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Oct. 5, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
40:58
The Right Stuff

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comReal Euro Hours returns for a fascinating conversation, covering The Right Stuff dating app and the “eugenics” of polarization, as well as a discussion of the war in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s “One Snuggle” ideology.

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Have you guys seen or heard of this new dating website called The Right Stuff?
I saw a tweet about it, but I haven't really gotten into that.
Only thing that kind of reminds me that they might have some copyright problems with one particular podcast.
Maybe.
It is interesting because it's like, you know, The Right Stuff.
Podcasters, when they say the right stuff, what do you think they're referring to?
I mean, it seems like this is all right-wing stuff, you know, like a smorgasbord of the far right.
That seems to be the connotation.
Maybe I'm wrong.
But The Right Stuff is a famous book by Tom Wolfe.
Yeah, in the movie, too.
One of my favorites, actually.
Yeah.
And it's so, it has a, it does have a kind of eugenic connotation.
And I'm sure the phrase, the right stuff, long predates that book.
I'm all positive of that.
But it, you know, it does have a kind of eugenic quality to it.
Like, are you the type of person?
Who can fly a plane past the sound barrier?
Are you the kind of person who could walk on the moon?
Are you smart enough?
Are you athletic enough?
Do you have lung capacity and bravery and all sorts of things?
Do you have the right stuff?
So it does have a kind of eugenic component.
And I think, you know, the curious thing about dating sites is that there is a eugenic quality to them.
And, you know, and I'm not saying that.
There isn't also a, maybe not dysgenic, but just radically degenerate quality to online dating.
I mean, I think this was always present to a degree because they've always had websites that are basically hookup websites.
I remember on, I don't know if people still use Craigslist at this point, but I remember on Craigslist, which, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, Was really actively used for all sorts of things, for finding a roommate, for giving away old furniture, for maybe even buying a used car and all sorts of things.
And then there was also this, like, there was one section which I think was highly romantic.
And it was, like, missed...
I forgot what it was called.
It was, like, missed opportunities or, like...
Something like that.
And it would be people who would offer these, you know, very soul-wrenching and, you know, titles of like, you know, I saw you on the subway, you know, just south of 42nd Street.
Like, we made eye contact and you left the train.
Like, please contact me.
But then there was also one in there called Casual Encounters, which was basically like the most crude thing you could imagine.
You know, hey, I'm up for a fuck.
Why don't you come over?
I mean, literally that, you know, squalid.
And so I think this whole aspect of, like, hookup culture is a long-range thing.
Obviously, there's nothing new under the sun.
People are fallen creatures.
And so a lot of tender is just that.
The 80-20 rule, in effect, where if you're tall and cool and handsome and whatever, there probably are plenty of girls.
If you're in a big city, there probably are just plenty of girls that you can just contact and hook up with.
And this is possibly eugenic, you could say, in the sense that The 80-20 rule is in effect.
So basically, or it might not even be 80-20, it might be 98-2.
So the top guys are getting all the girls.
And, you know, 80% of the guys, maybe even 98% of the guys are getting nothing.
It's almost like a version of polygamy that has been reinstituted into the world through these dating apps.
And, you know, that's interesting.
You know, the hookup culture is possibly kind of eugenic, although I seriously doubt it.
There's probably a lot of contraception and abortion going on.
It's probably just generally bad.
But that's not all that Tinder or Bumble are.
And there are lots of other sites like this.
I mean, it is about selection.
And even though it is geographically based to some extent, It is about a kind of selection process going on that happens at first glance, because it's a swipe thing.
But it's not just based on geography or location, although it is based on that to some extent.
And I think there's something fascinating occurring in the world now that we're 20 years into online dating.
In the sense that traditionally you would marry your high school sweetheart.
I would imagine the workplace was a location where you would frequently meet your mate.
Certainly your town or city.
Meeting people at bars was a classic thing.
That's why people went to these things in the first place, not just to drink.
And that's being changed.
And so there were some of these sites that came up originally, like Match.com and OkCupid and even eHarmony.
There was this kind of eugenic quality to them in the sense that...
You would list your education, and you still do that on Tinder.
You list your college, which is, particularly in the United States, a real sign of something.
Or your employer.
I work at this big corporation that everyone's heard of, so I'm climbing the ladder, and I have my shit together, and so on.
And so we're increasingly meeting people in that way and not just purely due to the accident of birth and in the sense of geography.
I think college was huge in this as well.
So many people would marry someone, not just their high school sweetheart, but someone they met at college.
So they met them.
As they were kind of coming into their own, becoming an adult, thinking about what they want to do in the world, and so on.
Bill and Hillary Clinton, for instance, met at Yale.
I believe they met at Yale Law School.
That is significant.
You have two very ambitious people from different parts of the country finding each other in mutual ambition, most likely.
And it ultimately does change who we are.
As a race.
And I think even tender, although I, of course, admit that it's most, you know, 60% about debauchery, even tender is part of that process.
You're not settling anymore, and you're not having a match made by, say, your aunt or grandmother.
You're actually choosing people, and so much of it is just going purely on, like, immediate data.
How tall are you?
Where did you go to college?
What corporation do you work for?
Are you handsome or beautiful?
You're making a kind of instant decision based on, like, three data points.
But you're making that decision, and I do think that it is changing who we are going to become for better and for worse.
The incel phenomenon is changing who will be born and, in other ways, who will be selected in the future.
So when these incels whine about, like, you know, women should be barefoot in the kitchen or even more so, they should be put into cages or whatever the hell they talk about, they have a genuine lament in the sense that You know,
universal middle-class monogamy enforced through peer pressure, you know, if you were a single mother 60 years ago, that might be really detrimental to your life and career.
I mean, you'd be shunned in many cases.
Maybe not in a big city, but certainly in most small towns.
So this universally enforced monogamy was It's socially constructed and it is political even.
It's certainly constructed through tax incentives and some other things.
But it was a social contract that ultimately was highly beneficial for people who aren't that great.
Even if you are a bit of a loser or you're ugly or...
You're not terribly bright.
You still get a piece of the pie.
In other words, you'll still have a woman that you can regularly have sex with.
You can have children.
She'll help out and so on.
It was a kind of social bargain that was ultimately egalitarian and was...
And, you know, a lot of people say, and I've heard this of like, you know, as nature decided, you know, man and woman, because we have been, generally speaking, an even number of men and women.
Well, that's not exactly true.
And there's some interesting exceptions to that rule.
But the law of nature, which should be distinguished from so-called natural law, which is a...
Fundamentally Christian, or I guess platonic on some level concept, is not that one man gets one woman and it's all even, more or less.
The law of nature is that 90% of the population doesn't reproduce.
And two, maybe 25% of the men get all of the women.
And it is...
Hotly eugenic in the sense that it is brutal.
And once men fight to demonstrate strength and genetic inheritance, they grow antlers, they grow peacock's tails, they rams slam into each other.
And this has been going on since the age of the dinosaurs.
And so the law of nature is not really about monogamy.
Monogamy is socially constructed.
It does bring a level of fairness to society.
And it lets everyone kind of be invested in it.
But I guess what I would say from my standpoint is that this is, we are moving away from this due to a number of factors of sexual revolution.
Technology.
I mean, I'm kind of, what spurred me to talk about this was this data gap.
And a whole host of other factors.
We are moving away from it.
And, you know, it's, I think we, many conservatives can rightly lament the decline of this or call for greater monogamy or greater religiosity or so on.
But that is a bit like trying to empty the ocean with a thumbball.
You're going to be overwhelmed by these bigger factors.
So I think it might be more useful to look at, you know, what is really happening in this?
Is there a kind of silver lining to what is occurring?
Might there be a kind of brutal eugenic quality that reenters the world due to all these things?
And I do think the answer is yes.
And so I'm trying to be value neutral on this matter.
I understand why this stuff is pretty heinous.
And I understand the pain of the incel on some level.
But it is what it is.
In terms of the right stuff, it also is not entirely new in terms of a conservative-focused...
I've heard of Christian Mingle, and I've never been on there, not surprisingly, I guess, but I think that was very popular.
And no, that wasn't politically based.
It wasn't, we're right wing.
It probably had that quality to it.
I don't think I'm wrong to suggest that 80% of the people on there.
We're Republicans.
And I think it was also highly evangelical.
Also, there was a time, I remember about 20 years ago, when Bill Regnery, in one of his many projects that he throws out there and then doesn't fund, had this idea of white date or something like that.
And it was dead in the water, and I think mostly because no one actually put money behind this.
The Right Stuff apparently has a million or two from Peter Thiel.
I'm sure there are other people like Thiel who have thrown into this.
They might just simply do, I mean, a million dollars doesn't mean much to Thiel.
I think they might do it just to kind of, you know, stay in the conservative good graces.
They might actually have a kind of ulterior, deeper motive to this, and I think it's interesting.
To look into that.
But it's not entirely new, although it is fairly new in the sense of it's strictly conservative or right-wing.
It does have a kind of overwhelmingly white quality.
Can you guys see the pictures I'm putting up there?
I'm sharing them with you.
Yeah, I can see that.
Yeah, in the opening, when you...
So I downloaded the app.
I'm not on it.
Because it's invite only.
I think they're doing this specifically because they're building up the site and they don't want to be overwhelmed with guests.
They also probably imagine as well that some asshole leftists are going to try to do a DDoS attack or something like that.
They're kind of doing invite-only, so I have not been invited.
And no one I know is on there.
But anyway, it was remarkably white in terms of the opening little video that they had.
I actually don't think there was an exception.
They did do another promotional video.
That I think a lot of the dissident right incels are reacting to because there's a girl who's kind of, you know, the funny fat chick wearing a leopard skin shirt showing off her cleavage who says she loves alpha males and so on.
And they were reacting to this in the way that they do.
You know, back to the cage with you, woman, which I think is actually very stupid.
Anyway, it is interesting.
There's just some, like, little, like, I don't know.
There's a kind of subtle implied quality to a lot of this.
So what sex are you?
They're too sexist.
And then when you actually click on it, it says this can't be changed later.
So you cannot change your sex.
Maybe even the fact that they use the word sex is interesting as well.
Anyway, these are just little things.
How tall are you?
I did fill out a profile, but I'm not on because I've not been invited.
What are your ideal plans for children?
Want kids?
Open to kids.
I have kids.
Not sure yet.
Kind of interesting.
It does seem to have a little bit of a fertility bent.
There's no option for I don't want kids.
On Tinder, there is.
Your religious beliefs, I found this particularly interesting.
So what are your religious beliefs?
And I guess these are, yeah, these are in alphabetical order.
So Buddhist, Catholic, Christian.
Are they implying that Catholics aren't Christians?
Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, spiritual, non-practicing.
So there is no option for atheists.
Obviously, atheism is highly correlated with being liberal, but it's certainly not the case that all atheists are liberal.
There are actually many atheists that are pretty right-wing, in fact, and they're vocal about it.
But anyway, it's just interesting that I guess spiritual is the Most hippy-dippy thing that you can be.
And non-practicing, I guess that means you're kind of elapsed, but there is no atheist.
Then the rest of it are pretty normal things, like your date, and then date of birth, that is.
And then you fill out a profile that looks exactly like Tinder.
Again, I'm not on it, but I assume that it is...
A swipe app.
I assume they're just reproducing the technology.
So they're kind of reinventing the wheel.
It does beg the question of, why are you doing this?
In the sense that you can have a tender profile that says, you know, MAGA forever, no liberals allowed, or whatever.
Or you could have a tender profile that says, you know, Biden 2024, no Trumpers.
Like, that's very easy, and that's an easy way of selecting.
I know they're not going to kick you off the site for that.
Tinder has banned a lot of conservatives I've seen.
But it's just interesting in terms of what to make of this.
On one hand, hey, Zeus, stop.
Come here, Zeus.
Sorry, my dog is doing his usual barking to enter the conversation.
He's mad about this.
You could say that...
This is just simply reinventing the wheel.
They've come up with another dating site for conservatives, and they're going to try to make money off it.
And this will be a lot like Truth Social.
It will have its fans, but kind of putter out.
It's better to have an all-encompassing platform than to have a niche platform.
Gab, whatever you want to say about it, I was actually fairly, or really, in fact.
I was sympathetic and enthusiastic about Gab in 2016 or 17 when it was first launched because there were these waves of deplatforming from Twitter, including myself, for a month right after Trump won the election.
And I was thinking, wow, you know, they're going to offer this free speech play, so there's always some place to go.
I thought it was a very good thing.
Very shortly after that, I...
Did not like the site.
I stopped using it.
I actually deleted my account at one point.
And it just became a cesspool and hive of right-wing crankery.
And it was most notable for someone who attacked a temple, a Jewish temple, a synagogue, for...
Announcing his plans on the platform.
It's just awful.
And then Andrew Torba is a maniac, Christian nationalist type.
And a very uninteresting one, I would add.
But you want to be on a platform where you can possibly interact with everyone and speak your mind.
I mean, this is why I...
We actually want there to be monopolies, in fact, in platforming.
I don't buy any of this.
We need to tear it all down and let a thousand flowers bloom.
I think it's much better for there to be one central monopoly for the world so that you are playing in their garden.
You're playing on their ball field.
Whatever metaphor you want, you are speaking to the world and you're not just in this weird echo chamber.
And, you know, kind of barnyard for malcontents.
And there are obviously a whole ton of bad incentives to being in an echo chamber.
It turns you into the worst version of yourself.
I guarantee it.
It's good to have some feedback and to basically, you know, tweet as if you were talking to the world and not just some crazy lunatics.
But where was I going with this?
Oh, so on some level, the conservatives are doing, this is true social, or getter, or gab, or whatever.
They're just reinventing the wheel, but not doing it as well.
And showing no creativity, just simply trying to find a niche.
It's almost as if they want to say, oh, this is not Coca-Cola.
You know, this is Cola Coke only for conservatives.
It has the exact same ingredients, but, you know, this is made for you.
This is the right stuff.
It's just ridiculous on some level.
It shows no entrepreneurial creativity whatsoever.
It's simply a way to kind of cash in on a niche.
And true social, from what I understand, is failing.
Getter goes nowhere.
It's technology that was created by that very strange Chinese expat.
Anyway, but might there be something kind of deeper going on here beyond the superficial qualities?
Well, I would ask, what would be the main drawing point of this app?
Because for Truth Social...
It's, of course, the presence of Donald Trump there.
That's where people go to read his truths or his tweets.
It's not like you have Ivanka or Trump's other daughter on this app that you might have a chance to meet her through this app.
Well, I've heard the rumor that you're dating Tiffany.
It's just a rumor at this point, so I can't confirm.
But I will repeat it.
Can it be just another sort of a cash grab by the conservative movement?
Or does this really play into the polarization in America?
Because there needs to be a separate platform for conservatives about anything.
They need to have their own Twitter.
That's like true social.
Now they have their own Tinder.
Maybe they'll have their own streaming service.
Ben Shapiro has his movie production company or something like that.
I think it's just sort of plays into this trend of polarization.
But then again, I've never really found that dating could be politicized in this way.
I have friends who are on Tinder who are, let's say, right-wing leaning.
They don't have a problem dating a leftist chick.
Yeah.
Don't you want to date a leftist chick?
And they're even in serious, serious relationships with people that have different political opinions.
But I think it's just...
And I looked at that promotional video.
I don't really...
That's a matter of taste, I think.
But I don't really find that type of women who are in that ad attractive.
They sort of look like this Kellyanne Conway or that type of woman.
Yeah.
They look really boring.
Maybe stupid, too.
But I don't know.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I was not...
All of those women there, I was not...
Excited to meet, with maybe the exception of the fat chick, you know, after 11 at the local bar.
Oh, yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, where I'm going with this in terms of depth is, you know, polarization occurs across the Western world.
It is hyper...
We are hyper-polarized in the United States, but, I mean, you could probably attest, I mean, there...
Even in a country like Finland, I would imagine there's a kind of creeping polarization that isn't as powerful as it is here due to the obvious reasons.
But it's there.
This seems to be the broad direction where we are going as a society, as a race.
There's some interesting polling data that I think I've mentioned on other calls.
Previously, and Pew Research has asked this question, and it's very interesting, it's a very controversial question, but like, what would you think if your daughter married or was dating someone of another race, or your son?
And you would get very strong reactions throughout the 20th century.
And by the 1990s, those reactions were lessening.
Now, of course, you know, it's important to remember what someone says to a pollster is not necessarily what they believe.
And so there's a kind of another level of that.
You could also say that by the 1990s, fewer people were willing to acknowledge a sort of tribalism.
And they might, you know, what they actually feel on the inside is another question.
But it's kind of like the polling question from 15 years ago of, do you think America is ready for a black president?
So it was about other people and not you.
And people supposedly would answer more honestly about their own preference.
You know, I just don't think other people are ready for Barack Obama.
You know, I mean, me, of course.
You know, I'm purely egalitarian.
But other people, you know, it's a way of kind of ferreting out the truth through the question.
But anyway, basically, at this point, people are, as they express themselves, they are much more worried about their daughter dating someone of another political party than they are their daughter dating someone of another race.
And this is particularly intense among conservatives, and I would imagine that it's particularly intense among conservative men.
Right-wing MAGA types, you know, if you bring home a Black guy with a red cap and who's, you know, votes for DeSantis or whatever, he's A-OK.
But, you know, don't you dare bring in some Yale graduate who's liberal and loosey-goosey and reading Marx on the side.
You know, that's intolerable.
Now, again, whether that's really true or not is questionable, but that is how they express themselves.
And I actually think it is largely true.
And so what we're seeing is, like, polarization is so deep.
And something like the right stuff, to the degree that it's successful, it just continues this issue.
Polarization is so deep that it is affecting selection.
Conservatives are breeding with other conservatives and liberals are breeding with liberals.
And that will clearly affect where we are and going down the road.
So there's a kind of sifting process.
Again, I certainly don't think that someone's political ideology is purely genetic or something.
I do think that people are kind of prone to these things.
And it's probably around 50-50.
I think that's a reasonable guess.
That 50% is kind of environmental or due to chance.
And 50% is visceral or genetic.
So I read a lot of the left.
But, you know, it's hard for me to imagine myself in any circumstance.
Really kind of like going along with their stuff, you know, or being fighting for the rights of the poor in India or something.
It's just not my bag.
And there is a visceral, most likely genetic quality that breeds for conservatism.
There's also a question about this conservative dating app.
What would be the...
Sex or gender distribution, I would imagine that there would be more men who would be using this app and that the number of women would be lower.
And also the age, I would imagine that it's more tended towards older people, like maybe people who are over 30 or maybe in their 40s, something like that.
So I don't really think that it can be used as a platform for breeding in that case, to have this sort of...
I think that's probably true.
I'm not sure about the age.
I would be interested to know.
The other thing about this is that, you know, just that peer pressure is extremely important in these kinds of things.
And saying that you're, you know, if you announce yourself as evangelical Christian, in certain communities, that is absolutely a signal that will benefit you.
It means that you're kind of on the team.
You're not some weirdo or goth chick or something.
No, you're a good girl and men are going to tend towards you because...
Or a certain type of man as well.
Some men want the crazy chick or want danger and excitement or whatever.
I'm probably closer to those people.
But that's a way to find a good husband or someone.
Like if you're living in Alabama or something like that.
You're in New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles or even Dallas, Texas or Houston, Texas.
The social cost of announcing yourself as like, I'm a Trump fan, which at this point of time, the Right Stuff app definitely is.
That has a huge social cost.
Not that there aren't any Republicans working at law firms or something like that, but I guarantee you there are no, like, VAC skeptics and J6 apologizers who are announcing that publicly, who are getting hired at major law firms.
And because of the kind of social pressure, that's not a way to get invited to cocktail parties, to put it mildly.
And so these social pressures do...
They are different, geographically speaking.
But what is interesting over the past 10 to 20 years, and I think Trump just exacerbated this, is that there is a lower status implied, for whites at least, of being conservative.
You're not with it.
You're not part of the vanguard.
And you kind of see this across the board.
There has been this, like, it's the so-called great awokening where, you know, white liberals are more concerned about immigration than Hispanics or so on.
And so what I'm suggesting is that I don't think the Right Stuff app is causing any of this.
I think it's just kind of like an ephemeral thing that's riding the wave of this.
I do think that polarization will affect selection to a significant degree.
And I think we are really breeding ourselves into different races.
And when I knew Henry Harpending, Henry Harpending died about five years ago or so, but he was an evolutionary psychologist.
He wrote a book called The 10,000-Year Explosion.
He was suggesting this even a decade or more ago about a kind of New white race due to selective breeding in which we're going to almost have a kind of double humped bell curve.
And that two bell curves were almost a better representation of the populations than just averaging everything out into a bell curve.
That we're going to start seeing a kind of selection away from things where people, you know, smarter people.
Including midwits, but they have a way of knowing which way the wind is blowing.
There's probably some hyper-intelligent person who just doesn't care and some dumb person who doesn't care or who can't comprehend these things, but more intelligent whites are going to start signaling regarding their leftism.
They have been doing this.
And it is interesting.
I mean, I talk to liberals and when you talk to them and they're comfortable, they will, if they're like a reasonable person and intelligent and so on, they are actually really uncomfortable with a lot of the gender deconstruction stuff.
They're not really uncomfortable with homosexuality, but like, you know, girls engaging and...
Breast surgery to have a flat chest at age 17. This does actually kind of creep them out.
But they know that they have to signal in a certain way.
And it's a high-class, it's a high-status signaling.
And if you're not signaling that way, I think it really does indicate a kind of...
Lower intelligence.
Now, you might gain a lot of benefits from that in certain communities, but those certainly aren't the communities of academia, the professional class, etc.
And so I think this is kind of part of a general phenomenon, which is splitting the white race into different groups.
And at the very least, I think this is something like highly significant that we should think about.
So a lot of white nationalism or so on, it has this kind of vague notion of whites, you know, like the establishment's anti-white and we're sticking up for whites, our people, etc.
I fell into this.
But I think we should kind of...
I mean, obviously, I believe that on some level.
I do think that there is a coherent white race, or you could say Aryanism, Indo-European population group.
And I certainly recognize a tremendous amount of diversity.
But it is interesting that we do all speak an Indo-European language.
We are even...
Even if we're, we are connected genetically, and that can be studied in genetic clusters, but we are kind of connected through a common language and cognates.
And I think that is powerful.
I do think that there is, I think the word Aryan is a coherent concept and is real and important.
But, you know, in terms of just more pragmatic matters, we do seem to be kind of separating ourself off ideologically, genetically.
And it's happening not due to any geographic restriction.
And I believe that this will intensify in the future.
So when you say something like white, it really is questionable, like, what exactly you're referring to.
And maybe, I'm just suggesting this, I don't have evidence for this, and I'm not even sure about it myself, but maybe Teal, who did...
Add some money to this.
I generally don't agree with much of Thiel's thinking, to be honest, to the degree that I understand it.
But I think he's off on certain things.
But might he actually want to be encouraging this?
You know, I don't know how much he put into this, a million or two.
It's not a big deal for him.
He could be fine.
He could write it off as a loss and not bat an eye.
But, you know, a million dollars is a million dollars.
Or two million or three million, however much you put in.
And that is significant.
And it does seem like if you fund something to that type of tune, you care about it, you see something going on.
And I wonder if there are people who actually want to exacerbate this.
I personally don't want to exacerbate this.
I think it's actually problematic in many ways.
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