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March 8, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
35:38
Trump Era Redux

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comRichard and Mark look back at the Trump era and the anti-conservative dynamic of 2015-16. Are we headed for a redux in 2023?

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So CPAC was held this past weekend, and there was a black cloud hanging over CPAC that involved Matt Schlapp, who's this typical and typically gross conservative organizer who was credibly accused of, quote, pummeling the junk of a male staffer.
Of the Herschel Walker campaign.
And I really don't know what to say about that.
I think that definitely kept some people away or just made the whole event seem icky.
But I also think there was...
And the crowds were way down.
And I've seen this myself.
I mean, I used to go to CPAC back in the day.
Before it was held at the aptly named Gaylord Hotel when it was in D.C. And these things were smaller.
They were also a little more kind of marginal in a way.
It was like hardcore conservative activists and not necessarily this big, you know, Trump cult or anything like that, although some major figures would speak there.
It just had a smaller feel and more of a kind of marginal feel.
CPAC was selling out.
CPAC has expanded.
They're going to Hungary.
They're going all over the place.
It's become a major event.
It was way down this year.
There were sparsely attended events and things like that, almost embarrassingly.
So there was an image of Donald Trump Jr.'s wife or girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, kind of yelling into the crowd about America first.
And they showed an image of the crowd and it was like half full at most.
Pretty embarrassing stuff.
But.
I think Trump is in an interesting position at the moment.
So Trump issued a policy statement of sorts.
A few days before CPAC.
And then at CPAC, he made a lot of promises, many of which we've heard before.
But I think the dynamic is interesting, and the dynamic is very similar to what we saw in 2015 and 2016.
So Trump issued this statement that I saw on Twitter.
I imagine he issued it first on True Social, and it was a short video.
And, you know, I...
A lot of it is, it's easy to kind of debunk it and call it bullshit, or we've heard this before, why didn't you do this earlier?
But at the same time, I kind of applaud him for at least offering a sort of vision.
I mean, he literally promised flying cars, which is bizarre on some level, and I think is a totally unworkable idea, even if a certain kind of vertical takeoff and landing You know, vehicle of some kind might very well have like military application.
The idea of people engaged in flying cars, I mean, just I don't even need to go into all of the just immense problems that such a thing is going to create.
And whether this is actually better than what we have now is also questionable.
Although I guess it has a Blade Runner feel and that's cool.
He also talked about using federal land.
To create new cities.
And there was a kind of Chinese feel to this idea of basically the government creating these new cities.
Again, I don't know where these would be.
Federal land, I don't know, in the Midwest or something.
And then kind of sponsoring Americans to buy heavily subsidized homes and kind of doing a...
A kind of Chinese solution on the American dream.
But also a kind of new version of the frontier of, you know, you go out there, you're a Sooner, you can get your land and build your future.
It's very interesting, even if it's something that isn't quite workable, or maybe is not desirable in many ways.
But it is a grand vision, this kind of MAGA communism, if you will.
And he also promised massive deportations at his CPAC speech.
We, of course, have heard this kind of thing before.
This was what a lot of us got excited about in 2015 and 2016, where he was talking really boldly like this.
I think he's grasping at a certain kind of vision.
And it is a grand vision and one that he probably won't implement, one that he's probably too incompetent to implement, but a grand vision nonetheless.
Very different to Ron DeSantis' kind of precise, targeted attacks on things.
Trump, to his credit, is offering a big, bold future off in the distance.
As easy as these things are to debunk, and as kind of bullshitty as these things are, I still would applaud him on some level for doing that, for thinking big.
But what I find most interesting is this dynamic that has arisen in which Trump is once again just directly opposed.
And a lot of this is coming out of the midterms.
It's not necessarily even coming out of the Mar-a-Lago issue or the other indictments or civil lawsuits that he's facing.
It seems to come directly out of the fact that Trump can be plausibly blamed for the midterm loss.
There's this stink in the air.
We need to move on from Trump and his candidates that And so it's kind of easy to blame him for losses.
And I think Trump is kind of back where he was in 2015 and 2016.
But I also think Trump is...
Back where he was, where he's directly reaching his supporters and making an end run around the Republican establishment that has been a kind of gatekeeper or kingmaker.
And so Fox News didn't cover his trip to East Palestine.
But everyone heard about it.
And he reached people directly and they were passing around these social media memes.
When Trump goes after, say, Mitch McConnell by name at CPAC, that's an applause line.
And that's something that kind of activates his people directly.
So Trump's genius, and it's not something he created.
I think it's a kind of wave that he rode.
Was twofold in 2015 and 2016, where he was able to speak directly to his people via Facebook and not bother with any kind of institution, even Fox News.
So Fox News was not pro-Trump at the beginning.
There's no doubt that it became a kind of Trump TV in effect for four years there.
But...
At the beginning, it wasn't pro-Trump.
In fact, the Megyn Kelly debate that she hosted, where Trump kind of infamously said she was bleeding out of her you-know-what, whatever he said, apparently a reference demonstration, although who knows, that was meant as a kind of dunk on Trump, a trap door that he was going to fall into, and he survived it.
Fox News was much more comfortable with Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or even Chris Christie as they are now much more comfortable with Ron DeSantis.
And Trump, you know, he didn't need those institutions.
He could, you know, if Trump were endorsed by, you know, the mayor of, excuse me, if Trump's opponents were endorsed by the mayor of Des Moines.
Trump could—his people and voters and potential voters didn't hear that from the mainstream media or from Fox.
They learned about it on Facebook from Trump.
And he would basically say, you know, like, another swamp creature endorses the establishment rhino candidate.
So they would hear it directly from him.
And so he was able to kind of do an end run around the institutions.
And this— By 2016, this whole dynamic was going into absurd territory with the whole fake news idea where actual fake news stories were trending on Facebook at greater numbers than real news stories from establishment sources.
So notions of...
Hillary Clinton is a member of ISIS, or the Pope has endorsed Trump.
Those type of obviously fake stories, although maybe ones that carried a kernel of truth to a certain degree, they were outperforming a basic horse race story on USA Today.
The New York Times or San Francisco Chronicle.
So we kind of passed through the looking glass in many ways.
And that was the secret to Trump's success.
And, you know, as I was talking last night, this Trump's kind of like negative identity, his insurgency vis-a-vis the Republican Party was what I and I think many other people found I mean,
he would go on stage and just murder Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, etc.
He would just blow them away on stage.
And that was in a way what we wanted.
That was what we were treated for years as, in a way, kind of like a part of the Republican Party.
But not of it, or if that's the right way of expressing it.
It was like, yeah, there are things like, you know, alternativeright.com or Radix or the, you know, the alt-right concept or Richard Spencer or all these people.
But we...
We kind of hate them.
They're marginal.
Screw them.
I was involved with the Ron Paul movement in 2008, and the exact dynamic was at place.
It was kind of like, oh yeah, we sort of like Ron Paul, but he's a leftist.
He's anti-war.
He wants to leave soldiers out in the field to die.
He wants to...
End America's military empire, etc.
He was part of the right, but a kind of ugly stepchild or something like that.
And the amazing dynamic of Trump in 2015 and 2016 was that he was directly assaulting all of these people who had mistreated us for so long and winning.
So it wasn't even like the Ron Paul campaign where Ron Paul would Get, you know, five, maybe 10% of primary votes, which is remarkable in its way, but he had no chance of actually winning.
But he would assault them in his way.
You know, he would just call them warmongers and neocons or whatever, but there was no real punch to it.
With Trump, you had this direct assault on the conservative establishment, and he was successful in doing it.
And it just seemed to open up a new...
You know, world in which the Republican establishment was totally unnecessary, dispensable, even a liability that you just had to get rid of.
And Trump saw the alt-right, which he catered to, to a degree, without being explicit about it, as his media apparatus, his unpaid social media managers, effectively.
And I don't think Trump ever could have won without the alt-right, particularly in that early period.
And I think he also explicitly catered to us with, you know, retweeting Mussolini quotes, the Sheriff's Star incident with Hillary Clinton, the claiming to not know who David Duke is, or I can't hear you, I don't know who he is, when he obviously knew who he is.
Who he was.
And kind of catering to us, retweeting some accounts here and there that were pretty outrageous, certainly not denouncing us, and recognizing that that whole movement, you know, from top to bottom was ultimately supporting him and was ultimately a kind of, you know, again, unpaid propagandist who were quite successful, in fact.
And the establishment was firing back at Trump.
So, I mean, if you go back to, I think it might have been 2015 or maybe early 2016, where National Review, you know, the bastion of conservatism and neoconservatism to a very strong degree, was publishing these articles against Trump.
You know, the entire editorial staff was there.
Rich Lowry and Ramesh Panuru and then also Glenn Beck got involved.
It was like...
Everything that I despised about the right was attacking Trump and losing.
And it was just an amazing feeling in that sense.
And so much of the alt-right, we forget, was directly opposed to conservatism.
I mean, the cuck meme, however it might be used now, it was not directed against Brooklyn hipsters.
Or liberals or something like that.
Oh, yeah, you're the type of pervert who likes to watch his wife get screwed.
It wasn't actually about that.
It was directed explicitly at conservatives who were, you know, figuratively and maybe literally getting cocked all the time.
It was directed at Trump's enemies who, again, were in the GOP establishment.
So there is this kind of amazing dynamic.
And one that was really intoxicating.
And that one that also eventually ended.
So during the transition, and ironically during the ascension of Bannon, who had claimed that Breitbart was the platform for the alt-right and all this kind of stuff, there was this marrying of Trumpism and the GOP.
And Trump was also moving away from the alt-right, even in 2016, where he got the endorsement of Scalia's son or grandson at one point.
He went to Liberty University and he's like, you might not like me, you might hate me even.
I'm a vulgar, secular figure who's had a million sex scandals, but you've got to vote for me.
You know you do.
It's about the judges, the judges.
He said he made a direct transactional appeal to the religious right.
And I think there was a tendency among those of us who lived through this to kind of overlook these things or just to say, well, it's okay.
We can keep on winning.
You've got to bring in people to the big tent, etc.
At the end of the day, that dynamic that was so intoxicating early on was ending, and in many ways, the alt-right was being dispensed with, for better and for worse.
You know, rightly or wrongly, it was being dispensed with.
Now, Trump wouldn't ever really denounce the alt-right, and infamously at Charlottesville, he made the both sides comment, and he went after Antifa.
Harder than he went after the alt-right, etc.
So he kind of had an instinct for these things and he maintained it.
But he was ultimately replacing it with a new type of movement that was going to be much bigger and that wouldn't have that original dynamic.
And I think this thing that replaced him was the religious right.
To a pre-existing body of people.
But it was also what could be called just QAnon.
We could just go under that label.
So QAnon started emerging in 2017 and particularly around the, at least when I first heard of it, was around the omnibus package that Trump, he both signed it and then he denounced it and then he supported it again and then he signed it.
It was just a weird, he was conflicted about signing this big bill in which there wasn't wall funding and there was a big expansion of government and all this kind of stuff.
And it was basically trust the plan.
Like, you don't know what's behind all of this stuff.
You don't know all the details of this matter.
Trump is isolating the demonic perverts in the CIA and FBI and the good White hats at the NSA are on board.
So we had to do this to get military control.
I forgot all the arguments, but it was something like that.
And it was obviously completely ridiculous.
But it was this trust the plan idea and a total demonization of Democrats and not the conservative establishment.
The dynamic had weirdly shifted.
There was this combination of alt-right talking points and memes that were increasingly being put into the mouths of the conservative establishment.
You can see this dynamic even at CPAC, where one of the more infamous things to come out of this past weekend was This figure, Michael Knowles, who is, I think, a former actor or comedian of some kind who's working with Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire, you know, selling non-woke chocolate and razor blades and having Jordan Peterson videos available on demand, etc.
But he said something that was actually pretty dramatic, to be honest.
It was...
You know, we don't need to just protect the children.
We need to eradicate transgenderism from the entire country.
If it's true for kids, if you can't become a man because you want to or a woman because you want to for kids, it's also true for adults and vice versa.
We need to get rid of the whole thing.
And, you know, liberals, I guess, have a point when they say things like...
If someone said, I don't want to attack Jews, but I want to eradicate Judaism, well, that's one way of putting it, I guess, but I think a lot of Jews would quite plausibly feel like you were engaging in a genocidal campaign.
When you use terms like eradication and, oh, it's not about you personally, we just want to eradicate your identity, well...
You know, I can kind of understand when people see that as genocidal or at the very least extremely tough talk.
And, you know, so there's this kind of weird irony of what's going on.
So Nick Fuentes went to CPAC.
He got kicked out again.
He did a kind of wild speech.
I just saw images of it and a few taglines where he was just saying all this bold stuff.
You know, Judaism has no place in our society.
And, you know, we're Christian nationalists and there's this, you know, he's almost becoming Kanye West in this kind of weird way.
He's wearing sunglasses and there's weird, like, Matrix-y background going on.
And, but, you know, it was pretty wild.
But additionally, like, there's a way where Nick Fuentes is kind of getting cucked by the people in CPAC.
I mean...
There's no doubt that Nick Fuentes is more radical or bold or whatever than Michael Knowles, but it seems to be a matter of degree and not kind.
You know, the concept of the alt-right really was a total rejection of conservatism and a totally new starting point.
And, you know, we're casting out the Buckley movement.
Whole cloth.
We're starting over from a different standpoint.
That was at least my conception of the alt-right.
And I think even though a lot of the alt-right online activity in 2016 and 2015 was pretty salacious and superficial, it still had that aspect to it.
It wasn't libertarian.
It wasn't about free markets.
It wasn't about ending healthcare.
It wasn't about...
All these things that conservatives care about.
It was anti-war.
Trump was anti-war.
Trump denounced the Bush family on stage in South Carolina.
It was a kind of alternative in the sense of a new starting point.
Fast forward to 2023, and how are you going to really...
Again, how are you going to outperform or outbold or outradical?
Michael Knowles when he is effectively calling for genocide on stage and getting huge applause as a result.
So that dynamic has kind of gone away.
Now, I do think that the...
The GOP establishment attacking Trump and yet Trump continuing to win, I do think that dynamic has returned to a degree, and I kind of like it, to be honest.
It makes me sympathetic towards Trump of all of these people against him.
Notably, even the Claremont Institute, which made its name as the kind of intellectual rationalizers of Trumpism, has also gone heavy into DeSantis.
They have gone all in with him and they're directly attacking Trump.
I don't know.
I feel more sympathy towards him because the exact same people who weren't destroyed by Trump's rise in 2016 absorbed Trump by 2017 on gained much from Trump.
Like the ending of Obamacare, the tax cuts, etc., are kind of back at it, being attacked by him.
And I generally do think the same thing will happen again, but I don't know.
Maybe you could argue there's something just so radical or just even so toxic about Trump.
He actually will end up destroying these people.
I could imagine...
I definitely think Trump is going to win the GOP primary, which is a little bit less than a year away now.
And I think that's going to be pretty clear even by the fall and winter of this year.
But if he doesn't, I could easily imagine him running third party and just saying, like, I can't in good conscience.
Support all these cucks and rhinos who want to take away social security and start more neocon wars or whatever he's going to say.
I could easily see him doing that.
And I could easily see him kind of finishing the job against the GOT establishment that he wasn't able to do at that time.
I'm not a liberal and I think that they're generally wrong.
And I am opposed to them.
just they're just kind of a less appealing um antagonist or opponent for whatever reason uh whereas uh the christian nationalists are kind of more openly sort of uh belligerent and obnoxious um so it's i i mean i i I'm glad to actually have both adversaries, but to be able to define myself against Christian nationalists.
So I think it's a good contrast for us.
I'm grateful for it.
And I think it actually ultimately...
Helps us.
So I think that however things play out, and I think that they're kind of playing out in a certain direction, in a certain trajectory, and things are becoming more Christian nationalist, I think it actually ultimately favors us.
And it gives us a good, again, a kind of like opponent or contrast.
And this is something that Nietzsche talked about as well, is that for his ideas or for his perspective to succeed, it would actually benefit the Nietzschean perspective if Christianity became more powerful, right?
So I think that that's true.
So, I mean, it's, you know, in a way we're defined by our enemies and we're only, you know, and so we take our worth to some extent from our enemies.
So if we don't have good or formidable or powerful enemies, then we on some level are unable to become sort of powerful or formidable ourselves.
So I like that.
I like the kind of direction, even though...
I'm against it, if that makes sense to you.
Isn't it also just kind of honest in a way that we're going to boil down conservatism to its essential ingredients?
Let's stop pretending that you're actually going to limit government or something like that.
This is an identity movement.
Of middle American Christians.
And they're kind of...
They're also kind of post-Christians in a way.
And I don't mean that they are necessarily unchurched, although many of them are.
And I don't mean that they're anti-Christian or a-Christian or whatever.
They're kind of post-Christians in the sense that the structure...
They don't know a lot about their own religion.
They don't know a lot about the Bible and they haven't thought seriously about these things.
But the kind of structure of Christianity is maintained in their ideology.
But they would probably more likely call each other patriots than they would call each other fellow Christians.
And they are both kind of like against Rome or the Pharisees or something in government, but then kind of hyper-patriots.
Patriotic at the same time.
And they kind of have a notion of saving America or something.
And I think a lot of this is really empty on some level.
One thing that Charles has said, which I definitely think is accurate, is that there's this motive on the right to have a kind of...
Empty yet violent revolt against your enemies.
So it's like the Flight 93 election.
You know, we've got to just run and seize the cockpit from the terrorist.
And isn't that just leading directly to and kind of prophesying and causing, on some level, J6, where it's this, you know, like...
Mad dash to get to the Capitol and yell about Trump and hang Mike Pence and all this kind of stuff.
But at the end of the day, it's just kind of fundamentally empty.
You know, it's like, what are you going to do?
Where are you going to fly this plane if you get control of it?
What are you going to what do you why do you want Donald Trump to be your president for another four years?
What are you going to actually do with this?
There's just like fundamental emptiness to what they're doing.
But then there's this like...
Class and quasi-race hatred of liberals and literal demonization of them.
But at the end of the day, it's like this empty thing.
And you could see that.
J6ers kind of won in a way.
They disrupted the votes.
And they're wandering around the Capitol with these kind of like dazed looks in their eyes.
Not having any clue of what they've just done or what they will do in the future.
Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right.
I mean, that's something I was thinking about today is that, you know, Jan 6 obviously was not a political coup in the sense that they, you know, they took over the Capitol and now they're our government, right?
Which, you know, obviously it was never intended as that.
It was a political protest that...
You know, ended up getting out of control, ultimately.
But they occupied the Capitol illegally.
And it was a kind of very striking moment.
But symbolically, I mean, basically, it led to a kind of victory on, like, in other words, it was effectively a kind of symbolic coup that was successful, right?
Because now we have Taylor Greene in there, we have Lauren Boebert, you know, all these guys who were We're formerly kind of marginal figures in American politics, but are now, you know, they're legitimately part of the political landscape in D.C., these new representatives.
And they are essentially the kind of the fruit of Jan 6. So the coup did succeed.
It was a symbolic coup, but it did ultimately succeed.
So they're in the White House.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, and I think also, too, it's not like, it's easy for me to say, and I think it's mostly true, I have, I view the Christian nationalists in a kind of, in an oppositional way.
I view them as ultimately adversaries, but I do think that they also kind of in their...
I don't know, sort of incoherent and kind of clumsy way.
They're also kind of like destroying some taboos that are useful to be destroyed.
So especially kind of on the sort of race and ethnic questions.
But they're doing it in a kind of savage and unsophisticated way that ultimately is not terribly useful in the future.
But I think that they're...
They're kind of rudely like breaking through these doors.
But those doors should be broken.
Some of those doors should be broken.
And in a lot of ways, it makes it easier for us to kind of like, you know, arrive with a sort of more sophisticated view or analysis of the situation and to, you know, apply a kind of gentler hand or seem like the more reasonable or gentle voice.
But yeah, some of these taboos needed to go.
And Christian nationalism, I mean, Christianity by itself, I mean, obviously, the subtext, there's a kind of racial or ethnic subtext here that's part of this kind of alchemy, though it is ultimately also a Christian movement.
But that movement needs this sort of racial and ethnic subtext.
And I think that some of the taboos or the cats that are coming out of the bag, so to speak, This is all good, ultimately.
And their sort of rough or rude or vulgar treatment of these topics benefits us in the long run, is my view.
Because we'll have a kind of more sophisticated view of it.
And, you know, I think that we'll find not, you know, I mean, I don't think that we'll...
Immediately find friends across the board, but I think that people will look at us and be like, okay, well, this is a more sophisticated group that is not completely irrational.
It's not a group about to commit pogroms or something like this, but is looking for reasonable or realistic long-term solutions that can ultimately help solve these very difficult racial and ethnic problems in a sophisticated and peaceful way.
You know, with kind of long-term view.
So I think it's good.
So I think that they are kind of these sort of berserker shock troops that ultimately, like on one hand, they're our enemies, but on another, they're kind of these berserker shock troops who are kind of like opening these doors in a kind of haphazard and clumsy way that need to be opened.
Like we need to kind of like...
Break some of these taboos on race and ethnicity for us to start to develop a kind of vision or path forward.
So I guess my view is somewhat ambivalent, even though I call them ultimately adversaries, and I'm happy to call them adversaries.
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