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Dec. 7, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
29:15
"Good Times"

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comJumping off from Nick Fuentes’s recent fame and infamy, Richard discusses the incel phenomenon and its potential impact on world history. Along the way, he rethinks the “Strong men create good times” meme; it will, in fact, be the self-described “strong men” who will tear down civilization.

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If you take out some things like having sex with women is gay or whatever, Nick speaks to the American public.
Not the American public.
American conservatives.
So a percentage of the American public.
And they agree with his stuff.
You know, even stuff like, we just need a Catholic dictatorship.
Now, most of them aren't going to agree with that.
And most of them are.
Protestant or evangelical or something like that.
But they kind of agree with the sentiment, actually.
So this isn't a majority of the population, but it's a very strong plurality of conservatives agree with them.
Now, I also agree that there's something, you know, like early Christian about claiming sex with women is gay, that this resembles Paul or even Taken to its limit, origin or something.
But, you know, and I think you could also say that there's some kind of, I don't know, like status of a particular kind of male in a particular situation that almost gave birth to that type of thinking.
So, you know, I think it's, yeah, I don't know.
Maybe I'm underestimating its appeal.
I don't think so.
I mean, any normal person wants to have sex with women.
So, I mean, I just, you know, they're going to not understand that kind of thing.
I think there is a peculiar kind of abstemious quality to the incel.
And it is funny how they are, they become almost like priests and they've adopted trad Catholicism.
It's very funny.
The whole thing.
It is kind of like history repeating, but as farce.
I mean, this gets to a bigger question.
I mean, what are the situations where you have excessive men who aren't valued and they go into a priestly-like posture?
Because that's the posture of a lot of the incel community.
And the Groypers, even.
During the Graper Wars, they were openly displaying rosary beads and all sorts of things.
They've taken a kind of priest-like posture.
And what they are obsessed with more than politics is hurting the flock.
What are they obsessed with most?
E-girls or Instagram thoughts or all this kind of stuff.
So I think there are particular situations that...
Where you have this male population that's getting screwed, figuratively speaking, and this is one direction that they take.
And it kind of is like the other side of the coin of being a porn fanatic, where you watch porn and play video games all day, and you just live in a kind of virtual reality of sexuality.
And the other side of the coin is that you kind of, like, embrace the resentment and kind of turn it into something holy.
That's at least what Nietzsche would have said looking upon the incel population.
And, of course, there's yet another option, which is to go nuts and go attack Chad's, Becky's, and Stacy's.
Like...
What's his name?
Andrew Rogers?
What's his name again?
Elliot Rogers, you mean?
Elliot Rogers, yes.
It's fascinating that he took a knife, which is a very sexualized way of killing people.
You're stabbing them.
And he went to a sorority or a fraternity and started attacking, violently attacking the people who were reproductively successful.
At least in his milieu.
So it's, you know, oh my god, the sorority chicks and some Chad football player that's banging three of them.
Like, he was violently attacking the people who were successful.
So he kind of fully embraced the nihilistic implications of the ideology.
There's something kind of interesting, though, with the use of these terms, like incel, where it's like...
And you've alluded to this point before with Nick.
It's like he's not necessarily involuntarily celibate because, as you've said before, anyone who has that level of notoriety can get some.
So at that point, it's just being voluntarily celibate if you are.
And it's kind of this conflation of like, it's sort of like the word gentleman.
It's like that word's really only appropriate if someone has other options than being genteel.
Right.
If you're just this skinny little twerp who's a nice guy, you're not a gentleman.
It's like you think you're moral because you were born without claws and teeth.
You're not moral.
You're just a little bird.
In a way, only the lion can be moral because he could actually refrain from killing the lamb.
Precisely.
To go back to the incel phenomenon, I do think the incel phenomenon is...
Hugely important.
You guys have probably encountered Roger Devlin's Sexual Utopia article, which it was actually published in the Occidental Quarterly almost 20 years ago now or so.
I don't know when that was published, maybe 2002?
I think he generally got it right.
It's that...
Women are naturally hypergamous.
So it's wrong to think of women as prudes.
They don't necessarily have less of a libido than a man does.
They just have a different libido.
And so women are naturally, they want to marry up.
They also recognize this difference where there's a kind of aggressive quality to male sexuality and there is a...
Sought after, or you could say passive, although maybe that's not the right way of thinking about it, quality to females.
And that goes as far as the fact that, sorry to be brutally scientific here, but the male sticks his penis into the woman's vagina.
He enters her.
He is the aggressor in this basic sexual act.
And so the woman understands herself as being sought after, and the man understands himself as going after someone.
And you can kind of see this in different ways.
Female beauty is a way to sell a product because it's an object of desire.
Now, yes, a male body can be an object of desire to some extent.
But we know that it's to a far, far less extent.
If you really want to sell a product, you put a beautiful woman there.
And even in women's magazines, they're looking at women.
So the woman is the object of desire.
The male is kind of the gaze.
The male doesn't exist.
And it is kind of interesting in pornography where very often the, well...
Always, I would say, the woman is in the center focus of the camera.
And she's usually her full body is shown.
Very often, you'll only see the male torso in the frame.
And so the male, in a way, is kind of like headless or doesn't exist.
So the male is like pure desire.
And the female is what is desired.
And this also goes to the fact that there's an asymmetry in sex cells.
So women have a kind of set number of sex cells for their entire life.
It's many fewer.
And they release this all-important sex cell once a month for their window of birthing.
Men more or less had infinite amount of sex cells.
And so there's just this fundamental asymmetry of men want to spread their seed.
Women understand themselves as the object of value, and it's like the best seed will find them.
So there is this fundamental asymmetry.
There's also something that's well noted and documented, which is that successful men are much more willing to have a so-called trophy wife or to kind of marry down.
It's not surprising when a successful man marries his secretary or marries some bimbo.
It just doesn't matter.
With a successful woman, a woman who's a high-powered lawyer or something like that, it's rather unusual for them to marry down.
And so monogamy is this way of kind of squaring the circle.
And it is squaring the circle.
It's taking an asymmetric situation and making it symmetrical.
And monogamy is absolutely a social construct.
It's not natural.
The natural way of doing things is for 10% or maybe even 5% of the males to actually reproduce.
And also, polygamy...
I'll put that in quotation marks, is also very natural.
Let's do the 80-20 rule just to keep things simple.
It's natural for 20% of the males to mate with 80% of the females.
So obviously, some are double dipping.
And we had monogamy as this social construct which squared the circle.
And that is now breaking down due to many different factors.
Due to sexual liberation, due to women in the workplace, due to the tenderization of dating, due to the asexuality, a kind of countervailing trend to rampant degeneracy, which is that, you know, millennials and Zoomers are lonely and don't have sex.
And so it's like we have...
Monogamy is being broken down.
Divorce rates are actually falling, interestingly, but that's just because marriage rates are falling, and in fact, just sexual activity is declining.
And one of the outcomes of this is going to be the incel.
And so it's a phenomenon that exists, and it's existed in previous ages.
You could even say it's a kind of natural way of being.
And so the question is, like, how are they going to react to this situation that wasn't present for them in previous times?
I think Fuentes-ism is a kind of expression of that and a way out.
So it's embracing nationalism and so on.
But I think it's very clear with Ye that all of this nationalism just kind of...
Withers away in the face of what they're really about, which is the assertion of Christianity.
And that's ultimately what's most important.
In fact, you could even say that a lot of these people were attracted to nationalism as a mission field for the promotion of Christianity.
You know, kind of where we're headed.
So I think on some level, like, you know, whether he actually is an incel or not is kind of immaterial.
He's reflecting and engaging with a very real thing.
And so you can kind of go in two directions from this state that you've been placed in.
You could play video games and watch porn all day.
And have a virtual reality sexuality and a virtual reality male aggression in all these video games where you're blowing away zombies or refighting World War II or whatever the hell you're doing.
Or entering the Tolkien-esque fantasy realm of the Middle Ages.
All these things.
They're very interesting.
Like, what is popular in gaming?
But it's all a substitute for real life.
And so...
You know, you could go in that direction, or you could probably go in a kind of shit-lib direction and just be some loser online who talks about Marvel movies and is saying, yes, queen, online.
You could do that.
Or you could kind of take the Christian route.
Or maybe I should say Abrahamic route, because I'm sure there are a lot of Muslims that respond to this.
And you could kind of embrace the resentment and try to transform that resentment through a kind of alchemy into something holy and higher.
And so you recognize the state you're in and you try to say, what this is really about is a holy mission that we're on to redeem the world.
And I think that's one out.
The other out, as I mentioned, is the Elliot Rogers out, where you embrace the resentment, but you also turn it into a kind of nihilism, and you go out and actively attack people who are sexually successful.
That is certainly one route.
I mean, this is the other theme that is worth talking about, where, like, isn't it interesting how all of these movements kind of end up?
As just Christianity at the end of them.
So, in 2015, Donald Trump really defined his campaign as immigration.
It's about the wall.
It's about protecting Americans from these criminals and rapists.
It's about not getting screwed over economically.
By Mexico or China or so on.
And that's how it started.
It was actually remarkably secular.
Trump never mentioned God in his announcement speech in 2015.
And he also, of all the things that he was politically incorrect about, homosexuality was actually not one.
He did not talk about gay marriage, which was controversial a mere five years before he ran.
Hotly controversial.
And it's almost become controversial again, interestingly, which kind of bolsters my point on this.
You now have Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh.
These are guys with millions of...
Viewers and so on.
They are now really going back to the gay marriage situation.
And they were just outright in opposition to the recent codification of gay marriage in Congress.
Interesting.
But anyway, it was remarkably secular.
Trump's campaign was remarkably secular.
And by the summer of 2016, things started to shift.
He went to Liberty University and gave a, maybe it was a commencement address, maybe it was just a big speech, and he said, you know, you might not like me, folks, but you've got to vote for me because of the judges.
You've got to vote for me, guys.
And that worked.
He also infamously was interviewed by Chris Matthews and asked about abortion.
He said, well, we're going to have to punish the woman.
And we want to outlaw abortion.
You know, we'll punish the doctor, we'll punish the woman.
He kind of had to think about it and say, well, yeah, we're going to have to punish the woman, too.
He felt that he had to go there to gain the Republicans' trust.
Mike Pence was put forth as another way of achieving that.
Mike Pence was only notable, really, due to his opposition to the bake-the-cake stuff.
And the Hobby Lobby stuff, I mean, that's where he came from.
You know, Trump went there, he pandered or tried to appeal to these people, but then they embraced him more than anyone else.
So, you know, if you look at various figures, like me, for instance, you know, I was off the Trump train, maybe the earliest, but I don't know.
And then, you know, Ann Coulter.
I don't really like Ann Coulter, to be honest.
And I think all she wants is DeSantis.
She just wants to go backwards and not forwards.
But regardless, she's way off the Trump train.
And the people who were off the Trump train at the beginning jumped on the Trump train.
And so Ben Shapiro became the, in many ways, face of the Trump movement.
At least in terms of the ideological online content.
And the people who remained absolutely devoted to him were the Christians.
And by 2020, you have Paula White, his spiritual advisor, whatever the hell she was, speaking in tongues on the eve of his election.
In your name, Father!
In your name!
You will destroy all enemies!
Destroy them!
I mean, it was wild as hell.
But on some level, like, all of that, I mean, look, the wall never really got built.
It got built to some degree.
Immigration was never truly reformed.
It's definitely true that there were some kind of draconian measures implemented by Sessions and company.
And COVID lessened immigration pretty substantially.
All of that's true, but there was never really any big solution to these issues offered by Trump.
And it's ultimately kind of gone by the wayside.
You don't hear people talk about the wall anymore, whatever.
And it's just become a religion.
The emergence of QAnon was probably, and I really hate it when I talk to some of these conservatives and they want to just deflect and deny and diminish the importance of this stuff.
I mean, QAnon was one of the most important social phenomena of my lifetime.
An online movement that motivated people to be fanatics, that is remarkable.
So it just emerged as this cult.
And you can kind of see this coming up later.
You know, as I've said, I think Trump needed to kind of like be radical again, be crazy again.
He's got to reignite the magic of 2015.
And he can't.
Maybe he's just played out.
Maybe he's just taken too many shots at this point that he's...
On the mat, dazed and confused, he can't get up.
That's possibly, probably true.
No one's even talking about Trump at this point.
And so you get this yay-ism, which waves the flag and evokes Americana, but is ultimately just Christianity.
And, you know, again, I listened to a lot of the Gavin McGinnis thing.
I should probably listen to the whole thing.
It just wasn't nearly as compelling as this wild Alex Jones interview that I listened to with rapt attention because it was so just absurd.
But anyway, if there is a policy there with yayism, it seems to be, you know, we blame the Jews for the fact that...
Porn is on the internet and we have indecent advertising and all that kind of stuff.
We blame the Jews, but we can't really, you know, kick the Jews out of these positions.
So what we're going to do is have decency laws.
How exactly that would play out, I don't know.
But that's at least the kind of germ of an actual policy in yayism.
But what's most prominent about yayism is the fact that it is just...
Pure Christianity.
To be fair, there is some policy there, more or less, but that's not the real thing.
It's about calling out the Pharisees, reading the Bible, putting your faith in Jesus, loving everyone, especially Hitler.
But isn't it interesting how populism, quote-unquote, Gets reduced to Christianity.
And I think that's the general trajectory of this stuff.
This just keeps happening over and over.
You could even say the replacement of me with Nick Fuentes as the kind of icon slash object of hatred of the online right.
That also is very interesting.
Because everyone knows that I'm...
Secular, at the very least.
And also, everyone knows that Nick is not.
This is the long-term trajectory of things.
To think about how do we explain this, this all comes in the context of a general decline in belief in God and religiosity in the United States.
And so I guess that I would suggest that it might be a kind of like late reaction against this overwhelming trend.
I mean, keep this in mind.
The number of unchurched agnostics or atheists is at the same level as evangelical Christians in the Bush era.
In 2022, the number of like...
Vaguely agnostic, who knows what they believe, is at the same level as the Bible-thumping flag waivers of 2004.
Objectively speaking, all of this stuff is declining, yet as it declines, it almost gets kind of reduced into something more intense.
Yeah, as someone just mentioned, like, mysticism is on the rise.
Like, no doubt.
No doubt.
I mean, there's something to be said for the notion.
Chesterton, and to some degree, it's a kind of notion of Dostoevsky.
It's like, when you don't have religion, when you don't have Orthodox religion, you're just going to have crazy new religions.
I do agree with that.
I think that is also on the rise.
Christianity in a recognizable form is simply declining.
Belief in God is declining.
Even people who believe in God believe in some hazy entity in the sky who's nice.
Whether they really believe in a Christian God is questionable, or a Jewish God.
But as this declines, I think this will kind of get more intense.
You know the meme that's very popular on the dissident right, and particularly among Tucker Carlson viewers and things like that, which is that Hard times make strong men.
Strong men make good times.
Good times make weak men.
Weak men make hard times.
Hard-minded times make strong.
And that's usually how it goes, right?
So, okay.
I more or less agree with the sentiment of that.
There's a little too much luxury in the world and you become decadent and frivolous and weak and so on.
And there's a kind of natural cycle where That leads to bad things, and it might ultimately lead to chaos, but out of that chaos, stronger people will arise.
So I kind of get it.
I agree with the essence of what they're saying.
But the people who share that meme are actually the ones who are going to bring about bad times.
And what I mean by that is that, like, These so-called weak men that these guys rage against, they're raging against them from a resentment standpoint.
They're raging against them from a lower status.
So when they say weak men, they're talking about the current Secretary of State or Biden's latest...
A press secretary or an MSNBC commentator.
That's who they're raging against.
And those people, whatever you want to say about them, I would agree with a lot of criticisms of them, but those people are actually actively managing the current system.
Due to the fact that it's going and the mail gets delivered, they're doing a fairly good job.
And it's actually these guys who share the strong men meme that are probably going to eventually end up attacking the system.
So they're the ones that are actually going to bring it all down.
Yet they want to blame the weak men for this.
And the people sharing those memes aren't necessarily even the strong men.
I mean, the people sharing those memes are like the guy who's a manager at Bed Bath& Beyond but wants to be a horse trainer or a factory laborer or something but kind of can't due to be fair to situations outside of his control.
So he's a kind of...
Bourgeois LARPing as a proletariat or peasant.
But it's those people who, again, are kind of like enraged against the current system and the current order.
And it's those people who are going to bring it down.
You know, whether it's like J6 or Ye-ism or, you know, just the kind of like Aggressive stupidity you see in this, like, Tucker Carlson video about men, like, heating their balls and wrestling and,
like, those are the types of people who are just kind of, like, feeling, they feel like the world is beyond their control and they're not invested in the elite and they're raging against it as, like, it's feminine or it's weak or whatever, like, but they're raging against it always from a lower status.
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