RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - The Inevitable Empire

March 23, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

02:17:34

The Inevitable Empire

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comNeema Parvini (aka “Academic Agent”) joins Richard and Mark for a wide-ranging conversation. Topics include “woke,” how music played a role in the fall of the Soviet Union, the nature of the American empire, “frontiers” and the American mentality, and how mainstream conservatives are increasingly radicalized, and more…

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	One of the little things I stumbled on a while back that may be of interest to some people, you've heard of the lawyer Alan Dersovich, right?
	He's a kind of hotshot lawyer.
	I think he does defamation cases and things like that.
	But he's been around for a long time and he's often on television a lot.
	And obviously Alan Dersovich is Jewish.
	One of the little things I stumbled on, I was writing a piece for Chronicles, which ended up...
	Well, I ended up basically saying I basically just can't run this piece because of the stuff I ran into.
	One of the things I discovered is that literally for about 20 years, Alan Dershowitz would write an article in which he called Pat Buchanan a Nazi.
	I mean, literally...
	Four or five times a year, he had a long running column.
	He tried to get Buchanan taken off air.
	He just attacked Buchanan a lot and called him an anti-Semite and a fascist and a Nazi and all the rest of it.
	One of the things I couldn't help but notice is that his record on Donald Trump was quite different.
	He had literally the opposite record of defending Trump whenever he...
	Whenever, really, he had a chance.
	And he represented him a few times, if you remember.
	He was the only lawyer.
	At his impeachment trial, yes.
	The first impeachment one, yeah.
	He represented.
	And I thought, well, that made me wonder, actually.
	Because back in 2000, if you remember, Trump was thinking about running.
	And it did make me wonder whether part of Trumpism was to...
	Kind of kill the Buchananism, if you want.
	Paul Gottfried seemed to think not, but I mean, what do you think?
	I think so.
	I mean, look, if you go back, this is the remarkable story of Trumpism, which is just filled with ironies and contradictions and so on.
	When he was running for the Reform Party, so the Reform Party emerged, and it might very well be still around, but it's a husk of its former self, but it emerged with Ross Perot's campaign in the 90s.
	And Ross Perot was a really interesting figure.
	He ran against George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992.
	And I can remember myself back...
	In those days, I mean, I was quite young.
	I guess I was, what was I, 12 or 14 or something like that?
	Just kind of being instinctively enthusiastic about Ross Perot because he was going against the system.
	He was putting himself out there.
	But it was a lot of doom and gloom deficit hawkery, I guess.
	But he was also against free trade.
	And he was a man of the era right after the fall of the Soviet Union, along with Pat Buchanan, who these are former Cold Warriors who are basically saying, come home America.
	I mean, that was the title, literally, of one of Pat Buchanan's essays in the national interest of, we did the Cold War thing, it's over, we won, now it's time to totally rethink.
	What America is.
	And again, he kind of lost that argument, as it were, to Fukuyama or Charles Krauthammer talking about the unipolar world and the first Iraq war, the second Iraq war and onward.
	America is an empire.
	And so anyway, this thing existed, which the Reform Party, that expressed a certain incoherent Though viscerally powerful middle American rage, you could say.
	You know, like something is going wrong.
	We don't quite know what it is, but we need some outsider to come in and fix it.
	And, you know, I'm being a little bit sarcastic in depicting it that way, but that's also a real thing.
	You know, that emotion.
	And it's a powerful one.
	And Trump got involved in the Reform Party because he's been talking about running for president since the late 80s, I believe.
	He was involved in the Reform Party and he himself was calling Pat Buchanan a Nazi.
	So Pat Buchanan ran in 92 on the Republican ticket and he ran again in 96. And then he ran this kind of even more hopeless campaign in 2000.
	He had a black female running mate.
	That created the 2000 issue of the hanging chads because all of these Jews in Miami were voting for Pat Buchanan because of the butterfly ballot.
	All these just kind of funny things that come back.
	And it is kind of amusing that there was a ballot issue.
	Jews, retiring former New York City Jews, living in Miami, were like, I can't believe I voted for Papi Cannon.
	It's kind of amusing.
	Now, of course, Richard, that is literally Ron DeSantis' base, right?
	That same group.
	The same group, yeah, next generation, yeah.
	And so anyway, he called Trump in the 2000s, was suggesting that Oprah be his running mate.
	To take the Reform Party ticket.
	And he was explicitly calling out Buchanan as a Nazi.
	Like, we've got to reform the Reform Party.
	It shouldn't be about this.
	And things like that.
	And that stuff's on the record.
	I mean, it's very real.
	And I think he actually also said, we need to get rid of the Buchanans and the Dukes of the world.
	And you notice, if you fast forward to 2016, He claimed extremely implausibly that he had no idea who David Duke is, even though he called him out by name a mere 15 years earlier.
	And so there is this kind of interesting way in which Trump is able to kind of like channel that energy, which is very real, but then kind of almost pacify it and play with it.
	So, I mean, I think this is where Trump is so kind of contradictory, and it is a kind of Trump v.
	Trump.
	You know, effect.
	Where, I mean, someone in this group, who might even be on this call, articulated it really well.
	He said, isn't it amazing that the most fearsome Zionists and the most fearsome anti-Semites vote for the same candidate?
	You know, so David Duke and Alan Dershowitz both voted for Trump.
	And isn't that remarkable?
	Now, that has something to do with the party structure of two big tents, and you bring in lots of different people.
	But I think it's actually deeper than that.
	I think you could plausibly make an argument that it's like this.
	This energy out there, which is incohate and incoherent, this populist energy is out there, and it can spill over into certain directions.
	Many of them are, it could spill over into anti-Zionism.
	It could spill over into outright anti-Semitism.
	It could spill over into white nationalism.
	It could kind of do all these things.
	And we kind of need to create a good channel for that water.
	Water will just flow.
	You can kind of re-channel the river.
	And flow it into something else.
	And I think a really intelligent Jew like Alan Dershowitz maybe grasped that.
	And a less intelligent Jew, someone reading the New York Times and things like that, sees Trump as just this, oh my gosh, this is literally Hitler and blah, blah, blah.
	Maybe someone like Alan Dershowitz is a little bit smarter than many of his contemporaries.
	You know, hardcore Israeli nationalists, you know, like the sort of people who would vote for Netanyahu, for example.
	Right.
	They see, I mean, I guess at this point you might call it like Populism Inc.
	I'm thinking like Salvini in Italy, Le Pen.
	You know, all of the kind of quote-unquote nationalists around the world, they see them as their natural allies.
	And, you know, I've had the thought more than once that, I mean, if I think of various figures from various scenes, you know, there's that Canadian outlet, what's it called, Rebel Media?
	Rebel, yeah.
	There was Tommy Robinson in the UK who also, strangely...
	Love the nation of Israel.
	And it did make me think more than once that if you're a hardcore Israeli nationalist, you're probably seeing globalism ultimately as an enemy in the long run, right?
	And so from a certain point of view...
	Maybe it's doomed, regardless of that.
	The season will pass.
	Yeah, so I guess what I'm saying is, from a certain point of view, for the fault line to be globalism versus nationalism kind of plays into their nationalism when you start to think of Israel.
	And I don't know if we could use this maybe to segue into the other thing we were going to talk about, but in a strange way, Israel is like a facsimile of a 1930s European...
	Nation state, right?
	Which had a short...
	Which really, in the overall scheme of history, is a short-run phenomena.
	I mean, literally from about 1850 till the end of World War II.
	1914, yeah.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah, I mean, that is a thought I've had more than once.
	That there's a kind of natural fault line there, which maybe, I mean...
	It makes more sense if you see a genuine split between the Hollywood types and the hardcore Israeli types.
	But I don't know if Mark has more developed views on this sort of thing, because I don't spend a huge amount of time trying to pass it, because after a certain amount of time, I just give up.
	It becomes opaque to me.
	I tend to look at other things.
	Yeah, jump in, Mark.
	Oh, sure.
	In terms of what aspect are you referring to?
	Well, the creation of a Caducean relationship between nationalism and globalism that is supported by, you know, not even all Israelis.
	I think we should be specific here, but Likud most prominently.
	Yeah, no, I mean, well, you know, I think that there is a line, of course, that they won't cross.
	But I mean, I think, you know, I think if we look at Israel vis-a-vis Ukraine in a kind of earnest way, I think that probably the sentiment there is, they've tried to be neutral, right?
	And I think the reason that they've tried to be neutral is because of the danger inherent to the situation, right?
	They don't want to antagonize Putin because they don't want that to create conflicts in the Middle East with Syria or whatever the case might be.
	So I think that they've been very cagey in their public face as it concerns that war.
	But if I had to imagine that sort of the larger sentiment is in favor of Ukraine.
	And they have shown some support to Ukraine.
	They've sold them weapons.
	So to the extent that they've shown favor to either side, they've shown favor to Ukraine, but they've been careful.
	But Ukraine, of course, is known famously for these Nazi regimens that it has, right?
	The Azov.
	So how does that work, right?
	How is Israel a country?
	Four Jews supporting a country that has these ostensibly Nazi regiments in the field.
	But I think what it is, it relates to, I mean, I think that they are very practical, very utilitarian people.
	And this is probably something that's kind of imitable on some level.
	I don't think that they, I mean, I think that those sort of, those Nazi regiments are probably drawn from kind of white ghettos in Ukraine, effectively.
	So they were basically...
	They're not all skinheads, obviously, but they're tapping into a kind of culture there that is martial and that is venerating Adolf Hitler or whatever the case may be in the Nazi regime.
	And they're exploiting that instinct among a kind of lower class group, just to be frank, and kind of channeling that energy in a direction that's useful for them.
	But there's no reason that they would feel threatened by basically a group that, again, has been basically harvested from white ghettos.
	It's not a group that would otherwise, without the sort of organization of the Ukrainian government, it's not a group that would otherwise be threatening or dangerous to them.
	So they're very intelligent in this regard.
	I think that when...
	Something like white nationalism reaches a certain level, though, it's not something that can be played with, as it were, right?
	The famous example being national socialism in Germany, right?
	So that was a problem that had to be dealt with on a global level.
	They did play with it early on.
	There was a famous transfer agreement.
	Yeah, and there were Jews for Hitler.
	We agree, Jews need to leave Germany.
	And this gets to a fundamental contradiction.
	Within Zionism itself, which on one level, it kind of reinforces nationalism.
	It is basically, you know, at its origins, 19th century origins, it is a declaration that we cannot assimilate, it's never going to work, and we need to get out of here.
	And with Herzl and so on, these are, you know, highly sophisticated, secular, atheists.
	Who are making this type of argument.
	And it kind of works.
	There's also a lot of very religious Protestants who wanted to reenact the Bible, basically, who supported science.
	There's just a lot of kind of countervailing and seemingly contradictory winds that are all kind of blowing into creating a kind of tornado or vortex in Palestine.
	Yeah, I was also, just to go back to Ukraine at a moment, one of the things I've been kind of interested in is the extent to which the American empire will kind of have an allowable nationalism on its frontiers.
	And the case I would point to is actually in Poland.
	Do you remember when Trump gave that speech in Poland and everybody was like, oh, I can't believe...
	Trump is speaking to the evil right-wingers in Poland and so on.
	Well, if you notice, all of that talk has gone away because it's actually quite useful to have a nationalist-oriented Poland against the Russians, right?
	So I do wonder how much it's a deliberate strategy to kind of allow these nationalisms on the frontier because it's controlled, it's contained, it's within the...
	It's within their sphere of influence, if you want.
	Remember, when he gave that speech, I believe it was in 2017, and that coincided with the funding and implementation of missile systems.
	I think defensive, but basically pointed at Russia on the frontier.
	And Trump...
	Gave a blood and soil speech about, you know, we love Poland, you know, Christians, nations, like, this is what we're about, you know, kind of thing.
	And so, yeah, I mean, I think your instinct is absolutely right.
	You kind of, it's not strategically effective to just completely suppress something that is real.
	And, you know, a lot of nationalism is kind of incoherent.
	You know, emotional.
	You know, I mean, that's kind of the nature of the beast, is that you feel something powerful and you want to do something.
	Liberalism is more technocratic and rational and so on.
	Nationalism is emotional.
	And so, you know, do you want to just suppress that and say, you know, you're a bad person for feeling this?
	Or do you want to channel it, you know, in a proper way?
	And I think there are definitely people who want to do this with nationalism that's occurring right now.
	I mean, the national conservatism stuff that, you know, Peter Thiel was speaking at these meetings, presumably funding them to some degree, I don't know, at least speaking at them.
	And you have a, like, literally an ancient Hebrew scholar.
	I mean, it's very, it's kind of remarkable when I think about my own career that did involve paleoconservatism for a time.
	And, you know, when you would go to these meetings, I mean, we were not getting funded by Peter Thiel.
	We didn't have a...
	You know, Hebrew scholar in our midst, you know, talking to us.
	And it was much more marginal, you could say, and shoestring or bootstrap kind of thing.
	And, you know, if you scratched anyone there, you would find the alt-right or the dissident right.
	I mean, you wouldn't have to scratch too deep, in fact.
	And it is fascinating that paleoconservatism has been professionalized and funded.
	Beyond the wildest dreams of people who were involved in it at the time.
	But again, it's been created in this way that it's, at least from our perspective, neutered.
	And kind of channeled in the right direction.
	So this is what we're about.
	This is what it means to be a paleoconservative.
	We're a nationalist.
	We respect other nations.
	And Israel is a nation that we respect, among many others.
	And we're going to be somewhat Russia-philic, but not too much.
	You know, Goldilocks, just right.
	And it is, I think it's a very intelligent strategy when you look at it, even if it is a strategy that's inimical to me and other people, I can still kind of respect my enemy.
	They're not going to invite me to speak national conservatism.
	Let's just put it that way.
	Or Mark.
	I mean, I'm probably more likely than Mark.
	But they, you know, it's smart.
	It's dialectical, and I respect them for what they've done.
	Because they're taking something that could be a danger, and they're turning it into a benefit.
	And that's...
	I would call it containment myself, but this is what power has always done, really.
	It's able to turn its own descent into a...
	I don't know if you've ever seen any documentaries by Adam Curtis.
	I mean, you know, he's got a certain style, but I remember there was one where he actually went into the extent to which Vladimir Putin has done this, like actively funded his own protesters, which is, you know, remarkable in a way that the dissident group, even the dissident groups in Russia are secretly controlled by Putin.
	And if you're not, you're going to end up in jail or with poison in your belly.
	Or flat killed.
	Right.
	I think people like us, we need to learn something.
	Because if we were in power, we might be tempted down the brutal road of like, if you criticize me, I'm just going to kill you or something.
	And I can see that kind of type of energy in a lot of right-wingers in general, but it's not the smart move.
	It's, you know, the best opposition is the one that you control.
	This is why I spend so much time studying Tony Blair, believe it or not, because I just think he is, of all of the kind of political operators in the world, he is the person who understood this most, right?
	Is that the way to defeat the right was to absorb the right.
	To say, oh, I've heard you.
	Yes, blacks do do more crime.
	Yes, we're going to be tough on the causes of crime, and we're going to be tough.
	And basically to say, yeah, I've listened to you, and I'm going to do all the things that a quote-unquote right-wing government would do.
	And that basically takes the energy out of it and means you own the entire space.
	And it's one of the things that our current elites...
	Certainly in America, they seem to be going down a rather different path, a much more belligerent path where they're not making any of the obvious moves.
	I mean, to me, the obvious move to do in America, I mean, as much as this may horrify you and some of your listeners, is just to allow the right to win a few times.
	Put Trump or DeSantis in and make a show of dealing with immigration.
	They don't actually have to deal with it.
	But that would get the buy-in of millions of Americans who've opted out of the institutions and who no longer trust their government and who, you know, it would just take the wind out the sails of all of it.
	Instead, they keep on doing the opposite.
	I mean, Trump could be arrested tonight, which is just, in my mind, just insane.
	And also arrested over something that's really defensible.
	I mean, it's actually a misdemeanor.
	I mean, look.
	Okay.
	I remember.
	It's a little bit of a funny story.
	My mother, she's told me this story many times.
	She grew up in Louisiana.
	And so Louisiana is famous for being corrupt.
	It's almost charmingly corrupt, in fact.
	And when she was speaking with one of her college roommates or something who was outside of Louisiana, she was talking about a judge who got some payoff or something.
	She was like self-righteously horrified.
	And she was like, okay, so the judge got paid off.
	By the alcohol interest.
	So what's your point?
	She was like, what's the point of being a judge?
	And my mother is a very moral person.
	It's just when you're around Louisiana politics, you just inherently become a cynic.
	But, you know, it's like when I look at the Stormy Daniel stuff, I mean, look, it's just like, for goodness sakes, yeah, of course Trump.
	It's gross, I guess, but I just fundamentally don't care, and I'm not surprised by it.
	And of course, they paid off this floozy to not talk about it while he was winning the Republican nomination, at least.
	Who cares?
	And they're going to get him on this.
	I have to say, I think on multiple levels, I don't think these New York, the DA and the Attorney General...
	They're really smart about this because they're feeding into Trumpism, and I think they're going to gift him the nomination at the very least.
	I think they're going to create a kind of fanaticism where the Alvin Bragg – I actually listened to an interview of Alvin Bragg yesterday, and it was about a 30-minute interview, and it was – Puff piece, you know, here, this is your platform to shine, you know, like, please show us how smart you are.
	The guy is just not very sophisticated.
	And they fire their first shot, which is, you paid off a porn star to shut up.
	It's just, it is going, I mean, it is the wrong move, 100%, if what you want is to suppress Trumpism.
	And you're going to make it seem like a witch hunt.
	You're going to inspire his most fanatical supporters.
	And even Fairweather supporters are going to...
	I mean, look, I'm expressing sympathy for him, for God's sake.
	I mean, it's just...
	I don't think they're sophisticated.
	And so we have this enemy group, the elites, the liberal elites, and we almost...
	I think we're giving them too much credit to think that they actually understand what they're doing.
	I think they're kind of shooting from the hip, and it's going to backfire really horribly.
	And it doesn't have to.
	I've often had the thought, Richard, that if somebody like Edward Bernays, just to pick an example, could come back, he'd just be horrified.
	He'd spend his entire life just telling everybody off.
	Every Hollywood producer.
	He'd be like, we were so much better at everything than you guys are now.
	Why taunt them?
	Letitia James.
	This past weekend, so much happens.
	Letitia James, who's the Attorney General of New York...
	Excuse me.
	The District Attorney is Alvin Bragg.
	Attorney General of New York State, I believe.
	It's Letitia James.
	Correct me if I'm wrong.
	She hosted a drag queen story hour.
	Like, she was there.
	And of course, the Proud Boys, like, protested it.
	And of course, the police fought off the Proud Boys.
	And you don't...
	When you're winning, it's not the time to rub it in the face of your opponent.
	You know?
	Like, if you're up by three touchdowns, that's not the time to, like...
	Spike the ball and yell at the other side.
	I mean, that's the time to be more of a sportsman.
	And they don't get it.
	This is actually something that, because I spend a lot of time watching Tony Blair interviews that like 100 people watch and me, right?
	100 people and me.
	And I stream them as well.
	But something he always talks about is that the first rule of politics that he learned was, Say no to your own radicals, right?
	So if you're the leader of the Labour Party, as he was, or let's say you're Joe Biden, you're the leader of the Democrats, you basically have to spend all your time shutting down the Bernie bros, shutting down the insane radical left and so on, because the people you're trying to win are the people who might vote Tory or might vote Republican.
	You know, they're the kind of undecided people in the middle.
	And broadly speaking, their instincts are small C conservative, right?
	So you need to make a big show of getting those and saying no to the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and so on and so forth, so that you capture that center ground.
	And then when you've got the power, you can completely transform the country as Tony Blair did, right?
	And I think a lot of people...
	I mean, Curtis Yarvin was one of them.
	Maybe you were another one.
	May have had the thought that Biden might do this, right?
	That they might go back to kind of late 90s.
	Because Clinton did similar sorts of things, right?
	He spent a lot of his time in power basically doing things that if a Republican had done, then they'd be called a fascist.
	And maybe the thought was that Biden might do this.
	But I'm still waiting for it to happen.
	I mean, they're just not...
	I mean, has Biden done any of this?
	I think he has.
	Okay, I think you might have a bit of a colored lens because you're from outside the U.S. and you're looking at it with too much influence from the dissident right.
	I think Biden himself has attempted in his own way.
	Biden's not as sophisticated, at least rhetorically, as Tony Blair or Bill Clinton or something, although those guys are extremely apt.
	I think he genuinely wants to bring things together.
	And he wants to, you know, he ends every speech saying, God bless the troops.
	I mean, he's an old man.
	He's an old white guy from a different generation.
	He's not even a boomer.
	He's a silent generation.
	And I think those are his political instincts, and I think he has been relatively successful.
	I think the entire left in general just can't help themselves.
	And he has to, he can't really, he can discipline his own side to some degree by just kind of de-emphasizing.
	Or talking about the dangers of MAGA extremism and things like that.
	But he can't really...
	He can't do much more than that.
	And he's not willing to do...
	So you can find interviews of him embracing transgender therapy for children.
	I mean, he's kind of caught in a hard place.
	But I don't think he...
	I think the depiction of him as like...
	Right, yeah.
	I mean, maybe he just doesn't have the wherewithal now to do all the Tony Blair moves, all the Bill Clinton moves, essentially.
	Because that requires a certain strength and dynamism to be on top of.
	And this is something that I think the left has, I mean, I say the left, the regime has lost big time within its own You know, within our lifetimes, which is what they used to call message discipline, right?
	They used to be very good at having key lines, they'd say.
	Whereas now, I mean, I don't know if it's because of social media or just because of the quality of people in place or so on.
	They're all over the shop.
	They just don't know.
	It's like a kind of, on any given week, it's like a scattergun where, you know, there are five or six different lines and you're not sure what's going on.
	Nobody's quite sure.
	I mean, they look for a while, like CNN was dialing it back for a bit, and now they're going all in on this arrest thing.
	I mean, it's just like, it feels like they don't have coherent strategy, which, again, I guess is a sign of a kind of late stage elite, I suppose, who need to be cycled out.
	Yeah, I do think it's a late stage elite, and I don't think we're...
	Really offering something to the world about being a part of the American empire.
	And I think that actually is a fatal issue.
	Sorry, I'm just getting a text message here.
	I might have to respond to that.
	But let me make this point.
	So I have this very long article now, it's extremely long, on U2 of all things.
	I actually wrote this around a year ago.
	I revisited it.
	Doubled in size.
	I talk about a lot of different things in that article, including the concept of even better than the real thing.
	One of the things I talk about is the way in which U2, which is a deeply Americanized band, they almost prophesied the end of the Cold War, but I think they even on some level caused it.
	And I mean that seriously.
	This is a bold claim.
	I totally understand that.
	And it's fine to chuckle.
	But I'm also very serious when I say that.
	And what I mean by that is when you...
	You can in some ways speak something into being.
	And what you two did in a song like New Year's Day is they offered this new world of togetherness that would happen.
	And that song was directly about the Polish protest, actually.
	Where we could be as one.
	One is that.
	We're one, but not the same.
	That line came from Bono, who was invited to speak at a conference by the Dalai Lama on oneness.
	He said, I'm not sure I can do this because we're one, but we're not the same.
	That became a line in the Octoon Baby album.
	I'm going maybe too far afield in my U2 fandom.
	Get ready for the big Depeche Mode.
	Depeche Mode are the ultimate expressions of Protestantism.
	That's coming.
	I'm willing to make these crazy arguments.
	Back to you, too.
	When you offer some vision that we're torn into we can be one tonight, you almost cause...
	You cause what you're depicting because you're offering a vision of what the world could be afterward.
	It's cultural propaganda.
	Sting did something similar.
	He had a song called Russians.
	One of the repeating choruses or phrases in it is that the Russians love their children too.
	Do you remember that song?
	I vaguely, I'll have to go look at that song.
	It was a popular song.
	I mean, they were playing it on the radio.
	1985 was when the song was released.
	And it was kind of, and there were these sort of countervailing anti-Russian forces in the media as well at the time.
	Remember, Drago was Rocky's opponent, so he was a kind of anti-Russian symbol.
	Look, you could make a similarly ridiculous argument that Rocky IV caused into the Cold War.
	Remember, in Rocky IV, in that battle, Drago is like...
	They start rooting for him, yeah.
	He is made of steel or something.
	And they start rooting for Rocky.
	Which is just, when you think about the notion of a home team rooting for the other side, I don't know if that's ever happened since the Greeks started the Olympic Games.
	Yeah, and there also grew this impression that the Russian athletes are the only ones that have done steroids, right?
	Which I don't think, which we've seen is absolutely false, right?
	But that was the sort of impression that grew from that propaganda or propaganda like that.
	Hey Mark, you don't remember the East German swim team?
	That's true.
	The East German ladies swim team.
	Oh yeah, well I'm not defending their abuse of steroids.
	I think that they were absolutely using steroids.
	But I think that Americans were also using steroids and have been using steroids since.
	You know what I mean?
	I was going to say to Richard's point that it was certainly in the ether.
	In the mid-80s there.
	I always remember the Queen song, One Vision.
	Remember that?
	I mean, the lyrics, I pulled them up here.
	One man, one goal, one mission, one heart, one soul, just one solution.
	No right, no wrong.
	I'm going to tell you there's no black and no white, no blood, no stain.
	All we need is one worldwide vision.
	It was definitely around.
	Yes.
	Right through the kind of pop music of the...
	Of the 80s and 90s.
	The classic kind of post-Beatles music that was extremely influential and kind of global in a way.
	I mean, U2 has always been an alternative act, but it's kind of like the one global band.
	There's another aspect of the Christianity.
	So U2 were members of this...
	A Protestant sect called Shalom.
	I'm kind of giving away the article here, but they actually met a man named Christopher Rowe at a McDonald's in Dublin.
	It was kind of like the perfect...
	Or they met his church.
	They met one of his emissaries at a McDonald's in Dublin.
	It was almost like the ultimate expression of Americanization in the Cold War and so on.
	The band is named after an American spy plane.
	But anyway, it was this kind of Judaizing, as the name implies, hyper-Protestant missionary group.
	And they were very much influenced by this.
	And I do think the vision that they offered was kind of rock and roll Christianity.
	So another lyric that's forgotten in Sunday Bloody Sunday, which is ostensibly about...
	The 1972, I believe, attacks where British paratroopers shot a dozen people or something like that.
	You can correct me if I'm wrong.
	But it's about so much more than that.
	And it's about how I'm not going to heed the battle call.
	This is not the battle we should be fighting, this nationalist stuff.
	And as Bono said, this is not a rebel song.
	And at the last chorus, while the band's singing Sunday, Bloody Sunday, he says the real battle's just begun to claim the victory Jesus won.
	And you don't hear that.
	It's often missed.
	But it's explicitly saying that, like, We could all be one tonight through rock music and through this Dionysian revelry of being at a concert and being drunk and listening to rock and roll, that kind of stuff.
	But he also placed in it, this is the victory that Jesus won.
	That's the victory that we need to battle for, is a one-world culture.
	Based on, in Bono's imagination, Christianity.
	I mean, Bono and the Edge were members of this cult.
	They've never denounced it.
	They are clearly Christians.
	They're global Christians.
	And they're kind of offering that.
	I guess the point that I was making before was that, you know, say what you will about that kind of stuff.
	And I'm sure people in this group will have various criticisms and so on that are accurate.
	But it was...
	It was a kind of offering to the Eastern Bloc, come take part in Coca-Cola and McDonald's and Levi's jeans and rock music and Hollywood films and we're one but not the same.
	So it was a kind of offer to go there.
	And I do think that the American empire in our kind of late stage were inwardly directed and were attacking one another.
	What does it mean to win this conflict with Russia?
	What does it really mean?
	What kind of dream are you going to dream now that you're out from under the boot of the Kremlin?
	Again, as I've made clear, I'm very sympathetic towards the NATO side and to the Ukrainian side.
	I do recognize the limitations.
	In some ways, this is a kind of rehearsal of something, but not the real thing.
	We're not really offering them something new.
	It's more of just Russia bad.
	And Russia, in a way, has done, I think, better propaganda in this way.
	Not all NATO propaganda has been bad.
	I've seen some Some good stuff.
	But it's been kind of absent.
	And Russia has engaged in, on the cheap, what is actually really powerful propaganda that is appealing to the right in the United States by saying, you know, we don't like transsexuals.
	Marriage is between a man and a woman.
	We're based.
	We're Christians.
	You know, all of those things can be disputed.
	I could show you statistics on drug use in Russia, statistics on divorce, statistics on abortion, statistics on all sorts of things.
	Russia has a lot of problems, as Trump might say.
	But it doesn't matter because it is something that they're offering the world where a right winger could have a stake in that battle.
	And they could say, we're fighting for...
	That's why.
	What is NATO offering?
	You know?
	Like Russia bad?
	That just gets old.
	Increasingly, I think, a lot of the perception of what the American Empire stands for, unfortunately, is the pride flag and affirmative action policies for the colored third world.
	I mean, that's increasingly what...
	It seems like America stands for.
	And it doesn't have to be that way.
	I mean, I'm old enough to remember the messaging that I received as a young man from Ronald Reagan's America.
	And that was, you know, it was still McDonald's and Coca-Cola, but it was kind of masculine as well.
	You know, it was kind of like fighter jets and He-Man and WWF wrestling.
	I mean, these were all kind of...
	I guess, masculine or rocky, if you want.
	I mean, they're all expressions of, you know, it's still the same neocon gender.
	It's just got a different clothing.
	Whereas there's not a lot really there for young men to get excited about.
	Unless, of course, young men are excited about sleeping with transsexuals or whatever.
	Well, perhaps we shouldn't underestimate that appeal, but nevertheless, I completely agree.
	I have seen something, maybe something like Top Gun Maverick, which was filmed in 2019, interestingly, but maybe there's some there there.
	I mean, that was the most popular film of...
	Of 2021 and or 2022, I guess.
	And it was, you know, 80s nostalgia, Tom Cruise, a diversity, but it was kind of almost like we're one and the same or we're many in the same because there were everyone there was diverse faces.
	There were brown faces and so on.
	But everyone is kind of American and badass, you know, even.
	I remember.
	Kind of a surprise.
	I mean, I don't know how much of a hit it was, but I enjoyed it immensely.
	It was Quentin Tarantino's last film.
	It's called Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
	And it was just a kind of, you know, it was just an opportunity to watch Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt be badass for a while.
	They beat Bruce Lee up at one point, which was controversial, but it was still like a cool film.
	Oh yeah, and they just mutilated the Manson hippie types as well.
	Yeah, they absolutely did some kind of Tarantino-esque ultraviolence at the end.
	But the point is, it wouldn't really take that much to, I guess, go back to a mode of a more robust American propaganda that actually appeals to people.
	Kind of what they've been doing, which is, you know, let's face it, just irritating their fan bases in the name of wokeism or whatever.
	You know, I mean, it's very tired to all of us, but, you know, just the ABCs of like good, I mean, all of the movies you would mark, reviewed back in the day, like Karate Kid or Jaws or whatever.
	I mean, this was effective propaganda.
	And it became part of people's childhoods and things.
	And those are the things that a kind of mass empire like this has to use.
	My view is that basically necessity will force it back because ultimately if they want to maintain an empire they need to have young men sign up for the army.
	Period.
	So I feel like, you know, there's some aspect of the people in charge who kind of, I mean, let me put it a different way.
	I'll put this to you.
	Do you believe that if the regime, as we sometimes call it, really didn't want Elon Musk to control Twitter, that they would have been able to stop him?
	That's a genuine question I will ask.
	Or if they really didn't want Ron DeSantis controlling Florida as an example, do you think they could have just put that away?
	Because my sense is that we have seen what they're like when they really, really don't want something out there.
	And I don't get that impression when it comes to likes of Musk or DeSantis.
	I feel like they want those voices out there.
	Or they want anti-woke to be a mainstream narrative.
	Otherwise, why is it everywhere?
	I mean, it's a vote-winning line, even for the Tory party here now.
	That's a genuine question I have for everybody.
	I kind of feel like they want it to happen.
	I would say that, yeah, I think they...
	It's an interesting question because it's very complicated.
	I do think that there are some absorption kind of instincts where we want to have a little bit of...
	Again, it's a smart instinct.
	Don't destroy your opponent.
	Kind of let him beat him, but kind of let him come back and absorbed into your polity.
	I would hold...
	I think Musk...
	It's opening up a can of worms because I think Musk might be not long for this world for many different reasons.
	Not in terms of dying, but in terms of being involved in some really shady shit and so on.
	I think it is a very good question.
	I think with someone like DeSantis, he's not He's not really pushing that hard.
	But, you know, I've made the argument as well, like, and I'll get to you, Johnny, you raise your hand.
	Like, if you think about the Roe v.
	Wade decision, so the Supreme Court is the inner sanctum of inner sanctums.
	And it might be symbolic in many ways, but it is, if you want to kind of come up with an elite...
	This is it.
	And they allowed the Roe v.
	Wade decision to be overturned.
	They encouraged it.
	And no one really stopped it.
	And we'll see what happens.
	A lot of this depends on elections and public mood, but I could definitely envision a world in which abortion is basically banned nationwide, in fact.
	There are moneyed interests that want to do this.
	The Federalist Society received a donation in the billions of dollars.
	I mean, it's incredible, in fact.
	They were given a business by Barry's side that's a multi-billion dollar business.
	Anyway, I could see that.
	And maybe is it that there's a portion of the elite that actually does worry about demographics and wants to kind of force the issue and say, This has actually gone too far.
	Immigration can't actually solve this problem.
	For among other reasons, these other countries have that same demographic collapse as well.
	Mexico is undergoing a demographic collapse.
	And immigration creates its own problems.
	So maybe we kind of need to force Americans to have children.
	And we can dress it up in legalism.
	I'm not positive this is what happened, but I am positive that this is, in a way, how elites can operate.
	That's interesting, Richard, because I remember there's a...
	In the absolutely massive book by Pareto, which is about 3 million words long, so don't ask me where this is, but at some point...
	He points out, he says, listen, Preto has this idea that ideology is bullshit, right?
	That most of the time, the elites are driven by more practical concerns and they justify it after the fact, right?
	Or they're driven by gut-level instincts and then all of the kind of superstructural residues are...
	Kind of things grafted on top.
	But he has this passage somewhere.
	He says, like, listen, when the birth rate is, when there's overpopulation, the elites will give you arguments to reduce the birth rate somehow, right?
	To increase the birth rate somehow.
	And they'll have policies that encourage the population to procreate.
	And when...
	And when, you know, when it's the opposite of that, then you'll get all the arguments coming out for reducing the birth rate or, you know, culling the population, etc., etc.
	It's kind of interesting to think about that our current elites would do it in such a way where the actual issue is hidden.
	So it's done under the guise of, you know, the abortion debate in America, but actually it's just the real thing driving it is.
	You know, it is that.
	And in fact, he gives several examples of where, you know, elites in the same country within the space of like 60 or 70 years make the opposite argument based on what the population is doing at that time.
	So kind of interesting thing to think about.
	It is.
	Johnny, do you want to jump in?
	Sure.
	Thanks, Richard.
	In regards to Elon Musk and DeSantis, just from my perspective, liberalism is the liberal system we live under.
	It's sort of like a fragile system.
	So any type of diversion into illiberalism, whether you put the screws to Musk or you put the screws to DeSantis legally or financially, I just think it creates a recipe for the breakdown of the current order.
	Does that make sense?
	Where, like, liberalism has to operate under ostensibly, quote, law and order, or else it just sort of falls apart.
	It can sort of collapse in on itself, even with, like, the iron laws of institutions and all that stuff.
	I just don't think that if you start acting in an illiberal fashion, our elites, I just think it's a recipe for disaster.
	Does that make sense?
	Because, I mean, even, like, even in the U.S. in the far right.
	They don't have to show themselves in a way.
	Right.
	Take off the belt to close.
	Right.
	They would have to reveal the fact that there are higher interest than allowing a free flow of money and ideas.
	And they're, generally speaking, not eager to do that.
	I think they like an idea where we think that, you know...
	It's McCarthy versus Pelosi, and DeSantis and AOC.
	It's a kind of battle between these figures that, you know, you don't have to be terribly cynical to define these figures as really largely symbolic.
	The thing that interests me, though, is that those two figures, Musk and DeSantis, are easily way more true to kind of American liberalism than their opponents are.
	If you read the, one of the articles I did a while back on my Substack was I went through the Stop Woke Act.
	I mean, the Stop Woke Act is basically something that wouldn't be a place in like communist Russia or something, or in this country we have something called the Equality Act 2010.
	I mean, the Stop Woke Act is, I mean, it might as well just say I ban racism in Florida, right?
	I mean, he's doing it.
	Like, DeSantis is doing that with the idea of stopping CRT and so on.
	But it's all under the rubric of anti-racism and of asserting equality and of doing away with, I guess, the idea of voluntary association.
	Like, you just, like, you have to be friends with.
	People of all different races, you know?
	I'm glad you brought this up.
	Yeah, I'll need to...
	It operates under the rubric of liberalism, all right?
	It's still operating under liberalism.
	Oh, no question.
	It's almost operating under a hyper-liberalism because I...
	I mean, let me go into this just a little bit.
	I mean, there was actually an article in the New York Times last week or this weekend on how one of these textbooks does not want to be divisive.
	And so they're struggling.
	And the textbook industry is multi-multi-billions, as you can imagine, with the number of public schools that are making huge orders of tens of thousands of textbooks.
	And they were struggling to talk about Rosa Parks because they almost wanted to do it in a non-racial way.
	And I almost find myself taking the side of the 1619 project or something on a lot of these issues.
	Like, it wasn't...
	Like, the Civil War was fundamentally about slavery.
	And it was actually...
	That was the...
	Not the...
	There were other causes, but that was the primary one.
	And that was one that...
	It could not be removed.
	If it were removed, the Civil War would never have taken place.
	And many other causes flowed from that basic issue.
	And I think you could even say that it wasn't so much about slavery as just race itself and the status of these things.
	But anyway, there's this weird way in which I do think the left are...
	Are far more accurate in this way, in the sense that they're willing to go there and discuss this matter.
	And I think, you know, when there's an issue, as you probably saw on Twitter, about, you know, how do you define wokeness and...
	Some poor young girl who wrote a book on wokeness was asked, what is woke?
	And she was just standing there.
	She can't answer it.
	It's kind of funny in a way.
	But it is obviously the term is overused and it's used for anything.
	It's like you want to take away gas stoves.
	That's woke or whatever.
	It's obviously misused, overused.
	But I think one way to define it is demoralizing in a way.
	DeSantis wants a vision, and other conservatives, they want a patriotic, but also post-racial or egalitarian vision of America.
	So we had this, you know, and Ted Cruz used these terms exactly.
	He's like, our original sin was slavery.
	So he's using, you know, Christian language.
	So we had this, there were some bad people once upon a time, but there are no more bad people.
	And we got rid of the bad people and we kind of overcame this into a post-racial liberal community.
	And that, from their standpoint, is moralizing.
	And I think the woke people are saying things that they probably do rub us the wrong way.
	But they are historically accurate.
	Well, actually...
	Slavery didn't really end, and the plantation system went away eventually, but the basic structure of society and hierarchies was maintained for a long time, even maintained after the Civil Rights Movement.
	And if you look at just a basic kind of ethnic nepotism when it comes to starting a business, or who do you go to church with, or who do you give priority to, and so on, we're still...
	Racist, you know, in many ways.
	And they're kind of poking at American society, not letting them have their dream.
	Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned this, Richard, because from my point of view, probably all of the worst scholarship ever published, ever produced by anybody, is basically like center-right mainstream history.
	From like 1960 to now, right?
	I mean, stuff that will be put out by the Hoover Institute or like, you know, the latest biography of Winston Churchill or whatever it is.
	I mean, I've said this before, like the left get a lot wrong, but what they get right, they get more right than the current centre-right, whose basically entire worldview is built on lies, on trying to maintain a kind of fiction.
	I mean, I'll give you an example.
	I mean, I was asked to do a piece on Thomas Carlyle a while back, and I've got lots and lots of books on Thomas Carlyle.
	Thomas Carlyle supported slavery, right?
	He wrote a...
	A famous pamphlet which caused him to fall out with J.S. Mill called An Occasional Discourse on the End Question, right?
	He supported.
	He had authoritarian views.
	He had the great man view of history.
	He refused honors from Benjamin Disraeli because he didn't like the group that Benjamin Disraeli came from.
	This was who he was, right?
	And it's...
	Part and parcel of his thought, if you pick up a textbook on Thomas Carlyle written in, I don't know, let's say 1976 or whatever, by some conservative intellectual who's trying to rescue Carlyle, they do this horrible thing of trying to whitewash it or trying to...
	So actually, Thomas Carlyle wasn't racist or whatever.
	He was!
	Right?
	And not only was he, it's really important to understand why he was as well, right?
	I mean, he's got a fantastic essay on Haiti, where he says, listen, I'll make you a prediction, right?
	In the next 200 years, Haiti will still be exactly where it is right now.
	And, I mean, we can look at Haiti today, right?
	And in a strange way, the left, because of their willingness to...
	To actually tackle these topics in an honest way, get more right than they get wrong.
	It's just where they're coming from on it, right?
	You know, I often do this thing of, you know, I was trained as a literary scholar.
	Marxists used to love to do this thing of like reading a text against the grain.
	Well, you can pick up a lot of leftist kind of scholarship and just read it against the grain.
	Suddenly it becomes quite based in a strange way.
	Have you ever done that?
	You can just kind of read it upside down.
	It's like, oh, hold on a second.
	Actually, that's a really good point.
	I have discovered some great stuff through left-wing scholarship because they alert you to things you wouldn't have been aware of.
	And then you think, hmm, I wonder what the real story was.
	And you just dig a little bit deeper and it's like, oh, right, okay.
	I mean, I'll give you an example.
	I saw the...
	Of exactly this issue, right?
	There's this guy, Matt Walsh.
	I'm sure you're all familiar with him.
	He's got 1.5 million followers.
	I think he's currently on Twitter calling himself the transphobe of the year.
	Well, he did a tweet yesterday saying, oh, ridiculous.
	Grand Valley State University is holding five segregated...
	Graduation celebration, singling out Asian, Black, LGBT, Hispanic, and Native American graduates, right?
	So this college is doing an Asian graduation ceremony, a Black graduation ceremony, a Latino one, and it's doing a Native one, right?
	And there's no one for straight white people is Matt Walsh's point.
	But I'm thinking, I don't know, like in a strange sort of way, I don't like...
	Maybe, like, if they all want to do their own graduation ceremonies, like, you know, I mean, you understand what I'm saying, right?
	It's this weird way where conservatives, it's like we're no longer colorblind.
	And so we based our conservatism on a colorblind concept, which we reluctantly accepted.
	And now you're moving on to identitarianism.
	We don't know what to say.
	We want the old lies back.
	And we're going to kind of just force our will upon the population so that we can live in this dream that race just doesn't matter.
	And we're going to kind of focus on sex.
	We're going to focus on the transsexual issue.
	And, you know, it's like we solved that problem.
	We reached a compromise.
	And now you guys want to go back and talk about racial identity.
	You know, I think that is getting to the mindset.
	But yeah, obviously, from our standpoint, if Asians want to have an Asian graduation ceremony, why would we want to stop that?
	You know, I mean, that's wrong or something?
	I mean, no, they want to have an experience of togetherness and good on them.
	Conservatives pick the worst hills to die on.
	It's like...
	Yeah, well, that is definitely true.
	I think there's an inner martyrdom concept within them.
	Exactly.
	And I've noticed, too, they seem, at least in the U.S., I can't speak to the conservative movement in other countries, but they seem to, like, revel in losing and complaining about it.
	You know, and they'll try it out, like, the double standard.
	Like, you know, what if the shoe was on the other foot?
	I'm just like...
	Is that all you got?
	Yeah, it is all they got.
	Yeah.
	I think also, to go back into this of the 1619 project, I think it would be interesting to look at the influence of slavery, and from a kind of revisionist standpoint, the influence of slavery, even in the American Revolution.
	Because the American Revolution had, in a way, two parts.
	I mean, we like to remember the Declaration of Independence and all this kind of heady language from Jefferson.
	There was a more northeastern, kind of more rabble-rousing revolution, the glorious cause that was taking place before that.
	And a lot of the...
	I wonder the degree to which plantation owners, slave owners, got on board under the threat of ending that system by George III.
	And all these other kind of like little things.
	There's actually a good book by George Wills, who's a former conservative who kind of renounced all these things, on Thomas Jefferson called The Negro President.
	And I think it's called The Negro Patriarch.
	I remember learning in middle school about the so-called three-fifths clause, and it was basically saying that we're treating African Americans as three-fifths of a human being.
	I can't believe we did that.
	Well, that is a total distortion of what was actually going on.
	What it said, basically, was that the African-American population would be counted at three-fifths of its total.
	Southerners actually wanted to treat African-Americans as one people and to count them in the population.
	It was actually the Yankees who didn't.
	They wanted to count them as none.
	African Americans obviously did not have rights as citizens that were enjoyed by white citizens.
	But they were counted in the population totals that determined the House of Representatives and so on.
	And so we have this secession of, with maybe John Adams as a counterexample, but of plantation-owning presidents early on in the history and Southern presidents.
	So much of that was that citizens were in effect being overcounted due to the Negro power, demographic power.
	So all of these, again, all of these kind of quaint ideas that we have about America, they are just that.
	They are pretty little wise.
	And a lot of those kind of, like, you know, I don't think, what I just said, I would probably be fired as a high school teacher if I said that in Ron DeSantis' Florida.
	You know, I'm going against...
	Teaching woke history.
	Exactly.
	But I don't know.
	I mean, it's the truth.
	And maybe there's something good about woke.
	The metaphor of woke is awakening.
	And you can understand that a few different ways.
	But that awareness that you have, that there's something that was hiding in plain sight and now you're able to see it.
	And it is in many ways a kind of awakening to...
	An identitarianism of some kind.
	And, you know, again, there's plenty in the left that rubs me the wrong way, that I find ridiculous.
	I don't even need to say it.
	It rubs everyone on this call the wrong way.
	But to just assume that the right is on our side or something, I think is completely incorrect.
	I think you could make an argument that we will benefit by kind of riding out this woke transition and that it can it could possibly kind of lead places that many of its current supporters aren't expecting.
	I mean, I always remember a Jonathan Bowden speech from back in the day, I can't remember exactly which one it was, where he starts talking about, I mean, obviously, this was quite a long, you know, quite a long time ago, but he talks about how a lot of what we're seeing is almost like kind of Training for white people to become a minority and to think of themselves as a group again, right?
	I mean, he does highlight that it's not much fun, right?
	Because you have to fight for your piece of the cultural pie as opposed to just being the de facto, the majority.
	But it's always stuck with me, that little line that Bowden had.
	I think there's something in it, especially in America.
	I think that the net effect of all of this really is a kind of racial awakening among white people.
	To be aware, whether it's through the kind of woke guilt or through the right-wing thing, right?
	It is this awareness that whites are a thing.
	Right.
	Whereas back in the 90s, I always call it, you know, back to Fresh Prince.
	Back in the 90s, it was like, well, I watched the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
	You know, I like Uncle Phil and therefore I'm not racist.
	We're all the same.
	Well, that's not the message anymore.
	So I do wonder if it's basically inevitable at this point that you will get a kind of white identitarianism.
	At the moment, it's still kind of hiding itself or speaking in dog whistles or whatever, but it seems like they haven't dialed it down.
	They haven't dialed it down.
	It has to be an identitarianism because I think DeSantis' vision of, like, I won't wake up.
	You know, I am anti-woke.
	Like, we will not wake up to this reality.
	We will continue to sleep.
	You know, like, Uncle Phil is a great man.
	He's an American.
	I mean, I have a theory...
	How dare you take this away from me?
	To go back to what we talked about right at the Star of the Core, I've had a long-standing theory that the bid to put Woke away is largely driven by...
	You remember we talked about the big retiree group in Florida who background DeSantis and Israeli nationalists and so on?
	I have a kind of...
	It seems to me that a large part of the anti-woke agenda is also driven by that group who perceive, perhaps rightly...
	That their place on the progressive stack doesn't count for anything anymore.
	And basically, the writing's on the wall.
	I mean, again, this is something that Mark may have looked at.
	But in this country, there's a comedian called David Baddiel.
	Not a particularly great comedian, it has to be said.
	He's famous for writing a football song called Three Lions on a Shirt, right, with a guy called Frank Skinner.
	But he's also Jewish and he's a comedian.
	And he wrote a book called Jews Don't Count.
	And the ostensible target of that, he wasn't thinking of the quote-unquote far right.
	He was thinking of the Corbynista left.
	Remember, Jeremy Corbyn basically was ousted over claims that he was anti-Semitic.
	But it really comes down to this idea that in the current kind of milestone of left-wing politics, there's no place at the table for Jews anymore.
	I have read pieces in Tablet magazine where they're, you know, worrying over...
	It's like, oh no, the...
	The Ivy League percentage may reduce from 30% to 20% over the next 10 years.
	This is a problem.
	Things like this.
	I think that's true.
	I think that's true that Jews increasingly don't count in the multi-culti table.
	They don't have a seat at that table.
	I think that's true.
	This is a kind of historical problem for them as well, because they had the Martin Luther King alliance of the Jewish Black Alliance.
	I think Gottfried has got pieces on this somewhere.
	But that broke down.
	That broke down around the time of the rise of the neocons and so on.
	And then they tried to put it all back together in the 90s.
	It feels like it's breaking down again.
	Yeah, it's a bit of the story of the Golem of Prague, right?
	So they create something that ultimately turns against them.
	Christianity being one example as well, which is intermittently turned against them.
	But I think that it's, for the most part, accommodated them or has been beneficial for them during its existence.
	I mean, I think we're seeing the end of Christianity, or at least among Europeans in the white world.
	But I think that, so I think that that's true.
	I think it's, multiculturalism kind of fits into a similar or same category.
	You could even say it's a kind of continuation or realization of Christianity on some level as well.
	But, so, yeah, it will turn on them as communism turned on them as well, right?
	So they have this habit, and it's sort of their will to power.
	And I think this is a very ancient phenomena that goes into the ancient world before Jews appear on the scene among these cults that I would call proto-Jewish.
	But there is this instinct to push egalitarianism, right?
	And that egalitarianism or equality becomes a kind of will to power.
	Poor Jews.
	But then the consequence of the success of those movements is that they see themselves in privileged positions, right?
	But once they're in privileged positions, then they are also the enemy, right?
	If everyone else is an egalitarian or everyone else is part of this idealized equality, then they also become the enemy because they've sort of ascended above it.
	Oh, please.
	One of the big things I've noticed that has changed, you know, in the years that I've been online, like, you know, from 2016 to now, basically, is the sheer prevalence of black violence videos that do the round on Twitter, right?
	And they're shared with a kind of real frequency now.
	And there was one that came across my timeline a couple of weeks back where...
	A guy is, like, a homeless guy was shot, like, in the street.
	Now, I didn't share that because I've got a, like, you know, I don't like to see, like, actual killings and things on my timeline.
	But I looked to see, like, well, who's sharing this?
	And I was absolutely stunned to discover that Ben Shapiro retweeted that.
	I mean, Ben Shapiro would never have done that.
	In kind of like his polite National Review kind of 2016 mold.
	But now he's like actively drawing attention to kind of black violence and things like this, which were never really, really talking points of the Daily Wire.
	So why is that happening?
	Well, I have to say, I wrote about this 10 years ago.
	I believe it was 2012.
	Maybe it was 2014, but it was a little while ago.
	And John Derbyshire was fired from National Review for writing an article that, I mean, to be fair, was pretty harsh.
	He kind of had a bit of a Scott Adams-like moment and was giving the talk to his white children saying you should avoid African Americans.
	A bit much.
	He was actually going through cancer at the time and so on.
	But what I noticed was that you have this vehement denunciation of Derbyshire.
	He was fired from National Review.
	And other people were pissing on his grave and all that kind of stuff.
	With very few exceptions, if any.
	But at the same time, there was this embrace.
	On Breitbart media at the time.
	So I don't think what you're describing is new.
	I think it's been amplified with social media because now everything takes place on social media, whereas previously things were taking place at like webzines and things like that.
	But Breitbart would have like full color stories about Danish tourists visiting Detroit and getting their clothes stolen and beaten up and all this just ritualistic humiliation.
	Of people.
	And the irony, of course, is that everyone sees that image of a Danish tourist, for example, getting beaten up in Detroit.
	Everyone knows what that's about.
	It's race crime, blacks, etc.
	But you don't say it.
	But Derbyshire actually came out and just said it.
	So I think there is a way, it's been going on longer than in just the past four or five years of these types of people kind of channeling that energy to go back to a theme that we were discussing earlier of, you know, we kind of can't fight this and we can actually use this to promote our stuff.
	I mean, and I think this has some like very kind of weird effects.
	I think someone like Scott Adams, I mean, look, is In terms of you should avoid blacks or something, I mean, look, that's something that whites have been doing for decades upon decades at this point.
	You don't need to talk about it.
	You just need to find a good school and a good neighborhood, etc.
	But I think he was a guy who kind of got radicalized by this immediacy of social media.
	So he was seeing all this stuff all the time.
	And he, in many ways, kind of mischaracterizes blacks as a hate group and out to get him or something.
	But I think his brain kind of got fried by this, where the boomer who was colorblind learns to hate through social media.
	You see a lot of other conservatives, when they depict BLM, it's like, they burn down our cities and so on.
	Well, that's...
	A bit of an exaggeration.
	And in your Iowa suburb, you were fine.
	There was probably some mild BLM thing with a bunch of people holding signs.
	But via social media and this intimacy and immediacy that we can achieve, in a way, they did burn down their cities.
	In a way, Antifa was in their backyard.
	Because that's the consciousness that we have, is that salacious video that you see on Facebook.
	I guess the point I was making is that Ben Shapiro now uses language like anti-white.
	Yeah.
	And his outlet, which I think is Daily Wire, correct me if I'm wrong, now leans into that sort of language, which even a few years back was the kind of, you know, that was part of the lexicon of what the alt-right used to be.
	And now they're kind of like Ben Shapiro talking points.
	And I'm just wondering, like, if I was part of the same group as Ben Shapiro, I would be thinking, like, you know, where do I make my alliance and what's my bet for the future, I guess?
	And I just see a certain element of the American elite, let's just say, is probably thinking, like, well, I don't know, like, when...
	When the board is like now replaced with like, you know, half of them are Mexican and half of them are black, for example.
	Or now like the entire governorship of my state is run by like the guy from New York that you were talking about.
	Are they going to have my back in the same way that somebody like Ron DeSantis is going to have my back?
	Do you understand?
	Totally.
	No, I completely understand.
	I think there's an element of Jews who are...
	Making that bet.
	And, you know, Bibi Netanyahu is laying down with very hardcore nationalists in Israel.
	And I think this is kind of part of the problem that he's facing right now.
	There's a protest, talk of civil war and so on.
	And I do think that on a funny way, the alt-right kind of won in the sense.
	Like if you look at someone like Matt Walsh, I can remember him from 2015.
	He was the ultimate cuck.
	He was anti-Trump.
	People were lambasting him.
	He's a hipster, Christian, silly boy or whatever.
	Now, he is the ultimate baddie.
	The guy who will just call out transsexuals to their face.
	Far-right fat.
	I think at one point on his Twitter, he bragged about...
	Theocratic fascist or something was like his description.
	This is an ironic thing.
	I mean, Matt Walsh probably says way more radical stuff than either you or I would.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, you know, it's a strange dynamic that is...
	And isn't it kind of infuriating that they denounced people like us four years ago and then they use our then idioms and...
	And slogans.
	And so, you know, it feels, kind of feels like we got used.
	Well, we'll contain, we'll contain.
	Yeah.
	But I think it's also assigned to me, I mean, the lesson that I learned as well is that you don't want to be assimilated.
	Like, you know, for instance, I don't know the last time I tweeted about transsexuals or something.
	You know, I mean, it's like, look, we get it.
	I don't need to retweet libs of TikTok to say that this person is kind of ill.
	We get it.
	It's sad in many ways.
	I just don't do it.
	But I think the challenge that I see as well is you have to put yourself on a level where you kind of can't be assimilated.
	It's showing that you are getting at something important and powerful.
	So much of the so-called dissident right and so on, they're saying the same thing that Matt Walsh is saying.
	They're saying it in a more polite way in many cases.
	So what's the point?
	If you are a real dissident, at least...
	In terms of civilization and politeness, I'm not a dissonant.
	I'm not out throwing Molotov cocktails at people or trying to undermine the system.
	But we are trying to undermine the system morally, and that means that you have to go to a different place.
	And you do need to start talking about things.
	You could go to a different place on one level of being an outright skinhead or crazy person or flat earther or whatever.
	Obviously, We don't want to go there.
	It's dumb.
	But you want to go to another place where they can't assimilate you, that it is too radical or too potentially damaging and demoralizing to the system.
	And I think that's the place we need to go.
	I don't think direct action, I've learned my lesson.
	I mean, I never engaged in direct action, you know, in the sense of like, I'm trying to cease the functioning of the government or I was not at J6, nor was I invited, nor that I'm not going to try to confront the government in any way.
	But we were.
	Something like Charlottesville, that was out there in your face.
	We're here.
	You're going to have to force us to leave.
	You ultimately can get bulldozed in that way.
	So I think that's a losing strategy.
	But I do think that we need to...
	The process of demoralizing the system and offering an alternative to the system, you have to go in a way where Matt Walsh won't follow you.
	Yeah, I mean, it might be one of the things that the likes of us need to do.
	Really is the complete, I guess, like the complete intellectual demolition of the post-war center, right?
	Would be a nice place to start, right?
	Because in many ways, they're the ultimate, they are the ultimate enemy, right?
	And a lot of the stuff we see, okay, I mean, right, nobody wants to see their own children.
	You know, brainwashed by transgender ideology or whatever, right?
	But ultimately, these are issues that the system is comfortable discussing.
	That's why they're on your feed 24-7, right?
	There are ever more fundamental things that we need to get at, in a way.
	And this is really what I'm, I mean, I'm writing a trilogy of books, you know, The Populist Delusion was my kind of attack on the idea of democracy, liberal democracy, liberalism.
	This next book I have coming out, which is called The Prophets of Doom, is really a kind of, it's getting at the idea of linear progressive history and trying to Trying to undermine that and knock it out for a month.
	So these are kind of really basic assumptions that nobody even thinks about.
	What is the shape of history?
	I mean, I think there's utility for us in having a cyclical view of history rather than a linear progressive one.
	And then the third book I want to write at some point when I recover from just having handed in this manuscript.
	It's called a boomer truth regime, where I want to...
	Really, my target is basically individualism.
	It's individualism.
	Individualism, yeah.
	By which I mean, like, kind of boomer, or even more importantly, like, Gen X individualism, right?
	This idea that...
	I feel like knocking those sorts of things out.
	These are the kinds of...
	These are the kinds of things that...
	That are so buried so deep in your kind of social conditioning that it takes a lot to see them within yourself, right?
	And in a way, what I want people in our little vanguard to do, if you want, is to kind of kill that boomer within themselves, if that makes any sense.
	Which is Very difficult to do, which is almost impossible to do, by the way, which is something I discuss in this book, which is, well, you have to also come to peace with the fact that you're never going to completely get rid of all your liberal priors because you are thoroughly the product of your time and your place, right?
	But you have to be able to see its limitations and how it is...
	How it has been used to stymie what the quote-unquote right has been able to do.
	I mean, I don't even know if you want to use the term left and right, but a kind of political force that would be effective against the enemy.
	So that's kind of what I see the mission as at the moment.
	Yeah, I can't wait for all this.
	I would say, regarding Shapiro, though, it does seem that, because it's one thing to say that you're anti-white, and it's another, and maybe quite another thing to say that you're pro-white.
	But that may be in the offing.
	Presumably, it is in the offing, right?
	So then, what does Shapiro do?
	And we're familiar with all these conversations, having been in the DR since 2004, Richard Arolier.
	So, some of that becomes, well, okay, you can be proud of being Scottish, or you can be proud of being English, but you can't be proud of being white.
	We start to enter into that territory, right?
	But ultimately, the question is, you know, can you be pro-white, and isn't it good to be pro-white?
	And I think that that is a question that's going to be emerging, even among the elite.
	You know, it's in even the kind of foreseeable future.
	So where does Shapiro go then?
	You know what I mean?
	And so it'll be interesting to see.
	And he might, you know, people like Shapiro, maybe not Shapiro exactly, but someone similar to Shapiro, occupying a similar cultural role in the future, may have to concede, yeah, you can be pro-white, right?
	Well, oh, sorry, did you?
	Did we lose both of you guys?
	Does anyone else hear me?
	Are you guys still there?
	Hello?
	Yeah, I'm still here.
	My whole Zoom shut down and then restarted.
	I don't know what happened there, but we're still recording.
	Yeah, I mean, I think he would, I think, I mean, to answer your question, I think he would weasel a little bit with the question, but I think he would, I think he would say that he's a white guy.
	But I think that that's not, you know, that's not a totally truthful answer, of course, right?
	Because his strongest fealty and identity is being Jewish, you know?
	You don't think there could be a white identitarianism where likes of a Shapiro or somebody like him might try to install themselves at the head of it?
	I can see that.
	When I look at the discourse, probably some of the most outspoken quote-unquote pro-white voices, I think it was someone like Amy Wax, right?
	I mean, you know, there's currently a call to get...
	Her tenure removed.
	She's a law professor.
	In fact, I met her once, Amy Wax.
	But you do get these kind of straight-talking Jewish intellectuals who are kind of...
	They basically repeat all the same sort of talking points that someone like Steve Saylor would make.
	Definitely.
	I guess that's my question for you, Mark.
	Why wouldn't they try to get ahead of the game and become the spokesman for whatever that new identitarianism is?
	Well, I think that they would, but I think that there's a line or there's probably a bridge that they won't cross, ultimately.
	And the reason that they would position themselves there is to lead the opposition, as it were.
	I don't think that their interest is in a revival of white racialism.
	It's just sort of where the tide is pushing, right?
	So that they would want to get ahead of it, as it were, and to control that sort of Caducean dialectic.
	I would say further, I agree with you that there's a big difference between calling out anti-whites and saying you're pro-white, but I could see these forces, maybe not Ben Shapiro himself, but maybe Ben Shapiro, declaring themselves to be pro-white.
	I mean, this is kind of where it's leading.
	And in some ways, they've already done this.
	I mean, the Judeo-Christian, I mean, all of that, the religious right came directly out of the desegregation battle, which was lost, basically, by these people.
	I mean, Jerry Falwell's paradigmatic in the sense of an outright segregationist who...
	Went back to his study and kind of changed his terminology and came out five years later and says, you know, ah, it's about abortion now.
	So, I mean, in some ways they've done this in all but name and I could see them like locking that tightrope in a way.
	I understand that it's threatening, but in a way, like, you know, one of the reasons why I'm attracted to your ideas is that You recognize that our message can't just be about we like white people.
	What does that mean?
	What does it mean to be white?
	What does it mean to be Aryan?
	And who are you talking about?
	Because it seems like a lot of so-called pro-white people aren't necessarily pro-white.
	They're pro-Republican voting rural and suburban whites.
	And they're not necessarily pro-white.
	That whole national divorce thing, that's been in the air in white nationalism.
	I can remember it 15 years ago.
	And it's basically defining the white race in terms of red states.
	The white race is Republican, basically.
	I am against that.
	And I think that...
	What we need to do is a spiritual message.
	I think that's going to be more powerful.
	I can imagine, and I grant you that it's kind of outrageous to even think about this.
	I can imagine Ben Shapiro...
	Saying, well, you know, no one here supports slavery or segregation.
	But, you know, we did have a white demographic for some time.
	And whites are very good corporate busybodies.
	And they don't commit crime.
	And, you know, I'm pro-white in that sense.
	You know, the white people, they sure buy a lot of daily wire subscriptions.
	So, you know, I'll give them that.
	I could see that.
	I could never possibly see him embrace Apolloism.
	Sure.
	That is not in the realm of possibilities.
	That is how radical we must be in order to...
	We can't touch...
	The old movement needs to be left behind.
	We need to go to a place that can't be assimilated.
	No, I agree.
	And I think that we're going there, or we're already there, so it's not...
	But what I'm saying, though, is that...
	Did only Richard drop?
	No, I'm still here.
	Okay.
	Something funny is going on with my...
	Someone just...
	See, I've been...
	Sorry about this.
	I've been experimenting with some apps on Zoom, and so that we could have kind of like a jumbotron, or people could...
	Could add stuff like someone is doing here.
	Anyway, I'm sorry.
	This is more of a distraction than it is anything in the moment.
	I'll try to.
	Yeah.
	Just mark the time code or whatever.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But yeah, no.
	So what I would say is that, okay, so if they're at the point now where they're denouncing anti-white, then we can say, well, they can start speaking in sort of pro-white.
	That's sort of foreseeable in the offing.
	But then once they get there, the conversation becomes, okay, well, what are some pro-white policies, right?
	And pro-white policies would include deportations, Africans having their own homeland, this sort of thing, right?
	And that's when I think that guys like Shapiro, I mean, I wonder how far they'll be willing to go.
	And we know that history shows that they will be going.
	They will be willing to go pretty far, right?
	Yeah.
	One of the things that I...
	It was kind of a horrifying thought, really, that I had when I was writing Prophets of Doom.
	You know, Spengler has this notion that the Western civilization is what he calls Faustian, right?
	Faustian.
	It seems to me that...
	I mean, one of the reasons that I don't...
	I don't talk about, you know, Jewish stuff a lot is because once you kind of see the pattern of their kind of modus operandi in a way, to me it gets a bit, to me it's like a little bit like kind of parochial and like self-serving in a way.
	It's just like kind of, you know, a version of ethnic narcissism or something like that.
	If you think of the true spirit of what Christianism is, it's kind of like...
	At the start of the call, you talked about a group that we might call the techno-globalists, right?
	I mean, I would say that Tony Blair would belong to this sort of group, or certain members of the Davos crowd and the World Economic Forum, or even someone like Elon Musk in his own...
	And there's this kind of separate kind of intellectual strand that would, you know, I think of people like H.G. Wells or, you know, it's kind of this kind of genuinely universal, genuinely futuristic, genuinely technocratic.
	And globalist.
	One world government, in fact.
	One world.
	And the horrifying thought I had, really, is that, I mean, maybe not, depending on your point of view, but I mean, I was wondering whether that is actually the true expression of what it means to be quote-unquote white, is to embody the kind of Uber technocratic Davos vision of the world.
	Because I've spent a lot of time looking at their materials and like, you know, Tony Blair Institute stuff.
	They don't really talk about like racist issues or like feminism or woke stuff.
	It's all about...
	You know, like picturing what the future will be like in 2050 and like, you know, massive, all-encompassing digital architecture that triages all of Africa, all of Europe, all of America.
	And like from a certain point of view, this is kind of like the whitest thing to be doing right now.
	And I mean, like for whatever reason, I don't find, I find those things kind of scary.
	Maybe that's because I'm naturally conservative or something and not a true Faustian.
	But that thought crossed my mind more than once.
	And one of the other writers I look at, Arnold Toynbee, he kind of leans into that a little bit more and basically says, yeah, this is basically the destiny of Europe, ultimately, is to give birth to some new religion.
	I mean, I don't like it, but just a thought.
	What do you think, Richard?
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Doesn't the world ultimately want to come together?
	I mean, we're speaking over Zoom.
	We're bringing so many people together through technology in this way.
	The English language acting as a kind of lingua franca globally speaking.
	And I would say at the very least this.
	And I do think that, and I'm not just saying this out of nostalgia.
	I do think that it's kind of inhuman to lose any kind of local character.
	Like they're just, and these things won't be lost.
	You know, there's always going to be some strudel you can get or a Wienerschnitzel or a crepe or something.
	People like that regionalism.
	Yeah, it survives.
	In many ways, it doesn't need us to defend it.
	It will defend itself because it is good.
	And it's just deeply human to care about your neighbors and to...
	You know, speak in a regional dialect, etc.
	I think those things, in a way, don't need to be defended.
	But, yeah, I mean, is the right, at this point, only presenting itself as a kind of roadblock, as maybe even a speed bump, as just this naysaying, right, of, you know, we don't want, you know...
	You're too powerful.
	You actually are going to win.
	We're just going to throw a wrench in your gears to stop you.
	But what is that?
	I think we all agreed that the right just completely lacks a vision that it can present as an alternative.
	So, like, is it, you know, Globalists of the past have not necessarily been liberals, as we use the term today.
	H.G. Wells being an excellent example.
	Isn't there just a natural tendency towards uniting the planet?
	I'll offer another example.
	So much of this Duganism, which has been taken up by the Kremlin, in fact, in their overt propaganda.
	On the web is about multipolarity.
	So we're going to have a multipolar world.
	And there's actually a recent tweet of meeting with Africans and so on.
	So no one will be in charge and you'll have your own little realm.
	We won't harm each other.
	This just strikes me as moralism dressed up as geopolitics.
	You know, it's not there's no.
	There's not any reason to believe that that's actually better or that there won't be expansions of some kind of system, whether it's Americanism or communism or Russianism or Africanism, potentially.
	So it's just this kind of morality of, you know, you don't tread on me, I don't tread on you.
	But all that is is just moral claptrap.
	There's no...
	While Dugan's saying that sort of stuff, and while people are arguing about Chinese on Twitter or whatever, I hate to keep on bringing it back to Tony Blair, but people don't understand how active this guy is.
	Just this week, he's met about six different African presidents, for example.
	In each one of those meetings, he sets up a deal where he says, listen, you pay us some money, we'll come in and advise you.
	And now, basically, we own the entire digital infrastructure of your country for the next, like, 100 years.
	So from a certain point of view, it's like, well, okay, yeah, Tony Blair, you know, technocrat and globalist and so on, but in a strange way, it's also like Cecil Rhodes.
	Do you know what I mean?
	I mean, this is like true empire building in a way that ensures that, you know, if our guys are there, like, If Tony Blair's guys are there, it's not the Chinese running, you know, literally Botswana or Chad or, you know, I mean, you name it.
	Like, they're there.
	They're in every single country.
	And the right just wants to have nostalgia.
	The right is like, oh, the great British Empire of yesteryear.
	It was fantastic.
	We just don't have anything like that today.
	They're just engaging in nostalgia, whereas someone like Tony Blair is actually building the future.
	Right, but it's not just building it.
	He gets to, like, none of those things, they're not just doing it as charity.
	They control the infrastructure and they basically then, through the back door, control the policies of that country.
	And so when he wants to bring in his, you know, multi-national digital ID stuff.
	It's all there.
	He already owns the network, if that makes any sense.
	And he's got his NGOs on the ground to quote-unquote advise the various governments.
	This stuff is not that hidden.
	They do it in broad daylight because nobody watches them.
	Nobody cares.
	Everybody's looking at this thing over here.
	I kind of oscillate between thinking like...
	This is like, you know, watching how, like, evil operates or whatever.
	But also, like, I have a certain degree of admiration that, you know, these are people who are, you know, they're doing the genuine world building that I imagine their 19th century forebears would kind of, in some strange way, approve of.
	Does that make sense?
	Absolutely, yes.
	I mean, look, Mark has been very...
	You know, outrageous, you could say, in talking about this as a global project.
	I mean, we're a global people.
	We need a global project and we need a global religion.
	And this has always deeply appealed to me.
	And much more so than any sort of nationalism, which does seem to be just retreating back to some older paradigm that is just kind of obviously outmoded.
	The only chance that you can succeed...
	It's also dangerous, Richard.
	I mean, as we're seeing today, it's dangerous.
	Sort of petty nationalism is dangerous.
	How do you mean that exactly?
	Well, I mean, just the example of the conflict with Russia, right?
	I mean, you say it would be better, or you've said it would be better if they were part of NATO, I think.
	So I think it...
	Or something along those lines.
	No doubt.
	They never would have been invaded if Ukraine were part of NATO 10 years ago.
	Yeah, there's no doubt they would have never been invaded.
	I think that one world government should be a kind of ideal, to be honest with you.
	I think it would be resisted, of course, but I think that that should be the goal.
	And I think in a way, it's always kind of the de facto reality in the sense that you always have a dominant global power.
	And then you have other weaker powers that are servile and some that are resistant to it.
	But that ultimately, you know, history shows that, you know, for a period, the Greeks dominated, then the Romans, that there is a kind of unipolarity to the world.
	But I think it should just be, I think it could become more expansive, explicit, useful, helpful, and sustainable, and have bigger and bolder goals that would benefit all of humanity, essentially.
	Yeah, I mean, I can remember my own kind of Ron Paul days when I was a lot younger, because so much, you know, I'm a young Gen Xer, but I am a Gen Xer at heart.
	And so much of my own political consciousness came out of opposing George W. Bush.
	And opposing the Iraq War and so on.
	And I think I was right to do that.
	And I think most of the critiques of the Iraq War were correct and so on.
	But at the heart, beyond the critique, at the heart of the vision was a kind of Ron Paul multi-polarity claptrap, not dissimilar to Dugan's claptrap.
	Which is basically, well, you know, we won't have military bases abroad and we'll be nice to everyone.
	We'll just kind of trade.
	And maybe we could have some protectionism, but mostly just about free love around the world, basically.
	And it's big, bad America, won't be bombing people anymore, and et cetera.
	And, you know, there's certain kernels of truth to this.
	I think being a...
	Being an American, I am in some ways complicit with the deaths of children in Yemen and the deaths of a million people in Iraq.
	I get that.
	But I also am a citizen of this empire, and I recognize that without America enforcing basically global...
	waterways and enforcing a certain kind of rules based order, as they say, that the world would be a much worse place, and that you take away the American empire and you don't uncover free love and friendship of the peoples.
	You uncover chaos and petty nationalist violence and other things.
	You also leave open a vacuum for other empires to insert their vision of the world.
	I mean, Islam, I don't think has a compelling vision to intelligent people, but it absolutely has a global vision.
	I don't think the Chinese way of life is going to be...
	It's not particularly compelling.
	There's no kind of Chinese dream or Chinese U2 that's inspiring people of other nations.
	But they absolutely have some sort of vision of a Chinese order.
	And I don't want to live in that world.
	I definitely don't want to live in the Islamic one.
	I don't want to live in the Chinese one.
	I don't want to live in the Ron Paul chaos globe that would be created once we remove American military bases.
	And all things said and done, I don't think the American global order is actually that bad.
	And there are, at the very least, just tangible benefits that we all have.
	And I think as I get older, and, you know, I...
	I understand this more and more, and I hope a kind of more mature and nuanced view of this.
	It's not that I want to be a shill for America or a shill for Biden, but I do recognize that America is hegemonic for a reason and that it's not all that bad.
	And yes, we should offer something even better, but...
	To offer a purely negative vision of, let's tear down the current world order and free love and friendship will rise in its place.
	That's just pure silliness.
	Yeah, I mean, this is something that, as I was writing Prophets of Doom, it really...
	I was thinking of some of the arguments that certain nationalists have made.
	I mean, sorry to name names, but Greg Johnson is somebody who springs to mind, where it's almost like they have this idea that there are going to be all the different nations of the world, and each group gets their own little country, and they're all going to leave each other alone.
	And I've always wanted to root my analysis in realism, right?
	I mean, that's the thing that I think is really important, because if it's not realistic, it's not going to happen, right?
	And I look across history and think, when was this time where you just had all the different nations of the world who left each other alone?
	I mean, I just don't see that.
	There's always, it's always the rise and fall of empires.
	I mean, even...
	Even the nations of Europe that you think of, I mean, Germany didn't exist until the 1850s.
	Italy didn't exist as a nation for, you know, hundreds of years.
	Even France, really, up until Napoleon, didn't really exist as France per se.
	You know, pretty much the only country that existed as a quote-unquote nation-state, recognizably, was probably Britain.
	Which was an island.
	An island and then an empire, yeah.
	But that was an empire.
	And, of course, there was a huge...
	I mean, as a Shakespeare scholar, I can speak to this a little bit.
	Shakespeare himself was involved in basically national myth-making, whereby they had to incorporate the different elements, the Scottish and the Welsh, and they drew on...
	They drew on certain myths that the likes of Geoffrey of Monmouth had written.
	And he wrote...
	He slandered my namesake, as we know.
	All of this is national myth-making, right?
	You have good kings like Henry V and bad kings like Richard III and so on, which were basically encouraging.
	People to think of the country as a nation.
	Yes.
	You know, you get, like, guys like Walter Raleigh, who are literally writing kind of, like, proto-nationalist propaganda, in a way, saying, like, well, why should we have, like, French products over here?
	We need to enact, like, kind of Keynesian protectionism before that had been invented, you know?
	But all of that is in, all of that then basically...
	It's the kind of preparatory ground for Britain as a country to enter the world, or England as a nation, to enter the world stage.
	I mean, this is how Spengler and Toynbee and some of these writers, they talk about nations or people, if you want, entering world history.
	Toynbee has this very strange idea that There are these periods of withdrawal.
	So he argues that for a certain couple of hundred years there, England as a nation withdrew into itself in order to build up this kind of collective identity that we're talking about.
	And then at a certain moment, it was ready to burst out and enter world history.
	This is really the only scope for...
	Actual nationalism that we, as we'd recognize it, you know, kind of existing in the overall scheme of civilizational history.
	Yeah.
	As a kind of short-run phenomena that inculcates, they called it a basia, you know, a kind of collective feeling.
	But it's only a small period that that happens.
	And it's usually because there are some natural frontiers.
	Like being an island or like having a river or mountains or something that stop an invader coming in, right?
	I would take this further, actually, because I would...
	So, I have two points.
	One's geographic, but I'll talk about the hegemonic one as well.
	I think the paradigm of the nation-state that emerged in the 19th century, I think, was connected to a certain kind of...
	It was romanticism, and it was a reaction to other forms of empire.
	I mean, German nationalism was a reaction to Napoleon's invasion.
	Legendarily, but I think actually, in fact, Beethoven wrote his Third Symphony.
	It was dedicated to Napoleon, the Eroica Symphony, and then he supposedly was scratching it out of the published scores after the emperor invaded.
	So it's a reaction to empire.
	But then also nationalism can emerge as a kind of underling of empire.
	So I've dwelled on this quite a bit in previous talks, but so much of that paradigm of the nation state was Wilsonianism after the First World War.
	And I think it was in many ways a kind of...
	So, after the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, mostly remembered due to the Versailles Peace Treaty, but it was a larger conference where the world was redrawn.
	There was Bolshevism kind of over the way.
	And Wilson, who was a professor, an intellectual, highly sophisticated person, was offering a competing vision.
	Which was an American order with the nation state as its kind of functioning pieces to it.
	And so Poland, for instance, was revived.
	You had other nation states that were created, the kingdom of Croats and Serbs and all of these kinds of things.
	But all of those things were only possible within an American order.
	So they were only possible underneath.
	An imperial structure.
	And yes, everything that's an ideal has some basis in reality.
	Obviously, I believe there's a sense of Czechness that exists.
	And there was a sense of a concept of German-ness that existed well before Germany was unified through Prussia.
	So there's a real basis for everything.
	These things can only come into reality in a certain way when powers, in a way, desire it and are willing to articulate it as such.
	And so all of this talk of nationalism, it's like they're embracing these paradigms that historically only came into being in imperial scenarios.
	And so they're kind of in...
	Say, I would kind of...
	Suggests that there's no real basis for these things.
	And they're thus, by singing the praises of the nation or something, or talking about how we would all respect one another, don't tread on me, I won't tread on you.
	It is just kind of intellectual masturbation at the end of the day, because it's blind to its historical reality, and it's blind to just the power realities that have to exist in these cases.
	No, I agree.
	I agree with everything you said there.
	Yeah, spot on.
	Russia is also interesting.
	I mean, what is Russia?
	It's a huge geographic space that has to be managed by some kind of imperial force, and you have to push people all over the place in order to kind of protect the borders of this big thing.
	Very similar.
	Russia and the United States are...
	Very similar in that way.
	They're kind of inherently imperial.
	We had this idea of, you know, go west, young man.
	Keep going to the frontier so that we can control this continent.
	And it's a very different perspective to, say, a...
	A Prussian who's like, you know, we need to guard our little plot here, and we've got enemies on all sides, and so on.
	Frederick Jackson Turner pointed this out, and I think it's one of the most brilliant observations I've ever read, in fact.
	It's that the frontier, that word frontier, which exists in plenty of European languages, it means the opposite in American English that it does in...
	In its European context.
	So if you think of like, what is it?
	Doctors without borders.
	It's medicine sans frontières.
	They mean it in the sense of doctors going across borders.
	That notion of the frontier is a line that separates you from a potential hostile enemy.
	In American English, frontier means the exact opposite.
	Frontier means an open space.
	Frontier in the American context means an open space that you can go out into and conquer, as opposed to a line that separates you from your enemy.
	So in that sense, the American mentality was fundamentally different than a European mentality.
	And you can view that through language.
	Anyway, that's kind of going in a different direction.
	But I do think the United States and Russia kind of have similar sentiments in that sense.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I'd agree.
	I've talked about the frontier as a fundamental American idea.
	I'm going to have to go in a minute, by the way, Richard, because I have to do my show.
	One of the things that has really struck me about a difference between Europeans and Americans when it comes to the idea of the frontier is the whole idea of white flight, which we were talking about earlier on, right?
	This idea that you just get up and leave and go and leave somewhere else.
	I read a statistic before that the average American, I think, moves 14 times in their lifetime.
	Which seems, like, extraordinarily high to me.
	Whereas, of course, in this country, you just can't do that.
	Right.
	You have to, like...
	You know, this village, which has been here for, like, 800 years, I mean, there isn't another one.
	You can't just pick up on...
	You can't just drive 200 miles down there.
	There is no 200 miles.
	So you have to kind of stay here.
	I'm not saying white flight doesn't happen in Europe.
	Obviously, it does.
	I'm just saying that it's...
	It seems like a fundamentally American idea.
	And a lot of what I think happens at the moment, and this is why I think there's, I guess, increased anti-American sentiment in Europe at the moment, is that because America is a kind of global hegemon, in a strange way, it exports its own forms, tries to start reproducing itself in places where some of its basic assumptions are alien.
	And this is kind of what I think has been happening, where it's trying to remake Europe in its own image, in a way.
	Anyway, go on, Johnny.
	I'm currently in Italy.
	I grew up in the US, but I moved to Italy because my family's here.
	And I can attest to that, that you sort of see this amorphous blob.
	Of, like, American ideology being imported, and it's, like, completely alien to the continent.
	Does that make sense?
	Just like some of the political ideologies, even in the right wing here, you just see them sort of, like, importing this, like, American brand of ideology.
	And it's completely strange.
	It's very strange because it hasn't taken, but they're making attempts to do it.
	Yeah, I mean, the most visible one is the racial politics.
	I mean, especially in a country like Italy or Germany or whatever, the racial politics of those places, or even in this country, are different.
	You know, we don't have the kind of...
	It's just a different understanding of all of these things.
	So when they start being imported here...
	It has a kind of different flavour, and I think that it basically ends up with a kind of resentment.
	It's just like, well, this is not us.
	This is being brought here by the hegemon, which is why I actually think that as time goes on, we'll see even more increased anti-American sentiment from the Europeans as they get less ostensibly out of the deal.
	Yeah.
	They need to sort of get out from under in Europe.
	They really need to get out from under because, I mean, it seems like being America's friend is worse than being its enemy at this point if you're sitting in Europe, quite frankly.
	Well, I mean, from the American point of view, there has to be a better offering to something.
	I agree, yeah.
	But I kind of disagree with this.
	I think there are many forces.
	That are bringing us together.
	I think the Russia-Ukraine conflict is certainly one of them.
	I think we're going to do this together, actually.
	And I do think that there needs to be something new.
	But I've heard this as well from right-wingers and so on.
	you know, if only Europe could get out from under America, then it would just be like crazy nationalism would just immediately arise or things.
	I don't buy that.
	You kind of have to wonder about Europe.
	Understandably, and I think we should show a lot of sympathy towards the absolute devastation of both world wars on the European population.
	The Russian experience is incredible.
	A very large percentage of young men for a few generations just don't simply exist.
	But why is it that you haven't been able to get out from under American idea, Americanism?
	I mean, is it just the military bases or is it also the fact that we're in your heads and that we offer a more Even today, and I've said, I've stated flatly that I think we're losing it.
	We're too turning to ourselves and so on.
	But what is the European vision that is more powerful than Americanism?
	What is it?
	Right.
	I mean, I could tell you, I mean, the leadership here, I mean, really isn't better than the leadership in the US.
	I mean, the political class here is just utterly incompetent.
	These people have no vision.
	They just sort of, it's sort of a very sterile type of ideology, quite frankly.
	And yeah, I just don't know where it's headed, especially Italy.
	It's sort of depressing sometimes just watching these people on television.
	I always, I'm going to have to go in a minute, but I always remember reading the, A neocon book from back in the early 2000s by a chap called Robert Kagan.
	I'm sure you're familiar with it.
	It's called...
	Mars and Venus, right?
	Yeah.
	It was Paradise and Power, or Paradise and Power, it was called, where it basically argued that since the Second World War, Europeans have got to live in a postmodern paradise, right, which is underpinned by American power.
	Which means that Americans have to live in the real world of, like, realpolitik or even, you know, maktpolitik, like power politics.
	And Europeans basically just get to, like, sit around being decadent, basically, and talking about whatever and going to anti-war process and so on.
	Now, even though I'm not a neocon, I do think there's still an underlying truth to that analysis.
	To use the language of Spengler or Toynbee, Europe as a whole has basically withdrawn from world history since the Second World War, and it hasn't re-entered the stage yet.
	I mean, I don't know if it will re-enter the stage, but at some point, maybe Europe will be back and we'll come back to world history.
	But at the moment, the stage is America's, and to the extent that any European nations have a place on it, I mean...
	You know, there's a kind of bit part for various British players, I suppose, as a kind of supporting act or whatever.
	But really, this is America's show at the moment.
	So, I mean, in my mind, the political leadership of most of Europe, you might as well be talking about, I don't know, the African political leadership under the British Empire or something like that, right?
	They're not...
	You know, these aren't proper leaders.
	These are spineless people, a lot of them, quite frankly.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, the other thing I would say, too, is that I mean, I think that America is I think it's correct.
	We are the empire in the world, as you've described.
	And I think that we're also the kind of natural seat of the next phase or transformation.
	Of the American empire, but of a kind of Western global empire, right?
	So I like to think of us as not exclusively Americanists.
	And I like to think also of Europe kind of sharing our destiny, but of us being part of the same kind of global destiny as it were.
	But that's, you know, I don't know if that...
	And I don't think that that's just rhetoric.
	I think that it would be intelligent for us to kind of include all those elements and to kind of break down those barriers and to include them as part of our project.
	I mean, I think it would be a kind of sound, intelligent, and diplomatic gesture, certainly.
	But I also, I think it would be a kind of reconnecting with our brothers in Europe.
	I'm against...
	So in other words, the Apollonian project, as it were, is a globalist project.
	So it's something that goes beyond America.
	Now, we're Americans primarily, though there are European Apollonians as well.
	And again, this could be the sort of seat of change or transformation that we're seeking.
	But if it were to happen in Europe through some fluke, then...

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