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Sept. 3, 2021 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
49:13
9/11 Nostalgia

Ed Dutton and Richard Spencer discuss the End of History, demoralization, and the coming nostalgia for Dubya's America. 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
The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger.
These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat.
But they have failed.
Our country is strong.
A great people has been moved to defend a great nation.
Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America.
These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.
All right, Ed, how are you?
Good evening.
Good afternoon.
Hello.
Yes, I'm...
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yes, of course.
I forgot how far to the west you are.
Yes, I'm okay.
Yes, I just had roast chicken for dinner, which was very nice.
And I've...
Yes, it was all right.
Well, I just recovered from a violent illness.
As you definitely know, some of these super viruses seem to incubate in child environments like playgrounds and bowling alleys.
And when they hit an adult, you spend about 24 hours in furious vomiting.
I won't go into too many details, but I somehow survive.
Is that the virus of drinking heavily the night before?
No, it's not a virus of I'm lying and I'm actually...
I was actually down at the blue moon getting wasted.
No, I actually got a virus.
It's one of those 24-hour things.
Yeah, I remember visiting my nephews many years ago for Christmas.
They would always pick up some virus.
And because the child's immune system is so powerful, which is a great thing, obviously, they would recover in like three hours.
So they would vomit and then, you know, be out skiing or something three hours later.
And I would be in bed for 24 to 48 hours.
But that's the way life is.
I used to get viruses like that when I was in my late teens, early 20s.
And on one occasion, I went to the doctors about it.
I was in this pain and the doctor said, look.
and I have to admit that yes I was and he said yeah just have a warm bath and you'll fill it up with it That's my answer to everything.
I know what you mean.
But anyway, speaking of people that are, or things that are ill and falling over, America.
Yeah.
Well, I genuinely believe that we are, At the end of an era.
And you can look at this in a lot of different ways.
You can say that culture is so played out that it's almost become a parody.
You can say that that American dream of a universal middle-class lifestyle is, again, becoming something unreachable and that we have a kind of returned almost class.
Consciousness on some level, at the very least resentment.
You can look at this in terms of population decline, which is obvious, just a general population decline and slowly declining immigration, interestingly, and then a white population decline that is in real terms.
But I think all of this is dovetailing with the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
I wanted to go back to September 11th and look back at that from 20 years.
We both experienced that in our early 20s or late teens or whatever.
It was obviously one of the most impactful moments in time.
I do feel like we're at the end of an era in the sense that fewer things are now possible.
There's just a general mood of withdrawing Coming home.
Leveling things out.
We can't do this.
Less things are possible.
I feel like this is very significant.
The fact that we're, again, coming up to that 20th anniversary of September 11th is pretty remarkable.
You could do all kinds of things.
I mean, if you wanted to, you could wipe Afghanistan off the map.
I mean, you could destroy it.
I mean, you could, and that would be the end of that.
You could do that.
But there isn't the will to do that.
There isn't the desire to do that.
There isn't the feeling of superiority that enables one to do that.
There isn't the feeling of there being a future and America being chosen by God and being superior to lesser nations that used to be there and which used to incentivize you to massacre Native Americans or whatever.
I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it was a sense of your own importance and superiority.
You know, do what you want.
I mean, if you were in a major war now, would you nuke Hiroshima?
Probably not.
You would just let it go on and on and on.
And I think that's the change.
It's the change from a feeling that you're the best people in the world that are blessed by God with a special mission to a feeling that you're nothing and you're nobody and you're not important.
And not just that, you're bad.
Not you're worse and not important.
You're bad people.
Yeah.
And a real toxicity about being an American.
And again, I'm looking at this objectively.
I'm trying not to get into one of these polemical battles.
But just the prevalence of critical race theory just kind of waned a bit.
But it was hotly debated there for a few months.
And I think conservatives, I mean, they might not have fully understood what CRT is about.
Or they couldn't explain it or whatever.
But they did sense in their bones that it was a toxic ideology that wanted to diminish America.
It wanted to kind of look up the skirt of America.
It wanted to demean it.
And I think they correctly perceived it as a toxic brew.
And the fact that those kinds of things are so dominant, as opposed to an American exceptional narrative, is remarkable.
Well, I don't find it remarkable at all.
I mean, it's an ideology of humiliation.
So it's an ideology which compels you to say things which you know aren't true as a means of indicating its power over you and the power of those who are the authors of the ideology over you.
Right.
But wasn't American exceptionalism similar?
That made people say a lot of things that weren't true.
Right.
Yes.
Whereas these things aren't true, and it's like putting down the things that do inspire you, and having to say that you're rubbish, you're no good, you're awful, you're sinful, and the only way that you can, you can never find, you've never removed those sins, but you can, like the sort of Catholic Church, you can go through occasional cycles of...
And that worldview, that kind of idea, comes along at the end of empires.
It comes along during the winter of civilisation.
That's when you have it.
And that's why I'm not shocked by it.
So it takes over.
Europe, in a sense, came into its winter before America did.
So we had communism and things like this in our winter, where America didn't.
America kind of rose up out of the ashes of World War II and was the dominant nation and whatever.
And now your winter is here and you have your communism, which relates to your racial history.
And you had the fall of Rome.
You had Gnosticism, which was a very, very dominant ideology, very, very influential, and even aspects of non-heretical Christianity.
The world is evil.
It's an evil place.
It's inspired by Satan.
You're inherently bad.
You shouldn't have children.
You should just feel awful, and you should say how awful you are.
And that's what this ideology is doing.
And the white people that advocate it, like this D 'Angelo woman, it's quite fascinating that she is white.
She is herself white.
And she talks about, if you've read her book, she talks about it almost like a Damascene conversion, where she realized the sinfulness of her own whiteness.
So although she is white, like you, dear reader, and it's aimed at white people, she's a better white person than you, because she's had this realization, she's had this epiphany of her own, like she's seen the face of God, she's aware, who's black and lesbian, and she's aware of her own sinfulness, and you're not, and come along with me on the journey of my book, and you will have the epiphany as well.
Do you think, to extend this theological...
Do you think that a comparison could be made between total depravity and the critical race theory ideology or white fragility?
D 'Angelo is a little bit different than CRT, but they are kind of of one kind.
But there's this sense of total depravity that it's a notion no one is sinless.
Not only were you born in sin, you bear Adam's curse, effectively.
But you have, you know, each of us have, even after we woke up, even in the short time that I've been awake this morning, I've lied.
I've expressed ambition.
I've wanted, I've had sexual lust in my heart.
And that in some ways that this anti, whatever we want to call it, white critical right studies or whatever, that it's actually kind of deeply Protestant.
Yes, I think it is.
I don't know if you...
Yes, sort of.
With Calvinism, you have this idea that the key thing about Calvinism is that there's an elect.
There's a saved elect.
I guess you could argue that...
They're the elect.
They're the good whites.
Yeah, they're the good whites.
But it's not Calvin.
It's not some...
No, no.
It's...
Oh, goodness me, what's his name?
That Dutch theologian.
It's Arminian.
That's it.
In the sense that it's not predestined.
All of you can if you have your epiphany and realize your true racism.
Be saved from the evil of whiteness.
But the problem is that most of you don't seem to understand that you people think you are racist.
There is this structural racism in which all whites unconsciously participate.
And one way in which they participate in it is by disagreeing with what D 'Angelo is doing.
Simply by disagreeing with D 'Angelo and saying she's wrong, they are attempting to maintain their dominance within the racial hierarchy.
So they either have to accept the gnosis that D 'Angelo has to offer, or they are failing to understand that deep down they are racist.
It's like in Monty Python, only the true Messiah denies his divinity.
What kind of chance does that give me?
Okay, I am the Messiah.
And it's like that.
But she has risen above it.
She is a prophetess who has managed to rise above this situation.
You know, it's funny.
This wasn't exactly what I was planning on talking about, but I think this is a very interesting discussion.
I remember about 10 or 15 years ago speaking with the idiosyncratic and rather grumpy blogger named Lawrence Oster.
Were you ever aware of him or have you become aware of him?
No, I didn't.
He was a...
Very, very shrill blogger and highly prolific.
And he started to attack me, although I guess everyone attacks me, so that doesn't really single him out.
But I actually had lunch with him one day, and it was very interesting.
And he said that he was on a bus at one point in New York City, and he was surrounded by...
Non-white people.
And again, he is Jewish and was fervent about his Jewish identity, but he also identified as a white person as well.
And I believe he's like one of those that converted to Catholicism or something in his deathbed or something like this.
But he...
He said, I was on this bus, and I was surrounded by people.
Some were speaking Spanish, and they were Puerto Rican.
Many were Black, and they were talking to each other.
They were maybe an Orthodox Jew over here, and so on.
And he kind of saw all of these people.
And he basically said, effectively, it's okay to be white.
This is me.
And there was a kind of level...
He just talked about it in a very genuine manner.
There was a kind of level of reflection that he had where he accepted who he was and then could actually move forward with it.
And I feel like with people like D 'Angelo and company, it's almost like there are two paths that you can take.
If you were living in 1950s America...
And race isn't really something that is pressing on you.
Outside of certain circumstances, granted, there was some ethnic bigotry and rivalry, and obviously there is the African question, which has been important in America since its beginning.
But if you were growing up in a small town in Ohio, Race isn't ever-present.
It isn't there.
And thus, you don't really reflect on it.
And I think people are kind of reflecting on their identity in a way that might actually be very positive going forward.
And so is D 'Angelo.
And she's kind of taking this path towards self-overcoming and repentance and redemption or so on.
But that actually is A path that everyone has to take at some point.
Almost to give her too much credit perhaps, but everyone ultimately has to reflect on that in a way that they didn't have to reflect on that.
Even myself.
Growing up in, you know, being in Dallas, I can remember going to Highland Park in the 80s.
It was basically like a simulacrum of the 1950s.
Little burger joints and milkshakes and baseball card shops.
It was the whitest damn thing you could ever imagine.
And we kind of protected ourselves from reflecting on it.
She is getting beaten.
She's aiming her hook for people.
Not particularly thoughtful people, obviously, who are content to be white.
They're content that I'm white and I'm better than these other bad whites because they're racist and I'm not.
And what she's telling them is, no, you are racist.
You actually are extremely racist because you have an inherent racism and all kinds of little things that you do and that you contribute to and that you take part in make you racist.
And isn't that true in a way?
Yes, that probably is true.
So in a sense, you could argue she's confronted them with their own hypocrisy.
But by doing so, then you could argue she's simply upping the ante and having them say, oh God, yeah, I thought I was saved, I'm not saved.
I'd better be even more fervent.
I'd better be even more anti-racist, even more than I already was.
And I already was the kind of person that would dismiss someone out of hand and say stupid things like, oh, well, don't you know that racism is a social construct?
I already am that kind of idiot.
And I'd better be even more of an idiot or else I'll feel terribly, terribly bad about myself when I won't be able to cope.
So I think she's just making it worse.
It's a runaway anti-racism in which she is taking part by saying I am even more anti-racist than you by virtue of my realisation, which then makes people...
Further signal it, until you get to pulling down statues and just the idea that anything white is evil and then beyond that, I don't know what.
I'm waiting.
If there was another revival like there was in 2020, as I said to you at the time, I'm waiting for a white suicide cult.
All suicide cults are white, but you know what I mean.
A white suicide cult based around whiteness.
And I don't think that's a coincidence either, that suicide cults are often a white thing.
I don't think that's at all a coincidence.
Because of the sense of guilt that white people have, because of the sense of group conformity that they have, because of the extent to which they can be indoctrinated, because of the neuroticism level that they have, and so on, that is not combined with being highly ethnocentric, and therefore they can be taken out of it, and therefore you end up with these suicide cults.
Yeah, I mean, suicide is the ultimate expression of conscious will, in a way, in the sense that you are overcoming even your instinct to survive, which might seem to be the most powerful instinct.
You are gaining control in perhaps the most powerful way possible.
But, yeah, okay, so we got off on an interesting tangent there.
I think I might just leave that where it is.
This will be a...
Rambling podcast today.
That's good and fine.
Let's think about the path that we've tread over the past 20 years.
Do you have a 9-11 story?
I remember with my parents, everyone had a story of where they were when JFK was assassinated.
And even if it was a mundane story, like I was eating breakfast and I saw it on television, it was something that was just burned into their memory.
Do you have something like that with regard to 9-11?
Surely I told you my 9-11 story.
Well, yes, but there's a difference between the reality and podcast, so you're going to have to tell the audience.
Well, there was this thing at Darwin University called the Milk Round, and they would come there and they would get people from elite universities, and they would try and get them to get a job in finance, basically.
They would try and get people in finance.
And so the holidays at Derby University were between the end of June and the beginning of October.
And so at the end of my second year, the milk round were there, and they offered this company that had offices in New York.
And so they would pay for you.
You'd have a hot summer holiday of working, not very well paid, and they'd pay all your expenses and stuff, and you'd work in New York.
So that's where I was on September the 11th, 2001, working in New York.
I was working as a journalist.
It's funny because I was actually at a flight school at the time.
I was working as a journalist, a work experience as a journalist for a...
Local newspaper in London and this is 2001 so it's amazing to think it but there was no internet yet in that newspaper, everything was done by a fax machine and there wasn't even a telephone, sorry television, there wasn't even a television in...
The office.
There was no television.
It's just radio and a factory machine and a computer with no internet.
And then someone who was...
There was two floors.
One was the journalists on one floor.
The floor below was the adult advertising.
And one of the chaps that adult advertising comes running upstairs.
He's got the radio on downstairs.
A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.
And I'd never heard...
It was about 3 o 'clock in the afternoon or something, or 2 o 'clock in the afternoon.
And I'd never heard of the World Trade Center.
I was like...
Where's that?
New York.
All right.
Never mind.
And then we just got on with it.
And then he comes running up again, how long after it was, another plane that's trashed into the other World Trade Centre.
And people, I didn't know what the World Trade Centre was.
I couldn't even visualise what it was.
And then we put the radio on upstairs, and all you could hear was the radio broadcaster saying, it's so hard to put this into words.
I didn't know how to put this into words.
Yeah.
It was kind of his job, really, because it was radio.
And so, yeah, that was it.
And then the next day, when I got back to the office, the guy that had come running upstairs and were excited about it had bought a copy of every single newspaper because he thought this was, like, the biggest thing ever in his lifetime.
And he wanted to...
There was no internet, so no belief that you'd one day be able to find all this online.
that was not understood.
And so, yeah, he bought one copy of every single newspaper and he was terribly excited about it.
Yeah, I was actually in New York for 9-11.
I wasn't involved directly in any way, but I guess everyone was touched by it.
But I was actually working at this internship in Brooklyn, and I was living in Park Slope, which is a...
Very nice kind of bougie part of Brooklyn.
But I would walk to work, and it was about a 45-minute to hour walk, and I would just get a good exercise in before that.
And I was walking down 7th Avenue, and I remember people started parking their car and then opening the door and turning on the radio.
And it was talk radio.
But it was almost like they, again, it was pre-smartphone, so it was kind of like...
You guys have got to hear this.
And they talked about a plane hitting the towers.
And I was just thinking, oh, that must have been some commuter plane that got into some accident or pilot error or something.
Yeah, I was just kind of like, oh, this is odd.
And as I kept walking down 7th Avenue, the tension just in the air was rising.
And I began to kind of sense that something was happening.
And again, you hear a lot of people, they were coming out of shops aghast, and you have people blaring their radios.
It was this weird communal thing.
And then I turned onto Atlantic Avenue, where you can directly see the towers.
And I'll never forget it.
This black lady came up to me, and she just grabbed me.
And she says, they've got the towers.
They've got Washington.
We're at war.
She was holding my hands, and then she left.
And yeah, I mean, I was kind of like, holy shit.
And then at that point, I could actually view the towers, and they were a smoking mess, but they had not fallen yet.
And then I went to work, and everyone was kind of in this zombie-like state of working while...
Being totally discombobulated and having their mind on other things.
So a bit like that, they were having smartphones and the internet.
A bit like that.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Where they're looking at the laptop.
Yeah.
But again, it was a crazy time.
The anthrax craze was going on.
I just assumed that there would just be mass panic and rioting going on.
And in some ways, I was overjoyed to find that things were actually pretty regular.
People got out of the city.
There were people who walked from the tip of Manhattan, the north, down to the south.
It was just Well, I've done that.
I've walked the right length of my apartment.
It's actually a good walk.
Everyone should do it.
It's a good way to see the city.
Go up to Honduras Street.
Going to the Grand Canyon, which is very boring.
Because there's stuff going on.
People and life.
Yeah.
But anyway, it was remarkable.
I think I mentioned this on the last podcast, but I remember seeing things that there would be like hipsters.
So this was in, say, Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I was spending most of my time.
Certainly, I wasn't going into Manhattan after this disaster.
And there would be hipsters doing candlelight vigils.
And I can just remember them.
So these were young people in their 20s.
They were my age.
And they had candles in plates.
They would stuck through the paper plate to catch the wax.
And they were holding American flags.
And they were lighting vigils.
And it was just this overwhelming sense of communal mourning and unity, even among people.
I mean, I think it's something that I don't think is even possible at this point.
You saw a little bit of it with the death of Steve Jobs, I guess, but that was almost like a parody of what this was.
But I don't think there was anything where...
People were unified behind one cause in a completely unironic manner and in a completely non-polemicized manner.
You get it.
Like when Diana died in Britain.
Yeah, exactly.
If someone that everyone likes dies, you get unity.
Or if you're at war, if you're under attack.
Then political, you know, you get unity.
A lot of civil wars that happened before World War II in Europe were solved.
The damage was lessened by World War II because it united the people.
So it's, yeah, it would take something like that to do it.
But the hideous thing now, as we go into this...
What I see, I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable.
On every single marker, we're going into the winter of American civilization.
Plus, you have other markers as well, such as the decrepit silly person that's put in charge.
You've got that in the winter of Rome, you know, Nero and Caligula and other nutty people in charge of Rome, mad people in charge.
You've got the Soviet Union with a succession of elderly secretaries of the Communist Party.
That's where I think we are.
I think Biden is a kind of out-of-touch elderly person, but someone who is facing reality in a way that...
I mean, he did this at the end of the day.
He withdrew from Afghanistan knowing that fewer things are now possible and that this is humiliating.
And what I see, interestingly, among a lot of conservatives in this reaction to it is a certain kind of 9-11 nostalgia that, although they don't exactly couch it in those terms, But either this kind of rage about, let's just go bomb the hell out of Afghanistan, or we've left people behind, we need to go just...
Or, why are we leaving right now?
Why couldn't we have just extended it?
This just kind of delusional procrastination of not really wanting to leave, recognizing that leaving is...
An admission of failure.
It's cognitive dissonance of the highest order because they have to accept what you're leaving because you have to leave because you can't do this anymore and there isn't the will to do it.
And so you can't, just can't do it.
And so this is diminishing.
For America's place in the world in a very obvious way.
And you could just about cope with it when there was the evacuation of Saigon in 75, something like that.
You could just about cope with it then because that was around the time when you were also doing other brilliant things like going to the moon, which you'd done only a couple of years earlier, 72 was the last time you went to the moon, or all these other things which showed you you were going somewhere.
So this could be portrayed as a blip in an otherwise forward movement of progress and success.
But this is worse because this happens in a context of decline, of obvious decline of the presence of European people in America, of two years of rioting and disorder and whatever, of four or five years of intense polarisation within the country and so on.
And then you get...
The election of this dodgy, seriously dodgy president and his neo-Marxist government.
And then this.
And so it can't be dismissed in the way that you could Nixon having to resign or the evacuation of Saigon.
It's more congruous with the narrative whereby it's just general decline, whereby America's day in the sun is...
America is being taken over.
America basically has a president who is a white American who has collaborated with foreigners, whatever you want to call them, new Americans, non-white Americans, to get into power.
That's how he's got into power.
He's collaborated with outsiders.
To a degree.
Remember, Hillary Clinton won a higher percentage of the Hispanic vote and a higher percentage of the African-American vote.
But there's no question that Biden is kind of keeping at bay certain woke forces and kind of...
Humoring them and so on.
While I don't think anyone thinks that he himself is really captured by them.
I think, again, the comparison I would make is Brezhnev.
It's just this person who's in some ways a realist, but who is just a kind of geriatric overseer of Of a corporation that's clearly seen its best days.
Yeah, impossibly so.
Although Gorbachev, you could argue that he kind of inspired people and made them feel positive again.
He was quite young at the time.
He was more like an Obama.
The parallels don't quite work.
But yeah, that is seemingly...
We had a Gorbachev and then we elected a Brezhnev.
Yeah, okay, you had a Warbushchev, then you elected a Kershnev, and now you have a Cherenenko or an Amitok.
Yeah.
And so after that, it's curtains.
But I think, I don't see how there's any coming...
It's just so humiliating.
He's lost the goodwill, even of a lot of the left-wing, well, most of the newspapers are left-wing, but even a lot of the left-wing newspapers in America just can't leave us.
And so he's lost all authority.
Not that he had that much authority to begin with.
He only had that authority because he was put up on a pedestal by the left and they wouldn't treat him fairly.
They wouldn't critically investigate what his son was doing and the laptop and all the other stuff.
They gave him such an easy ride to make sure he won.
And so I don't know what...
I mean, is there really going to be three more years of this doddering geriatric just hanging around with him sort of in charge, sort of not?
Well, I think there might be seven more years of it because I don't know what else is quite tolerable.
I mean, after Biden leaves office, I mean...
And all of these geriatric people.
Nancy Pelosi is in her 80s.
Chuck Schumer is in his 70s.
Biden is 80. We have this old generation of Democrat.
And after that, once there are millennials in charge, it's going to be very different and very nasty.
I don't understand.
You don't get this in Britain or lots of other countries.
Why is it that America has geriatric leadership?
Is there really nobody younger?
Is it just your system that did it?
Because it's mainly old people that vote in primaries, and so that's why he put in as a candidate?
I think that has a lot to do with it.
I think on some poetic level, it expresses the kind of age of the empire.
And Obama felt very young.
I mean, he just turned 60, but he felt like a guy in his 30s.
He was a kind of Gen X icon.
And I think there was a kind of, I don't know, there was an anti-war, a very strong anti-war push with the Obama campaign.
And I think there was a kind of like sense, I don't know, maybe an Indian summer, you could say, just kind of a sense of rebirth or just something new.
He's going to shake things up.
And I think people don't even bother pretending that they want that anymore.
Yeah, I don't want to really depress everyone.
There was something reasonable about Obama.
As a foreigner, Obama seemed like a reasonable kind of guy.
I remember there was this debate between him and John McCain.
He was asked...
What do you think about abortion?
Should abortion be legal?
And he said, well, this is a difficult question.
Obviously, there's a lot of issues we have to...
That's what an intelligent person says.
Yeah, he always...
He was thoughtful.
McCain, when does life begin?
McCain just goes, at the moment of conception.
And you're like, right, okay, shut up.
So there was something reassuring about that.
And now it's just gone.
Yeah.
There was an article that was published by Anne Widdicombe, who used to be the shadow cabinet minister in the UK, and she just said, do we have anyone now in charge of the Western world?
The answer is no.
There's no clear person that's in charge.
Who would aliens negotiate with?
This is one thing that I've been thinking about.
I can remember the Cold War, and I can remember this out and in concept where the world was divided pretty starkly between communism and Americanism or freedom or whatever.
And you could be out of some place and you could be in some place else.
And in 1989, where there was this crisis of confidence in East Germany, and a bureaucrat at a press conference just basically said, Yeah, I guess you can cross over to West Germany.
We won't stop you.
I mean, it was a bizarre, miraculous moment.
And that just led to a flood.
And it was, again, it was a lack of legitimacy.
He said, when will we be able to go through Brandenburg Gate?
And he didn't know.
And he was under pressure.
He just went, immediately, I think.
Right.
It was almost like there was this pent-up...
There was a pent-up urge, and then there was also a pent-up lack of legitimacy.
And when someone fails at a crucial moment, it just all breaks.
And it's kind of interesting.
I did this experiment with my daughter where you super freeze water, so you get pure water and you get it really cold.
And you actually get the water below...
Zero degrees Celsius.
And then you slowly take it out of the freezer and then you smash it or you hit it.
And so you create a little impurity and then the whole bottle freezes.
It's a kind of fun experiment.
You should try it at home, guys.
You should watch my new podcast, Mr. Wizard.
But I feel like that's how politics works.
Something is below freezing.
But you don't know it's frozen yet.
It doesn't know it's frozen yet itself.
And then you kind of remind it, and it goes...
And that was what happened in 1989.
And so there was a lack of legitimacy, but there was something that you could go to.
So there was a dominant paradigm that was also existing.
So there was this battle for the soul of the world between America and Marxism.
And then when Marxism lacked legitimacy and failed and was just viewed as just hopelessly behind and backward, there was something to go to.
So you could say, okay, now Russia needs to denationalize, privatize, and enter the West, and so on.
And obviously these things never happened perfectly.
That is more or less what happened.
It entered the capitalist world.
I feel like at this point where we are in the late American Empire, there's no other in a way.
There's no out.
You could argue that Eastern Europe is kind of culturally an other.
Maybe.
The Islamic world certainly is to the extent that you have cases of people literally defecting to it.
So that's definitely an other, although it's a small other.
But not as just opening.
When communism fell, there was a kind of open embrace of enter the new world with us.
We're the big kahuna.
Now, yes, Islam is another.
Eastern Europe is another to a degree, although that's all part of the American sphere.
But I don't know.
There's no system that you now go to.
I think we're kind of flying blind, and no one knows what's around the corner.
There was a long time before communism where there was no system that you could go to, or at least if there was, the perception was that what treason was to the West was to turn more.
And you have these people that would be taken as slaves in the 17th century by corsairs, and the one thing they didn't want to do was become Muslim, to be circumcised, because that was considered kind of just this unspeakable treason against Christianity.
So I suppose you did have a period where it was Christianity v.
Islam, and sort of a period where it was Catholicism v.
Protestantism.
But then various periods where there's no clear divide like that for a very, very long time, up until World War I and the creation of the Soviet Union.
And certainly World War II, because then off it goes.
So yeah, there's nowhere now...
I mean, the nearest thing I could think of would be...
Throwing your lot in with, as I say, the more robust aspects of Eastern Europe, like Hungary and Poland and Russia.
And they have a different way of looking at things.
And that may become more stark as time goes on.
I suppose China is not a possibility because of the cultural differences or whatever.
You do get cases occasionally of South Koreans.
That's America's influence affecting North Korea.
That can't happen, but again, that's...
A tiny little enclave of communism.
But you know, what is...
There was this fascination with Hungary recently in America with Tucker, but what is that exactly?
Except I want to have a little homogenous country.
There's nothing...
I don't know.
I don't find anything mildly inspiring about...
Hungary or Viktor Orban.
It's just kind of declining more slowly.
And a place like Poland is just clearly within the American orbit.
Hungary maybe a little bit less so.
So I do agree that there's a kind of yearning for that.
But it seems to kind of lack something.
Don't we need to battle for the soul of the world?
Who's going to be history itself and who's going to be in the dustbin?
These are the kinds of things that inspire people.
I think only Islam has the possibility of...
They've seen other countries do that and they don't want that.
They want their own little patch of their own little quiet country where everyone gets on with each other and it's homogenous and they're left alone.
They kind of want like Bhutan.
Bhutan!
But in Eastern Europe or Central Europe, that's, I think, what they have in mind.
They don't want to.
They're not like British people or Americans or French.
They've never been like that, the Eastern Europeans.
Russians have, but not the other Eastern European countries.
They just want their own little ethno-state.
I agree, but Russians, however they are now, they at least had a sense of destiny.
Throughout the 20th century, Americans had that sense of destiny.
Obviously, Germans did.
French or maybe outdo everyone to some degree.
But have we kind of lost that impulse?
Because is there nothing else there?
I think so.
I mean, I think in theory, you could do things like, you could, in theory, not that now, but probably 20 years ago, we were less stupid.
Perhaps you could have gone to Mars, or you could have gone back to the Moon, or you could have gone to Venus.
Well, you couldn't land on Venus, but you could have floated above Venus.
Just to do it.
Just to show that you can do this amazing thing.
But now we're not going to do these things now.
So if there was a time machine ever invented in the future, people wouldn't come back by now.
So obviously it hasn't been disappointing.
So no, I think the light will move elsewhere and what's happening in America, unless this is a complete aberration or something, is a sign of that.
I think the next thing is the breakup of America.
And I was saying this to you a year ago or so, the breakup of America, and you laughed in my face and said, stupid, that will never happen.
But I think it certainly could do.
If you've got people that hate each other this much, and you've got this complete lack of a sense of unity and this complete lack of a sense of togetherness and wanting the same thing, which is what inspired America to break away from Britain in the first place, a sense of American-ness.
then it will come apart.
It will lead people to create new policies, and that's what I think they're going to do.
And it would be interesting to watch that.
Yeah, I just think secession is pretty fantastical.
America still is a dominant power, a planetary power.
I mean, Afghanistan notwithstanding, it remains a planetary dominant financial power.
The idea that that kind of entity would just allow its...
Rump state to start falling apart.
I mean, I think it's in a way more likely that we'd experience some kind of collapse scenario than we'd experience like a velvet divorce or something.
No, it wouldn't be a velvet divorce.
No, it's not going to be nice.
But that's what the Soviet Union was exactly the same.
Soviet Union.
They all just gradually started with the Baltic states that were peripheral and that were quite culturally different because they weren't Slavic or whatever.
They just all sort of broke away.
And there was a leader that just didn't, they just didn't, how they just couldn't, people just couldn't be bothered anymore.
And I wonder if somebody was to declare the independence of starting off with some small American redneck state, whatever I know that nobody cares about, what would they do?
Are they really going to send in the US Army?
I think they would.
Look, when I was out in eastern Montana this summer, we drove by nuclear silos.
The idea that, I mean, if you want a backwater state, I mean, I obviously love Montana, but if you want to almost come up with a caricature of a backwater state, it would be Montana.
And there are massive nuclear facilities stationed out here.
So the idea that Washington would just be like, go on your merry way.
Good luck to you all.
I mean, I just don't buy it.
I absolutely don't.
What if Alaska did?
What if that group?
Would they care then?
Huge oil resources.
Is there any way that they wouldn't care?
It doesn't have huge oil resources.
Well, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, it's hard to think of one.
Actually, because there is so much of strategic value that you don't want to give up.
And places like, I think in some ways, and I said this earlier, I think there's going to be this battle of what is an American.
There's this kind of weird way where the places that are getting more and more dissociated from the new America are the ones that are the most hyper patriotic.
So Texas...
It's almost like the America within America.
Or you could say that maybe about Alabama.
You have the highest levels of patriotism, the highest levels of military participation.
Oh, well, that's when you get it.
You get that with the Amish.
So you get people that are breaking away from the Amish and setting up new Amish communities because the old ones aren't Amish enough.
They're like hyper-Amish.
They're like setting up new communities in Mexico where you're not allowed to have clocks or whatever.
So, you know, maybe Texas wouldn't let go there without the real America.
That's what it says to themselves.
I don't know.
But I don't think it's likely to hold together.
I think Britain's likely to hold together.
Because all these other things that are assigned to the end of empire that we've got, one of the things is smaller policies.
That's always what happens.
It always happens like that.
But Britain, at one point, the Roman Empire was literally ruled from Britain.
Yeah.
And Britain, with the exception of Scotland.
It was a unified place within a few hundred years.
It was about 20 different Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
Yeah.
Well, we'll see.
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