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June 7, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
23:30
Goats and Lambs

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comThis was an exceptional conversation! First, the gang reacts to Chris Christie’s entrance into the presidential race: Is it a hopeless clown act or might he be positioned to pull off an upset of Trump? Next, Richard and member Boris examine the geography and geopolitics of the recent sabotage of the Nova Kakhovka hydroel…

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We talk a lot about scapegoating, and that is this ancient term that is as relevant today as it was 2,000 or 3,000 years ago.
We all know what is meant by that.
I think you could say...
I think you could say with a lot of accuracy that currently conservatives are scapegoating drag queens or transgendered people or gay public school teachers or whatever.
Not that there aren't real issues with all of those things.
I think there unquestionably are.
But there seems to be an overemphasis on these people and a demonization of them and a way of kind of putting all of our problems onto the back of a gay teacher in Florida who is, you know, destroying the world or something.
The libs of TikTok effect, as it were.
And so it's clear that conservatives are kind of engaging in a certain type of scapegoating.
And I think that there's also a certain type of scapegoating with someone like George Floyd or Neely.
But I think it's a very complicated one.
So a lot of times conservatives will react like, Why is the left...
Why are they lionizing George Floyd or Neely?
George Floyd was a drug addict.
There's at least a possibility that he died due to drug use or that affected his death.
And he reportedly held a gun to a pregnant woman or something.
I mean, he was a bad guy.
Neely, as well, might not have been quite as bad, but he was terrorizing people on the subway.
He wasn't just out there dancing, doing the moonwalk, and entertaining everyone for cash.
He was terrorizing them and claiming he didn't care if he goes to jail, and he'd been to jail 40 times.
You know the stories.
These are weird people to choose as...
Heroes.
But I think that's missing the point in many ways.
I think they are a kind of scapegoat because they're bad people.
And what they're trying to do is demand that you see the humanity in the scapegoat.
And I've been influenced by Girard on this, who I had not read until fairly recently.
What he was saying is, so with Christ on the cross, you have this, the greatest sacrifice of all time in order to end all sacrifice.
So at this point, certainly sacrificing human, but even sacrificing an animal is seen as uncivilized and barbaric and unnecessary, at the very least, and grotesque.
Etcetera.
And we can kind of see Christianity as almost like ending that sacrificial tradition that was much longer than the Christian tradition.
But at the same time, it was the ultimate blood sacrifice.
I mean, God sacrificed his son, or in a way himself, to...
The blood cleanses us.
We are relieved of original sin as well.
But what Girard was saying is it was also a kind of way of...
He was the ultimate scapegoat in the sense that he was kind of the reverse of a scapegoat.
So the classic scapegoat is a blameless goat, literally, that we...
Project our sins on and then mistreat.
We kill, we cast out, etc., in order to kind of cleanse ourselves of the guilt that we feel.
So it served a social function in that way.
And what Jesus, who is a sacrificial lamb, as he's described, but he asks you to kind of see the humanity in the scapegoat.
He is being killed, and from a Christian standpoint, he must be killed, in fact.
But then, at the same time, he was a kind of perfect person.
And I think someone like Neely is in that tradition in the sense that, as I often say, his bad behavior is a kind of feature and not a bug.
Like, the liberals and the left, they're They're demanding that you see the humanity in this sacrificial victim.
You need to care about George Floyd, and in a way, George Floyd was a martyr, not in spite of the fact that he was this drug user and bad dude, but almost because of it.
You're challenged to not just see the scapegoat and kind of with a...
Sociopathic glee in your eye, like sacrifice the goat and say, ah, I'm cleansed of my sin.
You're supposed to look the goat in the eye and kind of see its innocence or see its humanity.
And the Jewish quality to the Holocaust was, it wasn't that the Jews were bad, but they were kind of innocent.
And so the Holocaust is a kind of grand sacrifice.
It's demanded of you that you sympathize with the thing being holocausted.
I mean, holocaust means burnt offering, literally.
It's demanded of you to see them as innocent, maybe even see Jews as Christ.
You know, kind of reiteration of this myth in a modern context.
And I think in a way, we're all agreed on this, how The world's kind of moving beyond the Holocaust.
And I think we are moving towards a kind of post-Jewish period in the sense that we tend to see an African-American as Christ or as the Lamb that we're actually meant not just to sacrifice, but we might need to sacrifice, but as innocent.
And you can kind of see this.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi was criticized for this, but I thought she was, in a way, kind of laying bare the dynamic of this when she went up and she said, to George Floyd, we are so glad that you sacrificed yourself.
And she is a Catholic.
She's just laying bare the religious quality to all of this.
This isn't just a crime where we want to talk about police misconduct.
And, you know, we can talk about police misconduct.
Are the police out of control in some situations?
That's a fair perspective to have.
But it wasn't about that, ultimately.
It wasn't about police reform or defunding the police.
It was ultimately about sympathizing with the victim.
All of that has a Jewish character, has a Christian character.
Christianity is Jewish.
And I think in some ways we're kind of post-Jewish in the way that we look at these things, where we've moved beyond the Holocaust as a central moral icon of life, and we've kind of moved in a new direction.
Holocaust victims from 1943 or something.
And I think we're going to talk more about Black victims of 2023.
It's that turn.
And this can be put in contrast to something that Mark has written about, and it's a central aspect of the book.
The first one, that is, the pharmacoy.
So there's a tradition of, in a way, scapegoating.
The ugly and sick and gross and maybe you could even say Semitic or criminal of a society, that there's a tradition of just beating them, casting them out, maybe even killing them.
And that was an earlier Greek ritual.
And in many ways, the Christ...
The act of sacrificing Christ was a kind of reversal of that.
So anyway, these are just some thoughts.
You can tell I'm still kind of putting the pieces together with this one.
But I guess what I would say is that we're both...
We are post-Jewish in our collective thinking, but post-Jewish does not mean anti-Jewish or a-Jewish.
It means post-Jewish.
We've almost moved on from the Holocaust while we've...
Maintained the ultimate sacrificial dynamic that the Holocaust was a part of.
Yeah, I would agree.
I mean, I just don't think that they can...
I mean, to put it cynically, I just don't think they can make hay with the Holocaust anymore.
You know what I mean?
Because it just becomes absurd at some point where they're the most successful ethnic group in the world.
And we're still upset about this event that happened during World 2. Meanwhile, everyone else is already mourned their dead and is not bringing forth their dead from World 2 and asking for reparations from Germany or whoever.
So I think at some point it's untenable.
Yeah, I agree.
Can we revise the Pharmacore?
I mean, one thing that we've all criticized in this group is the kind of, I guess you could say passive aggressive, but victimization that white nationalists have.
I don't dispute the fact that whites get the short end of the stick in the affirmative action regime.
I, of course, agree with that.
I also don't dispute, even though these things are kind of anecdotal, I don't dispute that there are anti-white hate crimes, in effect, where someone will be attacked because he is white by some out-of-control black.
That these don't get nearly the publicity that the reverse situation would get.
I mean, I get it.
I agree, etc.
But I think the ultimate criticism of that is kind of this, like, you're playing the victim.
You're never going to really be treated as a victim, but also, do you really want to be the victim?
There's something inherently demoralizing about imagining white people as these innocent fools, basically, out there being attacked by Jews and blacks at every corner.
There's just something so kind of...
Can I chime in?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, that's a valid point.
But imagine being in the inner city and one of your loved ones is like beat to death by a group of feral blood.
I mean, sometimes these people, they'll even be let out on bond, for Christ's sake.
I totally get it.
And it's a legitimate complaint.
But making that the center of your...
Like, movement writ large, I think is fundamentally demoralizing.
To put it in Trumpian language, it's like we want to be winners, not losers.
We want to be heroes and not victims.
But I think it's worth questioning at least, have we moved to a point where you can Scapegoat someone in that pharmacoy or old-fashioned way.
Can you look at someone who's weak and sick and ugly and crush him for being weak and sick and ugly?
Are we maybe as advanced or as Retrograde, depending on your perspective, to think in that way.
Or should we be moving towards another vision for how scapegoating will be?
If you understand what I'm saying.
There's always going to be that dynamic in society.
The libertarian fantasy of everyone just being just and we prosecute criminals, but it's not going to be like that.
We live in a religious society where you have to engage in this.
There is going to be a scapegoating dynamic to any society and how that is.
I think on some I mean, Nietzsche was kind of of two minds of this.
On one level, Nietzsche clearly sympathized with the Blonde Beast.
And it's just kind of like, yeah, the Blonde Beast, they were badass.
They won.
And they saw victory is good.
Losing is bad.
If you're ugly and weak, I'm going to...
Squeeze your throat until you suffocate.
You're not deserving to live.
But there is something, as you can tell, obviously kind of sadistic or inherently brutal about that kind of mentality.
And Nietzsche didn't think we could just go back to the blonde beast.
I mean, he thought that we had to, you know, in a way, the Jewish revolution in morality.
It made us deeper.
It made us...
It added depth to our personality and consciousness.
Nietzsche certainly didn't think we could just go back and be Aryan warlords crushing all other races beneath our heels or something.
He wasn't that kind of...
Bald or brutal or something.
He thinks you needed to pass through the Christian era in order to get to something else.
Go ahead, Mark.
All right.
Well, so, and what people, and this is probably related at least to the aspect that you're criticizing of the DR, and I share your criticism, which the victim mentality, they believe themselves to be victims.
You know, on some level, of course, we can say that the white man has been skin-coated to a large extent in a liberal view of the world, whether in academia, in history, or in cinema.
They've made a kind of effigy of the white man as a kind of reoccurring villain, for example, in cinema.
You know, to the extent that a white man is interested in his own, you know, genetic interests, for example, is a white nationalist, essentially.
He's the devil, of course, in cinema or in culture, right?
So they have succeeded in kind of making a scapegoat of the white man.
Now, so I think that that's true.
And I think that people, you know, people in the Dior would say, okay, that is the case.
And that's why.
We, you know, so they've essentially adopted that kind of effigy or that model, which is really kind of one of the points of art, is it creates, you know, people imitate it, right?
People, it's imitative, ultimately.
And they identify with that scapegoated white man or that villainous white man and understand themselves, start to understand themselves also as villains, as it were.
You know, so they're imbibing that propaganda.
Now, I share your sense that they shouldn't be thinking of themselves as victims, of course, right?
It's absurd.
It's ridiculous.
But part of it is a reaction to this propaganda.
Right?
And an irritation with the fact that, well, you know, why are we the villains in these films and this sort of thing?
Why is our history treated in an unfair way in academia and these multicultural universities and so forth, right?
So it's a reaction to that.
Now, of course, the better reaction would be to, well, to find a solution and to not complain, right?
And find it effective and good solutions and not ineffective solutions.
So that's what I would say to that.
I mean, I think that that can be fairly said.
Now, I don't think that anyone should feel sorry for themselves or white should feel sorry for themselves, obviously.
In fact, it's contrary to what I've just said, of course.
But yeah, I mean, what would you say to that as a kind of commentary to what you were saying?
Well, yeah, no, we're in agreement.
I mean, I'm just asking, like, How you get out of this, because you have to first understand the dominant religious dynamic of society.
Candace Owens, I mean, there are a couple of things here.
First off, over the past three or four years, and I think this is coming from Trump, you have the entrance of white victimhood into the mainstream conservative narrative.
Now, you didn't have that previously.
The Southern strategy beforehand was basically like Jared Taylor, though more subtle.
You know, it was like, whites, we never commit crime.
That was basically what the Southern strategy was.
It's a pretty good imitation of his voice.
You don't want your kids...
Being in school with those blacks.
So you go to a private school and whatever.
Obviously, I don't even want to go into it, but they're just kind of problems and self-serving qualities to this.
One of the interesting aspects of Tucker or Trump is you have this white victimization where they hate you.
They want to kill you.
They've destroyed your society.
They're bringing in Hispanics in order for the Republican Party never to win again, and a great replacement, kind of this stuff.
And that has entered into the scene where it's actually kind of everywhere.
You see that in the Daily Wire.
You certainly saw it on Tucker.
You see it on conservative Twitter, where they'll just say things.
And these are not like...
Major figures, they might even be anonymous, but they're just like the anti-white Biden administration and stuff like this.
So it's kind of seeped in there, and they're playing the victim.
And again, to be fair here, there's justification, etc., etc.
So you have to understand that dynamic.
You also have to understand the religious dynamic of why...
Half of the country will inherently sympathize with Neely.
They will look at this figure as a lamb.
And Candace Owens can go around and be like, oh, well, look, he was arrested 40 times and he threatened people on the trail.
All that's true, but you're just kind of nitpicking.
You're making these technical critiques.
None of that ultimately matters.
Feelings don't care about your facts at the end of the day, as we know.
The whole point of it is that he is a sacrificial lamb in this Christian or post-Christian manner.
And so I guess I'm just kind of asking how you get past this, because maybe on some level, conservatives and Myself, to be brutally honest here, you look at someone like Neely and you're just like, who cares?
He's just some criminal thug.
Why are we wringing our hands over this?
I think Nietzsche, his rejoinder to that would probably be to agree with His ultimate rejoinder is there's no way out but through.
Your brutal perspective on this matter is going to lose at the end of the day to the overwhelming Christian religious impulse in your society.
Where do we go?
How do we change the dynamic?
Do you just play along?
Do you be like, "Oh no, but whites are the real victim?" It's just not going to work.
I do think it will resonate with certain communities, but it's deeply unsatisfying.
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