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Dec. 28, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
16:48
Confidence Men

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comCharles Johnson and Richard Spencer talk Trump and, in particular, Maggie Haberman’s biography, Confidence Man (2022). In the free excerpt, the pair discuss the networks of the unhinged and foreign actors eager to use them: QAnon, the Alt-Right, MAGA, etc.

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QAnon arises as a kind of justification for Trump.
It coincided with basically Charlottesville happening and kind of, you know, diminishing severely the brand of the alt-right.
Because there was talk of, you know, Ted Cruz going on saying these are terrorists and blah, blah, blah.
And it also came about at a time when...
I was criticizing Trump pretty heavily.
And there was a lot of kind of, okay, Trump, you need to put it up or shut up.
Like, you are in charge, you've got Congress, you've got the presidency.
And what are you doing?
You're doing Paul Ryan's agenda.
And then you're signing on this omnibus, which he supported, and then decided to, you know, renege his support later.
And very similar to what was going on this past week.
So it occurred as this kind of conspiracy theory of, like, trust the plan.
Like, don't criticize him on the basis of objective reality.
You know, don't read the news.
The news is all fake.
There's a kernel of truth to that, of course.
But the news is all fake.
It's all the theater.
And he's secretly operating behind the scenes.
And it increasingly became more and more...
Religious, for lack of a better word.
It developed a kind of theology of what Trump is about.
And it created a network of people who are, as we say, like there are, what is it?
One in 30 people you meet as a sociopath, maybe.
But like one in 30 people you meet might be kind of like a nice person, but it's actually a kind of unhinged lunatic.
And I mentioned this to the group.
Before you got involved, Charles, but, you know, I met this woman just on the streets of Whitefish.
Very nice.
I liked her.
Attractive woman in her 30s.
And she handed me this book that she had, handwritten book, a little pink notebook.
And it is unhinged, to say the least.
It is this weird Catholic...
Trumpist theology.
These normal people you hate don't want to scare anyone.
But when you go sit in a bar or a coffee shop, one of these people right next to you believes that Trump is the son of God.
It's incredible.
Let me finish it.
This is a cherry on top.
So they created this constellation of people.
And whatever the motives might have been in like 2018, they can ship.
You create the network and then you can use it in other ways.
And January 6th, similar to Charlottesville, you know, greatly diminished the brand of MAGA.
But it still is there.
It can still be used and actualized in a certain circumstance.
And you can spend a year.
Beating these people new propaganda and new kind of drops and theology and use them in another way.
I mean, even to go back to the alt-right thing.
So the alt-right kind of got busted.
I signed off.
I was just like, look, I'm not doing this.
This is not what I care about, et cetera.
But like the alt-right network still existed.
And so like...
Just to hit the Russian angle a little bit, I mean, Charles Bousman is a long time, at the very least, pro-Kremlin journalist.
He was at January 6th.
TRS, which is probably the best example, I mean, with me, it was just like, I'm Richard Spencer, it's all about me.
With TRS...
That is a real network of hundreds, kind of thousands, you know, kind of concentric circles of activism and enthusiasm.
Charles Bausman is some kind of Kremlin asset or someone who wants to be a Kremlin asset.
Hold on real quick.
I think it's pretty clear that he is.
He utilized the alt-right network.
Yes.
This is a guy who, days after January 6th, was writing these apology pieces on his website about how I'm not actually racist.
I just happen to be best friends with Mike Enoch and I'm using them throughout 2020 on Trump's behalf.
He was also writing how...
The American people have woken up at last.
They understand that Russian Christians are their friends.
We need to all engage in this attack on the satanic liberals and so on.
He fled the country immediately after J6.
This was also a guy who was at the 2016 NBI conference.
I was hobnobbing with him.
He wanted to get involved with me.
He asked me about donors.
I found that extremely suspicious, and I kind of cut him off.
But he's just, you have these, so you have a network, and the network is still in place.
Like, even if you have a shit show like Charlottesville or January 6th, the network is still there, and you can kind of rebuild it, kind of change it, add different propaganda, and use it again.
You know, to go back to the J6 thing, Liz Cheney is both, like, attacking vehemently Donald Trump, for good reason to a large extent.
But she's also kind of whitewashing everything around it.
And all of that stuff around it can still be used in different ways.
And so, like, I don't think there's going to be another J6 in the sense that I don't think there's going to be another attempt to, like, rehearse what they did.
Because what they...
What they did clearly failed, but there's going to be another actualization or operationalization of the network, which is absolutely still intact and absolutely just as unhinged and drug-addled as it ever was.
I don't disagree with anything you've just said.
I would raise the question, though, I sometimes wonder how often social movements Are themselves useful or sort of cultivated or created by foreign actors or by foreign compromised people.
Yeah.
Right?
And I sometimes, you know, we have this sort of idea that there's these sort of spontaneous protests, right?
And yet, you know, you notice like a lot of the rioting during like the Black Lives Matter summer, that some of the people rioting were, you know, you look at them closely and you see They have tattoos from this black gang called God's Disciples, which moves a lot of fentanyl on behalf of China and on behalf of others.
And so one wonders if a lot of these things that we understand are not themselves created or shepherded in different ways.
And I'll note that Emmanuel Macron tweeted right before the commencement of the January 6th hearings.
I wouldn't say that they're quite a show trial.
I would say they're more a stage play, or a fake because is the phrase that I like to use.
They're a pretext for giving the public some window on what was really going on.
Didn't quite work, in my view, in part because Liz Cheney, whose family made millions of dollars off of the Chinese buying the stock of Halliburton.
She's very much complicit in a lot of these things.
And Adam Kinzinger, who is Mr. Tea Party.
I mean, there's a lot of weird stuff around a lot of these characters.
And one wonders if maybe perhaps they were sort of like told to be on this committee, right?
You'll note that like none of them are in more powerful positions, right?
After the committee, right?
Liz Cheney's career is effectively over.
Kinzinger's career is effectively over.
You know, Adam Schiff, who was supposed to be, you know, who was hoping to be leader of the Democrats, was bested by Hakeem Jeffries, right?
So there's these sort of, like, larger questions here.
And many of the people who are on the committee have retired.
And so my sense is, yes, it was a fake because.
But I think what we're going to see is we're going to see, by necessity, an increase in the surveillance state.
And I think, whereas I might have thought, like, 10 years ago or 20 years ago even, that that was a terrible imposition, I actually kind of think that, like, it's a necessity now because of these crazy people around us, many of whom need, like, proper help so that they don't end up homeless on the street, right, or they don't end up, like, drug-addled and dead, right, from fentanyl.
And so I think what we're going to see is we're going to see The state wanting to peer much more deeply into the psyches of some of these people.
And I think that's probably a good thing.
You know, I think, you know, you look at like the suicide numbers, right?
And how they've been on the on the upswing, right?
During the gen, you know, basically during COVID, right?
When people were locked down and going crazy on their phones all the time.
And so you see a lot of suicides from that.
You see a lot of people just like losing their grip on reality.
And I think, you know, since 2020, since Trump is out, you've seen Biden go after the tech companies, which are psyoping everyone.
I mean, his FTC is attacking Activision, the largest game provider in the country, which is itself backed by Steve Wynn, right?
The sort of mobster with Chinese ties.
He's going hard against Facebook, right?
He's now going hard against Elon.
And like, I mean, this Biden fellow doesn't fuck around, you know?
Right.
And who can blame him?
Like a lot of these tech billionaires who are, you know, they're foreigners, right?
They're literally alien to our system, right?
And they don't really have a loyalty to our civic discourse or to our society, right?
They require slaves to feed their, you know, imperial and commercial objectives.
And you can see that with like the low wages they pay their workers.
Or how they pay people in equity to the child slaves that Elon, you know, benefits from and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
So to my mind, this is not the least bit surprising, right?
What's surprising to me is that, I mean, I hate to say this, it's surprising to me that people are surprised, right?
And I think it's because as Americans, and I think, you know, she calls her book Confidence Man, right?
Haberman.
But really, it's like we have a generation of confidence men and women, right, who the fake until you make it, the sort of hustler, you know, culture, the sort of like technologies that aren't really real, like in the form of cryptocurrency.
Yeah.
You know, we have fake art.
Yeah, or artificial intelligence, for that matter.
Which is real to some extent.
I'm not a full-on denier.
Well, it's interesting, right, how on the AI front, they don't want to expand AI to facial recognition or to genetics, right, which are two areas in which the Chinese are possibly ahead of us.
So it's interesting, like, the way the debate in the United States is very much shaped by these forces.
Why is Sam Altman the head of OpenAI?
Why is OpenAI worth $20 billion?
What is it really doing with all of its Microsoft ties?
And Microsoft has its own tie-ins with the Russians and with the Chinese and with the Israelis through the Maxwell connections.
So anyway, my larger point, if I had to really explain it, is we need a counterintelligence operation for our crazies.
And for our billionaires and for our crazy billionaires.
And if we don't get that, we are basically importing an oligarchy on the one hand and a madhouse on the other.
And that is very disturbing to me.
And it's certainly something that we, to some extent, those of us who are sons and daughters of the American Revolution or who are good Americans I think you could be an immigrant.
It's harder to be Americanized.
So I don't necessarily want to say that.
But it does take a lot of work to assimilate into our culture and our way of life.
And I think we have an obligation to push back against these people in a very serious way and to be very alert to how they operate and how they go about things.
And if we don't do that, we might as well just give up the country now.
And that is a very depressing notion.
I'll say, I think we've talked about Biden before, but my God, what a difference it's made with him as president.
The Republicans have no arguments against him, really, other than he's old.
They don't have a competing vision of the world that they want to impose or promote.
Absolutely not.
There's no content there.
This sort of like the capture of the Republican Party by foreign connected.
I mean, Tucker Carlson, I don't know if you've ever met Tucker, but I've known him a long time.
And he's clearly gone insane.
Like, I don't mean that in a malicious way.
I mean, his mother literally left the family for being, you know, she was a crazy woman.
She literally abandoned the family, abandoned her duties.
That stuff is heritable, right?
There's a reason they ask you about your family's mental health issues when you apply for a clearance, right?
And here he is interviewing this libs of TikTok woman as if she's just some sort of innocent, naive woman who's just a mom or whatever.
She's just a real estate.
She just works in real estate.
As if that wouldn't be foreign connected or mobbed up, right?
How does she have all this time to do all this libs of TikTok stuff?
Who's paying her?
Who owns the libs of TikTok branding?
And then you discover, oh, it's the Babylon Bee that owns it, right?
And the Babylon Bee, of course, is the thing that ostensibly was the reason its banning was ostensibly the reason Elon Musk bought Twitter, right?
And so you start to see this pattern emerge of this sort of nexus of anti-American figures, all united on Twitter, trying to cause chaos.
I mean, Kim.com, right, is literally facing charges for being involved in organized crime and the mass theft of intellectual property of the United States.
And he's fighting his extradition from New Zealand.
You have this Ian Miles Chong character.
God knows what the hell his deal is.
And so you see all these people, and they are basically having a field day on Twitter.
And what's interesting is, I don't think they're totally wrong on the degree to which Twitter was itself compromised and screwed up by these foreign actors.
But they make the focus entirely on the FBI, which gives you everything you need to know.
I mean, Barry Weiss is not an objective reporter, right?
You know, so anyway, it's really quite maddening that very few people really want to sit down and actually explain this to people.
But maybe that's something that we can do, you know, or that we should do.
Yes, that is our charge.
I mean, it's sort of, I do feel a bit like I have to take out the garbage perennially, you know what I mean?
It's like a Sisyphean task to constantly take out the garbage.
Yeah.
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