wants America to have a major part in world affairs.
He is a child of the Cold War.
He's a child of, in some ways, the age of terrorism, of rah, rah, rah, America can do everything with the greatest.
He is a child of those periods.
He's not a Ron Paul isolationist or something.
And he recognizes that in order for Washington to have any plausibility...
To be a major player, if not a unipolar, you know, big kahuna of the globe, which I'm not sure America quite is anymore, but you need to plausibly engage in foreign affairs.
You cannot live in this just delusional situation, this just endless disaster.
And so, I mean, I think both Trump and Biden are responding to American imperial decline.
So there was a certain kind of high watermark in, say, the collapse of the Cold War in the early to mid-90s, where there was really, and this is the age of Fukuyama-ism, the end of history, There was no other plausible alternative to liberal democracy in an American-led order.
And America was, or at least viewed itself, but was largely viewed by the outside world as the good guys.
They just bring us consumerism and Hollywood movies and music.
Cargo cult.
Cargo cult America.
I agree, of course, but I'm kind of giving credit where credit's due here.
Then, I think you also...
9-11 really changed that.
We thought that we had reached the end of history, and then we have this radical specter of something that's anti-this, that's anti, in our minds, progress and modernity and wealth.
How do we deal with it?
It was blowing our minds.
Do you remember the cynical attitude of people of our generation as teenagers?
It was about being cynical about everything, like the Daria, an academic agent who is a YouTuber has talked about this.
I remember Daria.
The cartoon Daria, where you're just mindlessly cynical about everything and nothing is important.
Are you describing me here, Ed?
The black male Gen Xer?
Nothing is important.
Nothing matters.
And let's just mock everything and take nothing particularly seriously.
Because life isn't serious anymore.
Because life's over.
Because the battles have been won.
It's liberal democracy.
Liberal democracy has triumphed.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Yeah, I think that the flip side of the end of history is Daria-like cynicism.
I kind of agree.
Because in some ways, you have the end of history where it's like, we've won.
What else could you possibly want outside of a Gucci handbag and a voting booth and feminism and democracy?
This is it.
And then the flip side of that is that kind of, you know, Gen X cynicism of, well, you know, God is dead.
Nothing matters.
It's all bullshit.
I kind of agree.
I thought you were accusing me of falling.
Maybe I fall into that a little bit.
Well, you did used to wear straps when you were younger, so that's kind of a cynical move.
But, yeah, exactly.
And then 9-11, you know, it symbolizes the fact that...
This symbolized a broad process that had been happening anyway for a while, which was the increasing prominence of Muslim immigration, including in Europe.
And then after 9-11, of course, you have the attack in London.
Sorry, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in London, off it goes.
And suddenly there's a new war.
But also, we can't underestimate that level of patriotism.
So, I mean, again, I was born in 1978.
I certainly kind of came of age in the 90s.
And that kind of thing.
I can remember.
I was in New York City during 9-11.
And interesting stories to tell.
We should maybe do...
I should record this in some way.
But the kind of patriotism that emerged...
The unironic, sincere patriotism that emerged even among hipsters was remarkable.
I can remember being...
Because I was living in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
I can remember...
Young hipsters, people who are my age in their early 20s, holding candlelight vigils with American flags.
I remember just the candles and the kind of paper plate underneath to catch the wax.
It was a religious-like feeling.
Not just nationalists, but certainly a religious-like feeling.
And if you said something like, maybe we shouldn't go into Afghanistan because that's the graveyard of empires, you would get some nasty looks.
There was something I just saw on Twitter.
I had never seen this before.
There was Saturday Night Live.
Now it is the ultimate just liberal, cynical, we hate Trump kind of nonsense.
You look back 20 years ago during the age of Afghanistan, they are doing this kind of bizarre song about invading Kabul, which they are clearly endorsing and kind of...
Riding high on.
We're marching in to Kabul.
It's unbelievable the change that has occurred over the past 20 years.
I think Biden, on some level, recognizes this and understands that if the United States is going to have any plausibility, it's going to have to start drawing back.
There's also this thing that I would mention, which I was thinking about last night.
So America is not plausible, and I think it's increasingly unable, to engage in the kind of expansionism that was announced at George W. Bush's second inaugural in 2004, or 2005 to be exact, where he said something to the effect, our strategic interest and our most holy ideals are one.
We must spread democracy across the globe.
And he did say we will end tyranny in our time.
Now that is quite...
A whopper.
I mean, that is going to demand the spending of just trillions of dollars, hundreds of wars, thousands across the globe.
It's just a trite, the impossible remark, isn't it?
It's like saying a war...
No!
He actually meant it, and it had effect on foreign policy.
Did they invade every single tiny Amazonian tribe?
Obviously, it's absurd, but did he actually believe that as a born-again...
Yes.
Did that have effect on American policy?
Yes.
And I think they certainly wanted to do this to Iran first.
They didn't quite get that.
I don't think they will get that.
But yeah, there was a dream of a unipolar American order that infected the minds of think tankers and military...
Industrial complex people and the media, and it still has.
They're the ones who won't give up on the dream.
While you've had the rise of Islamic terror, while you've had the rise of the new Russia under Putin, and while you've had the rise of China.
One thing that amazes me, though, returning to Afghanistan quickly.
It's how quickly the media and indeed the governments of Western countries seem to have basically accepted that the Taliban is in charge.
So the president has fled and the vice president of Afghanistan has declared himself the legitimate president of Afghanistan and is holding out in an area of land that is not controlled by the Taliban.
It is controlled by the remnant Afghani army and by his people.
And you'd think that would be the recognised Afghan state.
I mean, we didn't recognise Lenin until Kolchek was finally dead.
I mean, we didn't recognise China in so good as knows how long.
We recognised Chiang Kai-shek.
But no, even so, nobody cares.
The Taliban are in charge.
It's almost like we like it like that.
It's like it makes sense now.
It's not complicated and nuanced.
It does.
And you have to, you know, that George W. Bush idealism just kind of has to be defenestrated and you have to go back to realism where Nixon goes to China and you basically recognize foreign powers and you do not judge them on the basis of their domestic affairs.
That is the fundamental aspect of foreign policy realism.
But to go back into this, I don't...
I am proud of Joe Biden just taking his lumps and moving on.
I am.
That being said, I don't think that this is a...
We should think of this as like, Joe Biden's a nationalist, or like, America First has won, or whatever.
Even though Trump, after expanding things in 2017, then actually did set this ball in motion, to his credit.
And I don't know if he would have followed through like Biden, but...
At least he set the ball in motion.
I don't think this is America becoming more nationalist or patriotic or America first is one.
I think basically it's going to be more inward looking because we can't plausibly project that kind of George W. Bush idealism.
So we're going to be more inward looking.
And I think that might be kind of worse in the sense that we're not going to be attacking terrorists abroad.
What was the line from the Bush era?
We're going to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here or whatever.
I mean, totally ridiculous sentiment.
But I think now it's we can't fight them over there anymore.
So we're going to fight them here.
And I think there's going to be these chickens coming home to roosting.
Your country is polarized and coming apart, so there's going to be a lot of fighting where you are anyway.
Exactly.
You've got the woke mob.
You've got the QAnon mob.
You've got various mobs that things are generating into.
So you're on all fronts if you're also trying to fight in Afghanistan.
So maybe that's what he's preparing for.
Maybe that's what he has to do.
I mean, you've got people that are trying to break up states in America.
You've got people in Oregon that want to secede from Oregon and become part of Idaho.
You've got all kinds of things going on.
So perhaps that's what he's...
He has in mind.
Although I'm not sure he has much in mind.
I mean, mind-wise, I think he's basically gone.
Listening to conservative media.
I mean, he's not...
It's not that bad.
The guy's 80 or something.
Yeah.
But we have geriatric leadership.
So did the Soviet Union in the 70s.
It's just the way old empire does stuff.
We're going to probably have a boomer or even silent-gen president in 2024, 2028.
A silent gen president.
How old is a silent gen?
We might have them literally in the 90s.
We're going to make Brezhnev-area Soviet leaders look like a spring chicken.
A comeback for Jimmy Carter.
I was quite saddened to discover that Jimmy Carter, his vice president, had died.
Because, of course, he could have had a bit of a comeback otherwise.
Walter Mondale.
Right.
Yeah.
So I just, again, I do think that we've reached an end of a paradigm, and this is the full end of the 9-11 paradigm, some 20 years on.
And I don't know what the next paradigm is going to be.
There is going to be one.
There's always going to be one dominant force that is going to define...
I don't know if the elite quite know what that's going to be.
But I do think it's going to be worse because it's going to be more inward directed.
And so America as this shining city on a hill that spreads its values abroad, that's over.
And I think we now are going to kind of turn on ourselves.
And that could be very nasty.
I don't think there's any truth to secession movements or something like that.
Or any teeth to those movements, rather.
But I do think it's going to be nasty.
We're going to have to figure out what it means to be American.
That just sounds trite, figuring out what it means to America.
I don't think you're going to figure out what it means to America.
I don't think doing it will help.
I just think you're going to turn on each other.
That's what I'm saying.
There's going to be a battle for defining what an American is.
Because we're not spreading going abroad.
We're going to try to define what that means.
The last time you weren't going abroad, the last time you were isolationists, what America was, was the great Anglo-Saxon land abroad.
That's what it was.
And that's what was deliberately promoted in the 20s and whatever, when you were isolationist, that you are the great Anglo-Saxon homeland.
So I can't see that being promoted again, considering your current demographics.
So therefore, what I think is more likely is an element of you will promote that kind of thing, and there'll be just a general patchwork breakup.
Well, an element, i.e., like, me?
I don't think there's going to be many people promoting that.
I think there's going to be the promotion of a kind of post-Trump MAGA conservatism, which is going to be just increasingly wacky and increasingly non-white and non-straight, actually, which is what you clearly see among MAGA right now.
But they're going to be fiercely, insanely, religiously patriotic.
And they're going to devolve into this kind of post-evangelical Trump cult, or I think the tendency of wokeness to become more...
radical and more, maybe even violent, but certainly more nasty.
I think it's going to be a battle between those camps.
not sure which side I'm on.
Well, you did vote for Bob.
What?
Well, I'm obviously not a leftist, but I...
The MAGA religion is going to lose and massively stupid, so I'm not going to side with them.
I'm not sure it's going to lose, but it is massively stupid.
But then on the other hand, one of the ways that you dominate others is through ethnocentrism.
So if you believe your opponent is satanic, then this will galvanize the more gullible.
Yeah, sure.
We'll see.
Again, as the chickens come home to roost and America comes home again, that just means we're going to be very nasty towards our fellow man.
Or woman.
Or they.
Or transsexual, transhumanist entity.
But at least in Afghanistan from now on, if you say something that upsets a woman, she won't be able to give you a nasty look.
Because her face will be covered up.
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