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May 26, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
25:53
God's Foreign Policy

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comThis was an epic conversation! In the first half, Richard, Mark, and the gang discuss Ron DeSantis’s disastrous announcement that he’s running for president, before taking an interesting digression into the world of Christopher Hitchens. In the second half, member “Boris” gives us an in-depth look at the recent inc…

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The fix is in.
So in other words, they want Trump to win is the thinking, right?
So the left wants Trump to win.
They should.
So in other words, so we can look at that town hall he had that everyone says was such a disaster and think, well, they want Trump to win, right?
Because they think he has a weaker chance against Biden.
Ironically enough, than DeSantis, right?
First off, I think that that's actually incorrect.
But whether they have that perception or not, that's a fair suggestion.
I think we're all in the darkness of our souls.
Don't you just want this?
I remember hearing someone interviewed...
I think it was like a Dallas Cowboys player.
It was like Micah Parsons, the linebacker.
And they were like, well, you know, you might face Brady in the playoffs.
Like, you know, are you going to be rooting for the other team against Brady?
And he was like, no, I'm rooting for Brady.
I want Brady to win.
I want to beat Brady.
And now that's obviously he's a NFL football player.
He's a tough guy, you know, kind of thing.
But, you know, like...
Don't you, just in the depth of your soul, ultimately want this monumental conflict to take place?
I mean, first off, it's just merely more entertaining, but you want to see the heavyweight bout.
You don't want to see Mike Tyson go up against his tomato can.
You want to see him go up against Holyfield.
I don't know.
You do.
I do.
There's some shrill, annoying white liberals who are like, oh my gosh, Trump should be illegal.
We should have good people on both sides kind of thing.
There's some people like that, but they're weak.
I think if you have any red blood pumping through your body...
You just want this monumental conflict.
I mean, surely I'm speaking for everyone here, just on a visceral level.
Like, let's do this.
Yeah, the left would love to destroy Donald Trump again, have another chance at him in an election, I think, just to tear him apart.
And I think they have an entire arsenal that they're getting ready legally and all other sorts of things to just come after him.
I think they feel slighted, too, at the fact that he won in 2016 still, and they want to come after him again.
Yeah.
Well, there's certainly more entertainment value to Trump, right?
Yeah.
And the existential quality.
I mean, let's just imagine this.
So the Alvin Bragg thing, actually Ty Cobb, who was like Trump's lawyer for a time or whatever, he said that Trump should prepare for like a year jail sentence or something, which seems a bit, to be honest, excessive for like this kind of crime.
I don't know.
I guess I'm kind of cynical, but whatever.
But there might very well be an indictment.
There is going to be some kind of announcement of an indictment in Georgia.
And that could happen next week or a month from now.
And the Jack Smith thing is real.
I mean, I follow that not as intently as Shirell liberals, but...
You know, I kind of will see little things popping up like he's filing motions constantly.
And I mean, you know, so Trump would be running for his life.
I mean, he would be indicted facing jail and he would over the Mar-a-Lago classified documents over J6, perhaps with Jack Smith as well, and over the Georgia phone call.
And then just throw into the mix, you know, the bookkeeping with Stormy paying off a porn star or whatever in New York.
He'll be running in order to avoid jail time, or at the very least house arrest or whatever they're going to do with the former president.
But whatever, the stakes will be existential.
All right, anyone want to jump in on this?
I have kind of another little angle that I have some interest in.
Go for it.
Okay.
So, this just interests me.
So, David Sachs, there are two Sachs right now who are of importance in the world.
There's Jeffrey Sachs and David Sachs.
I don't think they're directly related.
And they are both pretty avidly pro-Russia.
David Sachs is one of the Bette Noirs for Charles and his muckraking efforts.
He is part of the PayPal mafia connected with Teal and Musk and all of them and an investor.
Some kind of legitimacy.
Who knows?
But also someone who's put on the paleo-conservative hat.
So he is giving donations and writing articles for the American Conservative magazine.
He's kind of part of this NatCon culture that we've talked about that's out there.
He has some connections to the Claremont Institute, etc.
Also Jewish Zionist.
Shouldn't surprise anyone.
So he was...
I mean, the Musk town hall or space actually occurred on his account.
Because apparently the Musk account made it too popular.
So they went to someone with many fewer followers.
And they got it done.
He went on Fox News, and he's been going on a lot of these podcasts.
He actually even went on Jackson Hinkle's live stream.
Doing something like that indicates to me that he is very keyed in with Russia.
He went on Jimmy Dore.
He's been dipping his toe into people.
Probably less so Dore, but...
Undoubtedly with Jackson Hinkle, dealing with an actual asset of the Kremlin.
It gets a little bit edgy when you start doing stuff like that.
He went on Laura Ingraham's program afterward.
I guess we can go into the idiosyncrasies of all this, but I also had a broader point to make.
He was on Laura Ingraham's program, and they were talking about the space.
And Laura Ingraham was saying, well, you know, what is Ron DeSantis' perspective on Ukraine?
Because he's kind of played it both ways.
There was a time, maybe about, I don't know, three or six months ago, where Tucker Carlson asked for a statement from all of the major political candidates.
And Ron DeSantis gave a statement that was kind of, you know, had some escape clauses here and there, but it was kind of pushing towards the Trump side of things.
Trump basically said, you know, he was asked at that town hall, do you want Ukraine to win?
And he didn't answer.
He basically says, you know, I want to stop the dying, which is basically a pro-Russian perspective at this point.
I mean, it's Ukraine that's under attack.
Ron DeSantis went on the Piers Morgan program, and he quoted a line, although not attributed to him, but he quoted a line from John McCain, which basically said that Russia is a gas station with nuclear weapons, which is pretty harsh, but maybe not untrue.
But yeah.
Obviously, Russia is more than that, and history is more than that, but it's shorthand.
And that kind of insult seemed to indicate that he was on board with the neocons.
Certainly, the Republican establishment, to some degree, and I think to a large degree, likes DeSantis.
I mean, Jeb...
Said this is DeSantis' time and all this kind of stuff.
So there's this kind of like question of who is he and where is he on this very important question.
And Jeffrey Sachs is being, or David Sachs, sorry, I'm mixing them up.
David Sachs is being interviewed by Laura Ingram.
And he said, you know, oh yeah, I'm really against wars of choice.
And that's what this is.
This is a proxy war of choice.
So he's kind of mixing his terminology there.
But he's basically saying that we are engaged in a proxy war against Russia.
And it was a war of choice in the sense that we chose to get in, maybe most defensively, we chose to get involved to defend Ukraine.
We could have just let them suffer the consequences or even, and I'm sure many of Many, many on the right believe this, that we instigated this war, that really Putin is a victim in all this.
We created this Ukraine invasion.
And Laura Ingraham agreed with him.
So there's a lot to say there in terms of all of the ins and outs of why is Sachs so vehement about this issue?
Why does he take this position?
But there's another thing just kind of like on a broader level, because, you know, I've been around.
I'm 45 years old.
I can remember these things.
I can remember Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter and all of these people being fanatical Iraq War promoters.
And, you know, particularly Ann Coulter.
She was doing like workshops at CPAC about how to get your professor.
Fired for treason if he denounces George W. Bush in the classroom.
It was just totally grotesque, vicious type stuff, the rhetoric.
Ann Coulter, after 9-11, said that we should bomb their cities and convert them to Christianity.
Ann Coulter was part of the neocon attack on anyone in the right who opposed the...
The paleoconservatives in particular, but really anyone who was lukewarm on the war.
And now they're talking like paleoconservatives and using paleolanguage as well, which is interesting.
And I was just thinking about this.
So what is happening here?
And there's some plausible explanations.
One of them is that they've learned something from The Iraq experience.
Now, I have a rather jaundiced take on the right, so it's hard for me to agree that they've learned anything.
But who knows?
The other thing is that they've just kind of gone along with Trump.
Trump put himself out there during the South Carolina debate in early 2016.
He just said, you know, Bush lied, people died.
They knew they didn't have weapons of mass destruction, and they went in anyway.
It was a big whopper of a mistake or something like that.
And that that was just so bold that it kind of got in their head.
Maybe some of those things are occurring.
But I wonder if there's something kind of bigger going on here.
Because you could also say that these conservatives, granted Laura Ingraham would have been a lot younger in during the Cold War, but you know, she was, she graduated from Dartmouth in the eighties.
She would have experienced the Cold War I didn't.
I mean, the Cold War was over by the time I was 10 or something.
I do have certain memories of it, but I certainly wasn't a conscious, thinking person at that time.
But it seems like these conservatives would be the ones who would really take to A new neo-Cold War environment.
This would be in their wheelhouse, just a softball thrown over the middle of the plate that they could knock out of the park.
It's like, well, this is an attack on freedom and we have to oppose this Russian empire, which might very well be evil.
We need a strong home front in order to...
Beat the commies or something like that.
But they haven't.
They've gone the exact opposite route.
The exact opposite thing that you would expect them to do, at least hypothetically, if you were like a foreigner who had read a bunch about American history, you would basically say, oh, well, of course the right will be fanatically anti-Russian.
But they're not.
They're the opposite.
And so what is it?
What exactly is going on?
And I was just thinking about this.
I wonder if it's the case that the reason why they don't like this war is because it is a kind of, you know, intrafamilial battle between Europeans.
That they really took to the Rock War.
I mean, maybe they've learned some lessons.
I think that's being generous to the notion that any of these folks have learned anything from history or experience, but maybe they have.
And they saw the folly of Iraq, but maybe their vehemence and passion in fighting the Iraq War was really based on its Jewish or Middle Eastern qualities.
That it was an attack on Babylon.
That is Iraq.
And that it was on some level doing something on behalf of Israel.
And it resonated with them kind of religiously and emotionally in that way.
And at this point, saying, sticking up for a country in Europe.
They're just past that.
They don't care about Europe.
They don't think of themselves as a European country.
I mean, the dissident right can talk all day long about how, you know, we're an outpost of Europe and we should be connected to other whites and other nationalists around the continent and in Australia too, whatever.
That's not how conservatives fundamentally think.
That is not how they have thought for decades.
And so it actually isn't, it shouldn't be that much of a surprise that Laura Ingraham, who wears this crucifix prominently when she, you know, appears on television, who was a raging fan of the Bush era wars, denouncing anyone who dared to offer criticism, that this actually makes a lot of sense.
And they don't want to fight on behalf of white people or Euro.
They want to engage in some kind of crusade in the Holy Land.
And that that is the kind of foreign policy that ultimately resonates with them.
And certainly it resonates with David Sachs.
Just a thought.
Well, I do think it is notable that a lot of these sort of Titans of Silicon Valley, who have become very salient in our society, are essentially foreigners.
Sachs being one.
I mean, he's also South African, like Musk.
And I believe Thiel is German, is that correct?
Yeah, so, but essentially, they represent, you know, for better or worse, and I don't think this by itself is a mark against them.
I mean, you know my views.
On globalism, but they do ultimately represent a kind of global elite, as it were.
And they see, you know, it's almost as if they've watched the development of the American empire, you know, from abroad growing up in this sort of thing.
And now they're kind of, you know, entering into the arena of this sort of the power arena of America, as it were.
As foreigners, essentially.
Because it is a kind of open arena.
And America ultimately is a global empire.
So, I mean, I just think it's interesting to see this sort of generation, sort of the powerful people in American society now, in a lot of cases, are not even American, really.
It's a weird phenomenon.
Have any of you guys read...
A Christopher Hitchens book.
It's called H22.
It's about his memoirs.
And I've been into his writing for a long time, since I was in a British school.
And Colombia is a very Catholic society.
And this was a time of new atheism.
And I had a British guy from Wales teacher.
Who lended me his copy of God is Not Great, which was Christopher Hitchens, you know, bestseller book.
And I follow his career as a writer and the chapters in his memoir where he narrates when he became an...
When he got his, not his green card, but he became naturalized and he had to say the Pledge of Allegiance and take that history test.
He was more fanatical than any American I have read about America.
And the guy wrote the book about Thomas Jefferson and how America is exceptional.
He was a socialist.
A Trotskyist, sorry, in the 80s and the 70s, but he then became a neocon after 9-11.
Christopher Hitchens, I mean.
And you do find this weird phenomenon of foreigners who get naturalized and become more fanatical than the natives themselves about the country, which has given them political asylum or...
Or, like, has adopted them.
It's also very common in Latin American exile writers during the Condor Operation era in the Cold War.
So, yeah, it's a real thing, what you say, Mark, that some foreigners become fanatical American exceptionalists.
It's a real thing.
Yeah, you know, the Christopher Hitchens thing was interesting.
From what I can tell, and I actually recently watched an interesting roundtable on YouTube that was during that era.
I think it was about 2002 or so, and it was Christopher Hitchens and David Reif and a number of writers of good repute, in fact, and they were discussing these issues.
I think there might have been a socialist edge to Hitchens because he didn't become a conservative exactly.
And he kind of stuck to his guns in so many areas, but actually did feel that in this circumstance, the U.S. military could be a force for good.
And I believe, like, gosh, someone can correct me or somebody knows the history better than I do.
He was very concerned with this, like, Kurdish socialist organization that was in a way betrayed when George Herbert Walker Bush let Saddam slaughter the Kurds at the end of the first Iraq war.
Rob Java.
It's called Rob Java.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so he kind of saw this as like, let's do it right this time and let's knock out the big bad.
And he was also making the argument that Iraq isn't going to collapse anyway.
That seemed to almost be a, I don't know, a little bit bad faith.
I'm not sure that's accurate or anyone believe that.
But, you know, let's knock it over and then help out some of these people who I like, basically.
So anyway, he's a complicated figure because, you know, a lot of new atheism, to its credit, Really was reacting against the Iraq War and the rise of the religious right or the re-rise of the religious right.
It also had a decay day in the 80s with Reagan.
And, you know, the God Delusion came out in 2006.
Dawkins claimed that he had wanted to write it for decades or had written parts of it.
It came out as a torpedo launched against the George W. Bush mission-accomplished aircraft carrier, if you go along with my metaphor here.
It was of a time.
I have lots of criticisms of New Atheism, but it was justified.
A needed critique of a lot of the madness going on with evangelical voters, particularly in 2004, when they really came on board with George W. Bush, and he won a re-election in a landslide.
It was all these evangelicals who hadn't voted before.
Previously, they had a post-scopes monkey trial.
They had basically said, all politics is corrupt, and they're all evil, and blah, blah, blah.
There are these times where they get activated and they really get activated.
And they say, no, God has chosen George W. Bush.
We are fighting a war that is not about weapons of mass destruction.
And it kind of, sort of, is about spreading democracy or all that stuff that was articulated in George W. Bush's 2005 inaugural address, you know, we're a force for good bringing democracy to the world.
It was about that to a degree, but all of that talk was like tinged with a religious message.
And the fact that Iraq was in Babylon, I don't think is insignificant.
It was, whether they quite understood that consciously or not, it just, it was layered.
I don't know.
It's a very complicated way.
It's a complicated thing to think about, but I think my take on this is right.
It came to me last night while I was watching that interview with David Sachs and Laura Ingraham, and it was like, Isn't this funny?
And I think a lot of people in the dissonant right or Tucker Carlson fans, they're wanting to say, oh look, they've learned their lessons.
The right used to suck in 2003 with Bush and all that stuff, but they learned so much from that experience.
The idea of conservatives learning anything strikes me as impossible.
Basically.
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