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Jan. 13, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
38:56
The Peacock's Tail

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comRichard and JF discuss the history of the Alt-Right, and its relationship to the GOP, QAnon, and January 6. In the second hour, they delve into Artificial Intelligence: JF fears a dystopian future; Richard argues that a computer can think, but it can never will.

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Yes, I kind of chose the self-isolation hermit life, but having been on Twitter since the very beginning, I joined in March 2011, so I was very early on Twitter, and I built my entire career on Twitter.
If it wasn't of Twitter, I wouldn't have become somewhat known, I wouldn't have attracted...
The kind of respect that people can give me.
Not everyone, but certainly a part of the population.
And when you do that play of being a controversial thinker, you're betting on the fact that even if 99% of people hate you, there's always going to be enough in that 1% to support you to go forward.
And it's a risky bet when you lose your Twitter account.
You lose a big part of that bet.
You end up really cancelled on every account.
And that is very hard to take.
However, I had moved on.
I had accepted that I didn't have a Twitter.
And I went to produce a smaller show on Odyssey.
And I've been enjoying my life.
So it's a bizarre feeling to be back.
But certainly, you know, being on Gab for a year.
It's another world.
There's much less people, much less engagement.
And it's good to have a fresh feed that tells me really what's happening in the last hour rather than having a feed that tells me on Gab what the Christians of America think in the last eight hours.
Whereas Twitter gives me a picture of what the world thinks in the last 30 minutes.
Right.
So a couple of things.
First off, Twitter...
And I think other people recognize that as well.
And I might even include YouTube as a social network in this competition, even though Twitter, I believe, has something like 220 million users around the world.
So it's dwarfed by Facebook, which is well over a billion.
It might be even over.
I don't know.
And there are other social media platforms like Snapchat that have many more users as well.
But I think Twitter, because of its public face, I mean, I don't know the last time I read a newspaper where someone quoted Facebook or something like that.
But it seems like if I read, say, 10 articles in a mainstream newspaper, two or three of them, Will have an embedded tweet or reproduce someone's tweet.
So there's just this kind of like, are you alive?
Do you have a heartbeat quality to Twitter that I think is really remarkable.
And I think other people feel this as well.
It's not just a kind of like elite platform for news junkies and journalists or whatever.
I think it's much bigger than that, actually.
It's the public ledger.
When you make a public statement, you make it on Twitter.
If you make it on Facebook, you're making it to your followers, but that's a specialized thing.
That's where YouTube doesn't have this feeling of public ledger.
It's because for YouTube, you need to listen to a whole 20 minutes of someone, and in my case, a whole show of one hour, to get to their point.
Whereas on Twitter, people will compress to fit that character limit, which is the genius and the disadvantage of Twitter.
The character limit is what forces people to compress their statement to the essence.
So that people know where they stand and it will stay there forever.
A tweet is photographed, screenshot if it's controversial and there's no getting it away.
Yes.
So what was it like being on Gab?
Because I remember being very enthusiastic about Gab in 2017.
And I was actually banned from Twitter for about a month in 2017.
And it was a big thing.
It's kind of forgotten now because I, you know, knock on wood, I think I'm here to stay.
And it was just a different time.
Excuse me, it wasn't 2017.
It was the fall of 20 or the fall winter of 2016.
But I was very enthusiastic about Gab because I kind of felt like, well, at least we'll have something.
Like this can almost be a universal platform.
You can cross post, but this will never go down.
And maybe even it would outpace Twitter.
Who knows?
But as the years went on, I didn't use Gab at all.
And then seeing the post of Andrew Torba, I found Gab to be just a huge turnoff.
And it just seemed to be like an echo chamber where you probably are Exchanging comments with some guy who's likely to become a mass shooter.
Maybe that's a bit much, but you understand my point.
It's just, there's a kind of like, Gab became kind of like a movement.
Not just an echo chamber, but a kind of weird movement.
And so Torba would say all these wildly contradictory things.
Like, we're the ultimate free speech platform and blah, blah, blah.
And then he'd also be like, only Christian nationalists allowed.
You know, Episcopalians, you're going to get banned.
Or something like, I mean, you know what I mean.
And in his anti-Semitism and so on, it just became this kind of like, all right, I mean, I don't want to hang out with you guys, basically.
Well, I really am respectful of Gab.
I appreciated having a home simply for sanity's sake.
For the people who wanted to follow me and they were on Twitter and they were not seeing me anymore, they wanted to have a spot where they can get the same updates about where I'm at and my show and everything.
So I really appreciate Gab and I really think that Gab still has a role.
Even if everyone was to be unbanned from Twitter, we must keep Gab because I think...
We must credit, and I would like to welcome you to this thought, because I don't think you've thought about it, but I think you should.
Andrew Tarbaugh caused, through leverage, caused the current re-rise of Twitter and the takeover of Elon Musk.
Ultimately, if Andrew Tarbaugh is not there with an alternative, it's not the same thing, and it doesn't call for that much of an intervention.
With that much money for Twitter.
And in a way, having this kind of alternative power in the same way that the existence of Russia kind of makes Western Europe stand together more, the existence of Gab has led to true liberals and free thinkers and freedom lovers to take over Twitter and liberate it.
I actually agree with a lot.
I think truth social might have played a bigger role or even parlor, but I do think that part of the motivation was to cut off the alternative, which even if it couldn't surpass Twitter, at the very least would take a huge chunk of it away.
And yeah, I agree with that.
Now, all that being said, with all the respect due to Andrew Torba, it's torture to be on Gab, to be just on Gab.
Because I'm surrounded with people who think way too much like me, who, you know, my kind of humor that I can appreciate would be considered dark humor by normie standard.
But on Gab, I'm considered a normie.
Because I want...
Because I'm not a proficient user of wood chipper memes and other violent memes.
And so you kind of get radicalized in the sense that at this point, after one year of gab, it takes a really seriously dark joke to make me laugh.
I have become totally insensitized.
Wow.
Yeah, I feel that.
I think there was...
Definitely on Twitter in 2016.
I don't think this exactly has returned, but there was just an intoxicating insanity to Twitter.
Trump would win a primary in Indiana or something, and then you'd see these just totally wild 80s synth wave plus Japanese anime plus You know, gas chamber memes.
I mean, I'm not quite endorsing them because I do think they are childish and it's probably something we should get away from.
But when we were all captured by that feeling of winning, there was something just insanely intoxicating about it.
And just like no boundaries.
Every envelope will be pushed.
You know, just total madness.
Again, I look back on it kind of skeptically and maybe even cynically, but there was something going on.
It was a moment in time that was pretty remarkable, maybe unique.
Well, it depends on how you interpret it.
If you look at it seriously, well, of course, it's not making you look serious if you engage in this kind of mimetic.
But it was a time and it was relevant at the time.
Because we were demonstrating our power level in a way, which is a meme in and of itself.
But we were showing just how far we can go on the internet that previous models of communication couldn't go there.
And in a way...
A little bit like the peacock displaying its tail.
He's showing just how long of a tail he can carry while handicapping himself with a difficulty with regards to predation and other difficulties in life and the increased nutrient needed to feed that tail.
But he's doing it to show how strong he is to the female.
And I think that a lot of the mimetics around 2016, the edgy stuff...
Was to show, look how much we don't care.
Look how much we see cancel culture rising in front of us and we run to it.
And we say, try me.
Yeah, that's an excellent comparison.
And you could see that in the alt-right in general.
You could see that in Hail Trump and all that kind of stuff.
It was just this throw caution to the wind.
You know, I'm such a badass, I can fly mentality.
Not that we might have grown a little bit too big of a tail.
Because you ultimately, I mean, the peacock's tail is from a strict, hard evolutionary standpoint, it's bad.
You know, you're more likely to be killed.
But as you say, on a second level of evolution, it's a way of...
Showing your genetic fitness.
You're so fit that you can grow this thing.
Well, I think that there's an equivalent to the legitimate use of the pea cocktail.
There's an equivalent to the legitimate use of the edginess, which is we were signaling to the system, we're not purchasable.
We're kind of going to play scorched art with our own careers.
And we're not going to be ever purchasable and you won't ever want to purchase us.
And that's a necessary signal sent to the audience.
It's a demonstration of courage, which unfortunately has disappeared a lot from current society.
You know, when do we hear about courage being a value at all these days?
Well, we demonstrated courage back then.
And that's why we earned respect.
And I think that's the legitimate part of the signal.
I agree.
So did you just randomly try to reactivate your account or was your account reactivated at the request of Twitter?
I'm curious.
So I've spent the last year basically refiling an appeal every week.
And every week they would tell me an email that says, we've stacked your current appeal on your old appeal because we haven't addressed your old appeal and the cases seem to be related.
So basically it was about detecting, okay, this guy just keeps appealing, we're going to stack the cases.
And I started appealing even many times a week in the last month.
What I also did is on my show with a small audience, I was telling my people, Clip my request to Elon Musk, and I was sending messages to Elon Musk, and they were clipping it and publishing it as Twitter video.
Basically, every two or three days, I was complaining and yelling at Elon Musk and telling him that his amnesty general was a fake thing and that as long as I wasn't banned, this was all a lie.
So I made a lot of pressure so that he couldn't publicly affirm, really, that he had given general amnesty.
Until he liberated my account.
Now, did he pay attention to those clips?
I don't know.
But eventually, a week that many clips like this were being shared and retweeted on Twitter, it eventually got unlocked.
And I got unlocked at the same time as Stéphane Moliner.
So that makes me think I was maybe part of a batch of libertarians or maybe Twitter had some cat...
Canadians, maybe, absolutely.
Maybe Twitter had put me in some box and they were waiting to make a decision.
But since I'm back on Twitter, I've also published a list of accounts that I would want to be unbanned, about 25 accounts that I've spotted.
And I've demanded Elon Musk unbanned them before I declare that Amnesty General has been achieved.
And already three of them were unbanned.
10 hours after I tweeted about it.
Interesting.
Yeah, I mean, I do think that if Elon is serious, there has to be a kind of...
There has to be...
Not even a general amnesty.
There has to be a bill of rights, so to speak.
Yes.
Where you know why you're banned.
And I also think that a permanent...
A death sentence, effectively, is unfair.
Absolutely.
In the sense that you can definitely ban someone for posting a death threat or something.
But even in the legal system, if you threaten someone's life, you will probably go to jail for some time, but you are released at some point.
There just are certain crimes that...
Most all crimes don't reach the level of the death penalty, and I think that should be taken into account.
There just has to be something.
What do you think Elon is after, and what's your take on Elon?
I might be more cynical than you are.
Well, I think he's a genius, and I think he's reawakening an internet that I thought was lost to forever.
And so I want to commend this genius.
He is creating a form of life, basically.
I think that Elon pretty much approaches the net as a biologist.
He sees life, and he didn't feel life anymore on Twitter.
That's when he keeps complaining about butts.
Ultimately, we're talking about the creepy line between...
But artificial intelligence and real human beings, which is constantly blurred these days.
But Elon Musk didn't feel that there was the normal life of the internet anymore on Twitter.
And he reawakened it already.
I can feel the difference because even when I was banned, I still had my account.
I could browse.
I could see what was going on on Twitter.
And you can feel the difference in the last month.
There is much more diversity of thought.
And I think Elon Musk approaches it from a diversity of thought, humanitarian perspective, and ultimately perhaps a megalomania goal of having an X platform, the software of all software.
That may be his ultimate dream, but for now what he's interested in is reawaken the life of the internet that he has known as someone who was an early adopter of the internet world.
Now, of course, this is all subscribed in a global kind of political goal, because he's also admitted recently being a Republican.
So I think that what he saw in 2016, as much as the big tech...
Leftists keep saying we should never redo 2016.
Never again.
I think that Elon is saying, yes, again, let's do it again.
Right.
I guess I'm a little bit more ambivalent towards doing it again than you are.
But I think you were traumatized.
I think you carry trauma from 2016.
Is that correct?
Well, sure.
There might be some truth to that.
The main thing is that if it's going to be done again, it will be done...
Like, we already saw it.
It would be like...
It would be like you're up at bat in the big game and it's the ninth inning.
I'm sorry for the American sports metaphor for a French-Canadian, but follow along if you can.
You're up at bat and you strike out.
And then you go home and you start pretending to hit a home run and swinging away.
And going to the batting cage and hitting all these homers and imagining that it was real.
Because what I mean is that we've seen this thing and it didn't exactly work.
And there was some trauma involved.
There were some things that shouldn't be repeated.
And I do get the sense from a lot of alt-right Twitter that they desperately want to reinvent 2016.
And kind of like a programmer, they're trying to put the pieces back together.
It's like...
We saw this experiment.
If you put hydrogen and oxygen together in a tube and you light a match, boom, you get water.
So let's reproduce that experiment.
Well, that's not how history works.
And I feel like if they reproduce 2016, it would just be some massively dumb Candace Owens version of Ron DeSantis' campaign.
And I almost would rather...
Yeah, I would obviously rather Joe Biden win again.
I think Joe Biden's been pretty good.
You would still stand with Joe Biden?
Oh, yeah, 100%.
Joe Biden, well, we could get into a debate about this if you like, but you understand my point.
They're trying to reproduce an experiment as if we're in a laboratory, but we're not in a laboratory.
You don't reproduce these things.
I think you're absolutely right.
If we were to go at it, Too much from a position of redoing exactly 2016, that would be cringe.
And it's a little bit what Donald Trump, it's the same cringe that I feel when Donald Trump goes with his I Love America type of speech in 2023, 2022, and where it doesn't kind of catch like the 2016, because we all know it's a pale copy of who he's been and who he's been projecting to be.
So if you go just from a nostalgia perspective, it will suck.
But I think that the path that Elon is allowing, which is much cleverer than this, is let's make a chaotic situation again and let's see what happens with the world once freed.
Because I think that there are certain ingredients that have...
That haven't been mixed in properly in 2016.
And I think that the redo of the experiment will lead to different results.
For example, in 2016, I think that the whole discourse of the Democrats, this kind of radical anti-far-right, stemmed and succeeded at making things like Charlottesville really labeled as extremist.
And in a way, this is all constructed.
This is a kind of fiction, if you want my opinion.
Now, why has this fiction rooted itself into people's mind?
It's because of media control, it's because of elitism, and it's because of leftist anger and the anti-Trumpism of them.
Now, I think that if you redo some of the ingredients of 2016 again, And if it's not Trump and it's someone else, and if Elon controls Twitter so much that there is this kind of natural, organic action on Twitter rather than this controlled discourse and controlled algorithms, I think you might get a different outcome.
And I think that simply the fact that people have been desensitized to the idea of white discourse or white positive discourse At some point, you know, it's not going to trigger them just as much.
And I think some of the ideas that didn't quite make it then, they can make it now.
Didn't we already see that?
I mean, wasn't January 6th a kind of reboot of Charlottesville in a way?
I mean, it was not the same people.
There's some overlap.
Say, Fuentes and Baked Alaska and some other characters.
But overall, it was different people.
But don't you think that was a kind of reboot?
That was the final triumph of the optics debate of like, we're going to wave flags and be patriotic conservatives?
No, to the contrary.
I see the takeover because the January 6th events occurred under the same type of mediatic elitist control.
I think to the contrary that the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk is the beginning of the end for this form of Control of the discourse and that things that will happen from here will have a kind of fair window to express themselves through a truly organic population of individuals on Twitter.
That's why his fight against bots and his kind of recuperation of a...
Of a principle of you have a Twitter account, you're a human, and we won't promote the liberal talking point systematically.
All of this creates very fertile ground for innovative stuff to happen, stuff that we can finally look at and be surprised, because I'll be honest, it's been seven years that I haven't been surprised by the world.
Maybe if you put out the yay stuff, because yay kind of came out of nowhere and surprised me, but I want some excitement.
I want some things to happen that is not controlled by CNN, MSNBC, and stuff like this.
I agree, and I agree with a general positive attitude towards yay, even though it's not...
What I like or what I would do.
I agree.
There is something just disarming about the love speech.
I love Bibi Netanyahu, but I really love Hitler.
It was something that captured that crazy Dionysian energy of the alt-right.
You might be underestimating the degree to which the alt-right was somewhat synthetic, though.
And also, it wasn't just a kind of pure spontaneous order.
But anyway, that's maybe something we can go to.
Well, that's interesting.
Educate me about this.
What are you referring to?
Well, there's no doubt that...
Many of these bots that you're lamenting, and I agree with you, and Elon has expressed his lament, that many of those kinds of things played into this.
And I don't think that the...
I mean, the alt-right is gone in a way.
I mean, it was a phenomenon of yesterday.
I think what's happening now is different and should be distinguished.
But there were also...
I got sniffs, let's say, of foreign actors being very interested in the alt-right and so on for their own means.
So it wasn't just a kind of spontaneous order.
It served certain ends.
And let's also not forget that all of those CNN, New York Times, etc., I mean...
A lot of the criticisms of me do have a kernel of truth to them, even if they are given in bad faith and kind of silly on some level.
This idea that the mainstream media actually loved the alt-right and promoted it.
I mean, that was one of the interesting dynamics, is that Bannon obviously has his connections.
He wanted to get the alt-right as basically the Breitbart comment section.
And if they were racist or even anti-Semitic, or certainly if they were misogynists, they were welcome.
But it was ultimately kind of serving his end.
I mean, as he said famously, you know, Breitbart is the platform for the alt-right.
He said that to Sarah Posner.
What I read from that is that he wanted to channel it.
And even if you look at Milo's article on the alt-right, I think from June of 2016, it was this total whitewash.
It didn't get into the stuff that you're interested in, of Darwinism and evolution.
The future of intelligence, all that kind of stuff.
It dispensed with that.
I don't think my name was mentioned in it.
And it was basically, these guys are like paleo-conservatives.
And it was a whitewash.
And it was an attempt to channel that energy.
I mean, none of them believed any of this.
Particularly Milo, who knew everyone in the alt-right.
But it was this way of channeling that energy towards Donald Trump, who was at that time, by the midsummer, ultimately the Republican candidate.
And I think they are very much trying to do this again, in the sense that there's less and less of a differentiation between the mainstream right and the dissident right, if we want to use that term.
So back in 2016, the mainstream right...
Trump had declared war, absolute war on the alt-right.
And the alt-right was just like, yeah, bring it on.
You're a cuck.
And that was the dynamic.
And the remarkable thing about it was that Trump won.
So Trump did an end run around the...
And I'm not talking about like CNN or the New York Times.
I think CNN and MSNBC helped Trump immeasurably, in fact.
Despite the fact that he called them fake news later on.
Like, indispensable component of his campaigning was going on CNN.
But I'll leave that, you know, aside for now.
The Republican establishment did not want this.
They want, you know, multicultural libertarianism or whatever the hell they want.
Tax cuts.
Not even libertarianism.
Yeah.
Who knows?
They declared war, but we kind of won via Trump.
But at some point, the dynamic changed.
And Hillary Clinton was attacking the alt-right and kind of inflating it while she was attacking it.
And it was like, let's use this.
And at this point, I mean, if you go and look on Twitter and someone says like, Public school teachers are groomers and they want to take away your gas oven and their demons and whatever.
You don't know if that is Andrew Anglin or a Republican in Congress.
You don't know if you just read those lines.
But see, that's quite fitting.
That's a victory.
Well, there are certain costs to that victory.
There are costs, but I see it as a victory that basically every single point of the alt-right in 2016 has been recycled in one form or another.
Basically, the alt-right was disembodied and cannibalized, and its cadaver was recycled in every possible way.
This means first that there was some good stuff there, and it also means that a...
A relatively organic, although I will agree with you, I've seen the bot problem.
I was a streamer forever.
So, I mean, I've been at the forefront of distinguishing between what's a true audience and what's a fake audience.
And through the super chats, in a way, I've learned that the bots don't have much money.
And so, eventually, you can tire them off.
But yeah, so I think there's so much victory to be celebrating, and I see it as much broader than just the question of the evolution of the alt-right toward its death and the current state of this segment of the population.
I look at the whole internet, and I see vaccine resistance movement, I see freedom resistance movement, and I feel life in all of this all at the same time.
And they were all squashed under the censorship control in the last three to four years.
It might just be a situation where we have different perspectives and different strategies.
I mean, look, the alt-right was obviously a lot bigger than me.
And it was something that I couldn't control.
I mean, that's clear.
But I genuinely wanted to ride this out-of-control horse in a different direction.
And that was impossible.
And I don't support the direction that the horse has gone.
So, you know, on some level, we just simply have different perspectives on the matter.
And that's obviously good.
We're hashing it out.
But even if I did embrace, say, anti-vaccine animus and a lot of this stuff, I would even then be a bit skeptical of...
Charlie Kirk mouthing all my lines.
And I mean, look at the difference between, say, the alt-right and QAnon.
And as I've said, I've stipulated that the alt-right was manufactured in all sort of complicated ways.
But I'm going to let that go for now.
Look at QAnon in the sense that it was much wilder than the alt-right.
And arguably kind of...
You know, the alt-right would do a gas chamber meme with Hillary Clinton or whatever.
Or have a Holocaust.
QAnon would organize.
Right.
Have a Holocaust.
Yeah, the QAnon would create a gallows for an actual politician.
I mean, it's arguably much worse, much more popular as well.
Because the alt-right was kind of like OK Boomer.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if the alt-right invented that meme on some level.
There was a ton of anti-Boomer stuff, almost over the top and stuff I don't support.
But anyway, it was antagonistic.
The QAnon was able to call upon kind of like pre-existing hangups of Republican voters and many non-Republican voters.
And it was able to channel it towards the Republican Party.
So it was like...
The alt-right on steroids, but then in this weird way, it was like Alex Jones in a business suit.
And what I mean by that is that it was much more just objectively, functionally conformist.
Because it said, trust the plan.
You're anonymous.
Trump is doing it.
Trump's killing all these people in the CIA as we speak.
They're going to be hanged in center of town square.
And so it was a kind of like, just vote Republican, believe in God, and wave the flag.
And that's how we'll win.
Even though the ideology was total lunacy and was a kind of weird Christian Gnosticism, it was hyper-conformist in this odd way.
And it also had probably more, no, definitely more casualties to the alt-right.
Now, granted, it's a lot bigger, but...
Not only the deaths, like Ashley Babbitt is someone who's clearly, whether or not you think the shooting of her was justified, and I could hear arguments the other way, I'm okay with that.
Whether or not you think it's justified, there's no question that her mind was warped.
I mean, her final words on a live stream were a quotation of a cue drop.
Like, there's no question.
Like, what am I doing here?
How did I...
This kind of like goofy girl from the Air Force or wherever and has a pool cleaning company.
How did I end up invading the Capitol?
I mean, that's a remarkable story.
And there were kind of like more casualties along the way.
So I guess I'm just more cynical towards these things.
I think these things can be weaponized in ways that are bad.
I don't know.
I guess maybe also I have a bit of a tendency of like, yeah, the alt-right, that's so 2016.
We've got to move upwards and onwards.
No one was praising me for writing alt-right content in 2010.
All I got were attacks from the conservative establishment, but I did it.
And then there's a point where I'll just say it with...
The stuff that Mark and I are doing, it's like, you guys are going to be saying this in 2030.
Whether you like it or not, you're going to be...
So, like, we've moved on.
And when I see people just, like, in a trench or a rut, I just kind of like...
You know, I don't see it as, like, a new freedom awakening or something.
Go on.
Yeah, I just want to be clear that I'm not suggesting that we should bring back the alt-right.
I'm saying let's bring back the ambience of liberty under which something like the alt-right showed up and rose.
And let's see what happens then.
I'm not saying to bring back even any of the arguments or elements of the alt-right.
I'm saying I can finally feel that something...
Something great, something fun, something challenging for the mind.
And I can't wait for it to happen.
But it couldn't have happened under the fully controlled social media landscape of the last two years.
So that's why I'm cheering.
What happens in particular, I don't really care.
I want it to be as big and as beautiful and as life-changing.
Because you mentioned the comparison between QAnon.
I agree with everything you've said between QAnon and the alt-right.
But QAnon will have literally zero cultural impact.
Whereas the alt-right can be argued to have one of the events and one of the groups with the greatest cultural impact in the history of the last few decades on America.
I think that's actually true.
The only thing QAnon has left us are really bad t-shirts.
Yes.
Like double XL American flag.
And terrible memes.
Punisher mask.
I can sniff a meme from QAnon.
It's terrible.
I see them and I'm like, this was written by QAnon Boomer.
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