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July 12, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:09:17
The Zoomer Problem

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.com“Academic Agent” joins the show! Through the prism of Nick Fuentes, AA, Mark, and Richard discuss inter-generational change and the collapse of civilization and culture. In the second half, Mark and Richard offer their thoughts on some recent films, The Sound of Freedom and Napoleon, as well as some classics, Blade Runner and Barry Lyndon.

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I have heard of Fresh and Fit, and I think I learned a little bit about them when Hannah Pearl Davis, we talked about last Thursday, was on their program.
And I've seen highlights.
One thing that I have noticed is that there is this new genre of...
How do I put it into words?
Normie sex talk?
With edgy, outrageous commentary.
Is that the right...
You know what I'm talking about?
The whatever podcast, which I've never listened to a full podcast.
I couldn't even imagine doing it.
But I'll see these clips on Twitter of, you know, whatever and black Helvetica letters in the background.
And then they'll have like an OnlyFans girl and she'll be like, yeah, you know, I'm earning so much money.
And then they'll have a like...
Christian dad, or like young Christian dad who'll be like, let me mansplain this to you, alright?
Doing porn is not good.
And that's gonna come back to bite you.
I'm just saying.
Many men aren't cool with that.
And then they'll have like an obese transsexual who'll be like, I'm a 10!
Or something.
And I think it's just there to kind of generate content and generate commentary and so on.
That seems to be a fair and accurate representation of what that genre is.
Mars, on a previous conversation, Mars, I thought it had a pretty good...
I thought he was really on to something.
Yeah.
Sorry, I'm jumping into interpretation here, and I'll let AA have his due as well.
But on some level, it is mansplaining.
And what I mean by that is that, okay, these guys are saying you're not going to get a good beta Christian husband and get a house in the suburbs.
These chicks probably don't want that.
OnlyFans, like a lot of things, is effectively a tournament.
That is, there are one or a dozen or maybe a hundred winners, and then everyone else is a loser.
And so there's thousands of girls on OnlyFans.
And you hear these stories of them earning $20,000 a month or $200,000 a month.
I've heard all of it.
But the reality is that the vast majority probably...
There's probably an 80-20 rule, and then there's an 80-20 rule within the 20%.
The vast majority are earning 20 bucks a month at most, but giving the same product.
They just haven't won the tournament.
The average is sub 200 bucks, is what I've heard.
Right.
But that's an average.
Average is a very deceptive.
As many people said, if there's a bar with six people in it and then Bill Gates walks into the bar, the average income is now $100 million, but no one is richer.
It would be interesting to look at what is the average of 80% of OnlyFans?
I would presume it's actually quite low.
The average is $100.
I bet the average of 80% of them is like $7.
Nick went on a program.
I presume that Fresh and Fit is like that to a large degree, though it has a manosphere quality to it.
But here is my kind of ironic defense of Nick Fuentes.
I think this is the best Nick Fuentes because he's just being this elfin comedian and talking about how he's an uber-Catholic and he loves Hitler.
And Putin is based.
And it's kind of funny.
And it's not...
I do think that Nick can actually have a hot take, so to speak.
I think he can bring a perspective to contemporary politics that isn't just rah-rah team.
I think he is actually capable of that, to give him credit.
But maybe he's best at being this like...
Crazy little Zoomer kid wearing a sweatshirt talking about Hitler and how he wants to marry a 12-year-old or whatever.
I mean, as off-putting as all of that is, maybe that's kind of like the best, Nick.
What do you think?
Yeah, A.A., why don't you grab that?
I mean, in a way, Richard, I think it's the only Nick.
And I think that among several other things on Twitter, I'm probably known by some people for being relentless in my dunking of Zoomers.
I have a pretty low opinion of the Zoomer.
And I think that Nick Fuentes is in some way emblematic of this.
This kind of kid who's essentially got nothing to say.
This is the This is the thing that I find kind of simultaneously kind of fascinating, depressing, and infuriating, is that, you know, the internet has kind of democratized and leveled the playing field when it comes to anybody with a microphone now has a voice, right?
But the Zoomers, for me, are kind of like a unique...
Like a kind of cultural and historical ground zero.
Okay, so, you know, we talk about the boomers.
The boomers had their own ground zero, right?
I mean, I remember growing up in the 80s and the 90s, I was surrounded by boomer 60s culture.
And I remember reading like Rolling Stone and things like that.
And they were right in such a way that it was like, oh, the world was boring and gray.
And there was just like Frank Sinatra and Yeah, don't you think they were almost right in a way?
Not that we shouldn't criticize them, but...
There actually was something edgy and kind of creative about that period?
Yeah, there's something happening here, right?
But you don't know what it is, Mr. Jones, or whatever.
Or, you know, you can just see it in the songs, like Roll Over, Beethoven, or whatever.
There was an element of self-consciousness that was going on with the boomers, because they at least had the privilege, I guess, looking back, of living in a...
Living in a time and place that was only just beginning to fall apart, you could say.
And from the European perspective, certainly, was also trying to put itself back together after the tragedy of World War II, right?
I mean, whichever side your country was on in that conflict, it was just absolutely devastating to the world order as it existed.
Before 1945.
And so a lot of what happened in the 60s can be seen as kind of an attempt to find...
I mean, in politics, they called it a post-war settlement, right?
But that kind of happened on a cultural level as well.
And there's all sorts of interesting things you can say about boomers.
But for me, the Zuma, each individual Zuma is like their own ground zero.
But unlike the boomer, Oh, I think we're good.
And because I do some light editing, I can just do a little bleep or something.
If you get too hardcore on us here.
I think I'll be safe with saying the average Zoomer is so moronic and so lacking in even the basics of what I would call basic cultural and historical knowledge that any context of what they are doing socially and culturally is always already lost.
And there's lots of interesting ways in which this manifests itself.
With a phenomenon like Fuentes, which I'll get back to in a second.
But I mean, just to go off on a brief tangent a minute, I don't want to monologue too much, but I remember a few years ago, you know, back when I was teaching in universities and so on, I had to design all of my courses in such a way that would essentially fill in all of the history that the students should have learned at school.
Right.
Because they just don't have it, right?
So anyone of our generation, Richard, has a kind of basic idea, right?
Well, you know, the Elizabethan hero was here.
Then you have, like, the English Civil War, the Restoration, you know, then something like the Enlightenment happened.
Then you've got the industrial, like, we've got kind of vague map of the shape of history in our minds, at least, like, which epoch goes where.
You know, there's antiquity followed by the medieval era or something like that.
But because of the way that a lot of history is taught in schools, which is very kind of modular, it's very modular, I found that students just didn't even have a basic kind of sense of that.
You know, that at this point you have the War of the Roses and at that point you have the Tudors.
It just doesn't exist.
They don't have the map.
Because essentially, I mean, certainly in British schools, they study periods in isolation.
It's like you'll study the Nazis on their own.
And then you'll do another module and you'll study like, I don't know, Henry VIII on his own.
So there's a very little sense of history being joined up in that way.
There might be some virtue to doing that, to be overly fair here.
But I think what you're talking about is that the lack of a master narrative, even if it's one that you want to go and deconstruct, you know?
It's like, what's the origin of the Enlightenment?
Is it, you know, 18th century French philosophers?
No, actually, you can go into the Middle Ages and find it, you know?
Exactly.
But you have to do that after.
And this is an argument I actually used to have with colleagues and things, which is that essentially you cannot be postmodern, right?
You cannot appreciate what the postmodern is if you can't even walk.
You can't run before you've learned to even crawl.
And this is another, I mean...
Part of it goes back to the way courses are constructed and things.
I mean, I had radical feminist colleagues who were trying to, like, deconstruct the, I don't know, they were trying to teach, like, the medieval literature was written by lesbian women before these kids had even done, like, Chaucer or something.
It's like, well, this is going to mean nothing.
Like, if you haven't done Shakespeare and Marlowe and so on, nobody's going to care about Lady Mary Roth.
They just don't have a...
In order to see something as transgressive or as challenging, you have to have a sense of what the status quo is.
And my general comment is that I think the Zoomers are so lacking in any of those things that things that are just kind of bog-standard reactions that we might have, social transgressions, taboos, they just don't have it.
They just don't have any, like, there's no filter.
So when...
When we see somebody like Nick Fuentes being outrageous and saying crazy things and so on, it's like the Zoomers are so stupid, they don't even know what they're doing in a way, which can be a good thing and a bad thing.
They're immune to what I call boomer truth regime.
They don't have any of the haloed stuff around World War II and the mid-century Germans and so on.
But on the other hand...
It's like, well, you might as well be dealing with a chimpanzee or something.
It's like you're dealing with a caged animal who has no sense of anything.
You can just poke them around and they'll jump about and you can laugh at them.
This is my honest view.
To give you an example, Richard, I have a set of tweets I do sometimes.
Where, you know, sometimes on Twitter you're just kind of talking and you'll throw out a reference to something.
You know, I might casually mention Al Pacino or something.
And then what I've started doing is I follow that up with a tweet that says, for Zoomers, Al Pacino is an actor.
And what I'll do is I'll mix in obviously false information with kind of well-known things.
Right.
And then...
What is stunning about these?
Because obviously to me, or to you, these would be kind of funny little tweets.
You're like Al Pacino, former Prime Minister of Italy.
Yeah, exactly.
During the First World War.
There was a story with the Rolling Stones the other day, as Mick Jagger's now going out with an 18-year-old or something ridiculous like that.
Or some girl in her 20s.
And I just quote tweeted and said, you know, maybe he gives his satisfaction.
And then I say, well, for Zoomers, a tweet is a pun.
Mick Jagger is in a band called The Rolling Stones.
One of their famous songs is Satisfaction.
Satisfaction is when you have sex.
Sex is something done between two consulting adults that you've only seen in porn.
A pun is a play on words.
You understand that kind of basic formula.
Wow.
What's incredible about these tweets is that Zoomers then, without any sense of irony or self-awareness or anything, reply.
Saying, oh, I think I knew that.
Or, oh, thanks for telling me.
I've never heard of Mick Jagger.
It's just like, it's kind of mind-blowing.
I just don't like, and I'm not talking about, you know, you can say, well, all right, I wasn't born in the 80s, so I don't know who, I don't know, the second member of Wham is or something, right?
But I'm talking about like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Marlon Brando, you know, just like basic.
Basic stuff that everybody knows that they just don't.
And to me, that makes them simultaneously fascinating, sad, and also terrifying because they just don't react to anything in the way that you might expect because they're just not fully socialized.
It's kind of like a systematic failure.
You've got a generation of people who just essentially aren't finished.
And I think that Nick Fuentes is, I think the reason that he's popular only really with those people.
I don't think he has any crossover to anybody who comes from the before times.
He's like a pure creature of Zoomer internet who speaks really only to Zoomers.
And I mean, this is my basic take in a nutshell.
I've talked a lot, so I'll...
I'll hand over to someone else.
Well, yeah, look, I fully agree with you.
I mean, I remember when I was reading, I think I was reading Harper's Monthly.
This was like at least 20 years ago.
And they published an article.
They would often have these kind of funny and ironic snippets from things in the beginning of the magazine.
And they published an article where a high school teacher combined like Like misapprehensions of history into one narrative.
And so it really was like Jesus, an American, was born in 1900.
You know, like it just it was so wild that it just became absolutely hilarious.
It was like when Jesus killed Hitler or, you know, and then and then Thomas, then he made Thomas Jefferson president.
It was just.
Hilarious and absurd.
But I mean, this was taken from these things.
I remember visiting Paul Gottfried in, he was a, this was at least, I think it was 15 years ago, and he was a professor at Elizabethtown.
I imagine he's retired at this point from that position.
But he's at a Lutheran college, and they don't know who Martin Luther is.
These are college students.
So, I mean, it's one thing, you know, when we imagine like, oh, there's some kid in the hood whose dad is elsewhere and whose stepdad is beating him and his mom's on drugs and he witnessed a murder.
You know, it's almost like entirely forgivable that, you know, this Tyrone character doesn't know much about history, being that his situation is so poor.
These are middle-class kids from the Burbs attending a Lutheran college.
And it's like, oh, who was Luther?
What is that?
What is that?
Protestantism?
What is that?
They have no clue.
I think we have definitely evaporated all narratives and they are a test case of pure postmodernism in the sense that even if people like you or I want to deconstruct the narrative, they're not even...
There's no way of making sense of the world and your place in it.
And I think this is also confounded by something which I've talked about before on these episodes where I think I've leveled it sludge or anti-culture.
You can pick whatever name for it you want.
I am a fan of the free-flowing format, exactly like what we're doing today.
I love a good podcast where you have intelligent people, and it's better in a way than an essay because you can kind of pick up threads and go someplace you didn't expect to.
There is great content, in fact, that is possible in this kind of situation.
It reminds me...
Of the best kind of seminar that I ever took at, say, UChicago, where we would start with a text and then we would begin discussion and we'd end up someplace.
And I do like that.
But that's really at the best case.
I think there's this new genre of entertainment, I guess, which is quickly replacing the mainstream media and films, etc.
Which is like hanging out with your friends as content in this parasocial relationship where there's a streamer sitting in a gamer chair with fluorescent lights behind her and you can see just enough of the cleavage and maybe she's wearing nerd glasses just to add a little spice to her look.
And she's responding to questions, many of which are outlandish or meant to be taken unseriously.
And they're talking really about nothing for hours on end.
And when I was Nick Fuentes' age, I mean, again, I sound like an old man, like get off my lawn or something.
But when I was Nick Fuentes' age, I was reading books.
Like, reading a magazine, traveling around, you know, on very little income, but just kind of having fun.
But basically, I was consuming or imbibing is probably a better way.
I actually was an English and music major.
I studied a lot of English, Elizabethan literature, etc.
I actually hadn't really read The Ancients.
When I was in Germany in 2002, I read Plato.
I probably read him before, but I read him seriously for the first time.
I read Virgil.
I just sat down and read it.
It was just imbibing all of this stuff.
They're not imbibing.
They're vomiting.
And so it's just...
Yeah, I mean, what could they possibly have to say?
Right, exactly.
And there's no excuse not to vomit.
You can do a live stream when you're sick in bed.
I mean, you can just endlessly generate the sludge.
I mean, to give Nick some credit...
I've never watched an entire stream in my life of his, and I doubt I ever will.
But to give him some credit, I do find some of his riffs, for lack of a better word, pretty hilarious.
Like this, to have sex with a woman is gay.
I'm just like, all right, this guy is so ridiculous.
I kind of like him.
He's so stupid.
All right, remember one time, this was years ago, he was like...
People say the Bible is crazy, but like, all right, let me do an imitation.
People, they say the Bible is crazy, but then they want us to believe that large reptilian monsters roamed the earth called the dinosaurs.
Now, tell me, who's more outlandish?
Who's more ridiculous?
Science or the Bible?
Rest my case.
He's denying dinosaurs.
And I'm just like, I cannot believe it's funny.
To give him credit.
But I cannot believe I am listening to this.
You know?
And so I think that's where they are.
And their lives really are on, you know, in the media.
So I remember there's a line from a pretty good film from, you know, a decade ago, like The Social Network.
And it was said by that musician-cum-actor.
I'm forgetting his name at the moment.
And he was like, you know, at one...
What did he say?
He was like, Facebook is helping us.
We're entering cyberspace so that we will now, you know, we will now be living in cyberspace.
Like, we're fully plugged in where what happens in the real world no longer matters.
It wasn't Andrew Garfield, but don't...
It doesn't...
It's neither here nor there.
Someone mentioned that in the chat.
And...
I think that was silly, and I think there was something kind of heady and ambitious about that idea of plugging into the web.
Justin Timberlake was the guy who said it.
Yeah, I can't remember his character.
I haven't seen it in a while.
He's a singer, pop star, whatever, and he's also an actor.
Anyway, but I think it actually happened, but it didn't quite happen in the way that we thought.
I think we imagined kids in the 90s or something.
Plugging into the internet.
It's like the matrix or you plug in and you're in like a Tron-like universe and everything's cool and kind of dangerous and deceptive, but you're expanding your boundaries.
And so I think this was kind of the fantasy.
But the reality of being plugged into the internet, it's almost more mundane than real life.
Sitting in a gamer chair talking about maybe dating, I don't know, or video game playing.
It's weirdly more mundane than the real world in this shocking way.
But they do live there.
So their social lives are digital.
Their sex lives are digital, which is really remarkable.
Their friends, they're a better...
They probably know more about that weird streamer girl that they watch hours upon hours than they know about members of their own family.
Or certainly friends.
I've certainly had the experience a number of times where somebody casually mentions they've got a girlfriend or they're seeing someone or whatever.
And then I find out actually...
They're living across the other side of the world and they've only ever talked to each other on Discord.
I'm like, you don't really have a girlfriend.
You've never even met each other.
Do you know what I mean?
Have you mutually masturbated with one another over Zoom?
I'm not trying to be vulgar or outlandish here.
That would almost be the ultimate culmination of it, where you have this digital connection, but then you're ultimately solipsistically stuck inside yourself, maybe literally in this You're just jerking off together.
And so you're not actually creating a connection.
And needless to say, you're not going to reproduce yourself that way.
But that's almost like the ultimate expression of this would be a relationship of that.
I do think that it manifests itself in all sorts of interesting ways.
On the subject of Nick Fuentes, I think one of the famous memes is about the cat boy.
I don't know if you've noticed, Richard, but in recent years, just the sheer number of anime avatar right-wing transsexuals is enormous.
It's like the I would say it's more than one in ten of posts that I see now are from accounts of that, you know, of that sort of nature where it's kind of ambiguous as to, well, is this a girl or a boy?
It's clearly a man because of their typing style, but they present themselves as a woman and, you know, they've got their strange terms like booning and so on and so forth.
But it's like, how much of that is real?
How much of that is just a projection?
I mean, I've said it before.
I remember I had a tweet a while back that really angered a lot of people.
And in my experience, when you anger a lot of people, and I'm sure you're going to agree with this, you're probably over the target somewhere, right?
If you get real pushback, you probably hit on a nerve.
I remember saying that, making your own character in an RPG game.
It's like one step on the slippery slope to becoming a transsexual.
Yeah.
But that is basically what it is.
It is the presenting yourself as a transsexual on Twitter is really...
I guess what I'm trying to say is these people aren't really dressing up and going out and having gay sex or something like this.
They're not doing any of those things.
They're just sitting in their bedrooms, projecting an image of themselves onto the world, just like we used to make our Facebook profiles.
But it's now much more in the realm of fantasy and character creation.
It's kind of interesting, but also deeply tragic and sad at the same time.
But I think this can also...
It's weird when it spills over into the real world.
I do think that the alt-right as a movement was that spilling over into the real world, and people would bring memes into real life.
There was actually someone I remember who was a genuinely tragic case.
He was someone who was a successful engineer.
Of some regard, who was at Charlottesville.
And when you saw him, he was just dressed up in the memes.
I mean, keep in mind, when I got punched on camera, I was wearing a little Pepe pin.
And it was just kind of like, oh, isn't this cool?
I'm hip with the...
With the kids, you know, kind of thing.
And then obviously, you know, there's a dose of reality given to yours truly.
But this person who was at Sherlock, he was dressed up in all the memes.
He was like a character, like a mascot.
And it became real for him and became too real.
And he was doxxed and he eventually committed suicide.
Because it was just too real.
But the alt-right was a kind of spilling over of things.
I mean, Nick Fuentes is a connecting thread in all this.
I mean, what was J6?
I mean, I think it was a lot of things.
And I do think there was a legal theory there.
There were some machinations going on with the electors.
And Trump wanted to stay in office, obviously.
Fundamentally, it was a kind of like spilling over of the internet into real life, where all of those people had been connected through the internet and had created a kind of quasi-religious system that bore striking resemblances to Christianity, kind of had the structure of Christianity, but wasn't Christianity, obviously.
But it kind of spilled over to this point where they...
When it was in real life, they didn't understand what was happening.
One of the defenses of JSEX is that they were just walking around the Capitol like deer in headlights, which they were.
But it's a weird defense.
It's like they know not what they do, but they do it anyway.
I'll let you talk in just one second.
One of my favorite moments was a woman who was middle-aged, probably my age.
And she went over to a camera and she was complaining and she was like, "Oh, I got tear gassed." And they were like, "Oh, what happened?" And she goes, "Well, it's a revolution." It's like, "Yeah, tear gas is going to be the least of your worries if you're engaging in revolution, my friend." But I think that expressed that kind of unconscious quality.
Mm-hmm.
of the digital world flowing into real life.
But go ahead.
No, I mean, I was going to say that, you know, they say like the first time is tragedy, the second time is farce, right?
I do think there's a difference between Charlottesville and what happened in that moment and this thing that we've been talking about with the Frentice phenomenon and so on, which is that, you know...
For better or for worse, back in 2016, 2017, when you put that peppy frog on, there was a degree of self-awareness going on with you.
You're a man who's grown up watching Seinfeld or whatever.
You have a degree of sophistication where you actually understood to some extent what was happening and the social, political, and cultural context of that.
And that when you're transgressing, you actually know why and, you know, if something is edgy, you know what that line is and why you're crossing it, for better or for worse.
Now, the Nick crowd, I do not believe, has that level of awareness.
I just don't think they know what they're doing.
It's like a kind of...
You think they're not ironic and some weird...
That's interesting.
I just don't think they have any concept of any of those things.
They just lack the necessary knowledge, basically, to understand what they're actually doing.
Now, the actual effect, when Louis Theroux puts Nick Fuentes on a BBC documentary and middle-class women in bloody...
You know, Kent.
Listen to him saying that women shouldn't have the vote and all this sort of stuff, right?
That is probably very traumatizing to them, right?
But I just don't know if Fuentes understands why that reaction would happen, right?
I mean, maybe he does.
Maybe I'm not giving him enough credit.
But I just don't get the impression.
That there's the ability to distinguish between a kind of edgelord online space and just the real world and its real taboos and actual moral values that people have.
I've talked a lot.
My next book is going to be called The Boomer Truth Regime.
And, you know, I'm going to talk about, like, this is a kind of mental prison, in a way, for boomers and Gen Xers and millennials who have all lived their lives in this kind of ideological kind of post-World War II bubble that, in some ways, is kind of liberal and free, but in other ways, extremely brittle.
Yeah.
Okay?
I mean, there are whole topic areas that we can't even talk about without getting into trouble, right?
Well, I think that you're onto something, because...
Okay, so if we briefly describe the generations, obviously the boomers had this very unique perspective of being born after the Second World War and experiencing its benefits and kind of developing the taboo, which might have existed previously to some extent, but really, you know, Hitler is the worst thing ever.
The Holocaust is the most...
Kind of profound event that we could think about.
Liberalism's good, you know, and so on.
Gen Xers, we kind of reacted against that as their children, where it's the kind of Christopher Hitchens, you know, well, okay, but, you know, Israel just uses the Holocaust so they can oppress Palestinians.
We had a little sense of, and I'm a young Gen Xer, but I am a Gen Xer.
But we kind of had a sense of irony.
The millennials almost reinstated the boomer truth regime in a kind of funny way.
Gen Xers, I mean, I call it the Gen X Daria.
Do you remember that show, Daria?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I do.
You know how she was cynical and she'd be always kind of psychoanalyzing her parents and she'd never be impressed with it.
I mean, that's very stereotypical kind of Gen X. Yeah.
It's Bill Murray, basically, you know?
Yeah.
But then, like, millennials almost reinstated it in this kind of cutesy way.
But I think Gen Z, they're almost like, they really are.
Because if you look at the political profile of millennials and Zoomers, it's actually very similar in terms of, like, do you support gay marriage?
Do you...
Do you support abortion?
Do you support taxes or whatever?
They're actually very similar and they're very left-wing.
But I think there might be a profound difference that polling misses where it's like someone like Pearly Things or Nick Fuentes where they're just like, yeah, women shouldn't vote.
Women have no value.
They're just saying this directly unadulterated on social media.
That's a difference.
I don't think a millennial would do that.
No, I mean, millennials were extremely...
I taught a lot of millennials, and they were extremely earnest, and it's difficult.
I mean, I'm kind of on the cusp.
I'm either a late Gen X or an early millennial, you call it the Xennial.
I was born in the early 80s.
But certainly the later millennials.
They don't deal with ambiguity very well.
I remember teaching Shakespeare and they wanted to know who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.
You can't approach Shakespeare like it's Harry Potter.
But they almost wanted to make everything Harry Potter.
Genuinely a battle of good against evil.
Which is interesting in all sorts of ways.
Harry Potter and Marvel movies.
Yeah.
The gen...
The Gen Z, the Zoomers, as we've been talking about, I think what it is is that they, I genuinely don't think they have any sense of what you might call the sacred, right?
Now, you and I, we might start to question some of the, like you mentioned, like the uses of the Holocaust in kind of post-World War II myths, something like that.
And we can look at it with a kind of jaundiced eye.
But we also will have an acute sense, especially if you're just talking to a, you know, Joe Normie, member of the public, that this is an absolute kind of sacred symbol at the centre of the system.
And you have to tread really carefully around that because, you know, people can, if you tread on their sacred symbol, they can go absolutely apeshit.
And, you know, when it comes to that particular issue...
You know, you're dealing with some pretty untouchable areas, right?
But I don't feel like the typical Zoomer, and certainly not Nick, I don't think he gets that.
I don't think he gets that when he's making his cookie jokes or whatever, that this is going to be like...
I mean, it has the effect.
Like, he probably sees the horrified reactions and so on and thinks they're funny or whatever.
But I don't think he quite understands the depth of how sacred that value is.
Or, like, I don't know, women's votes or something like that.
So, I mean, see, it's a weird thing, because in a strange way, it's liberating, right?
But they're almost trying to achieve what I want to achieve with my Boomer Truth stuff, just in the most retarded way possible.
They're just doing it by being retired, not by any kind of...
Kind of knowing deconstruction.
And I find myself kind of torn because in a strange way, I also want to, how can I put it?
As I want to tear down the world the boomers built, I also want to kind of retain some part of it or appreciate some part of it because it's the world we grew up in, right?
But they just don't have any semblance of any of it.
I mean, another attitude I come across a lot from the Zoomers is that...
Oh, we live in such a morally bankrupt world.
Basically, all art produced after the war is degenerate.
You know, you'll talk about a movie or something.
Oh, why would I need to know that?
It's degenerate.
Or it's a Jewish author.
Like, oh, yeah.
I'm glad I don't have to read that book.
So you essentially get Zoomers justifying their own ignorance of everything.
It's like they're proud of not knowing anything.
Yeah.
Which is a very...
So that's one thing.
And their sacred objects come from the internet.
But this is the other thing, though, Richard.
This lack of a sense of what is sacred also means you get ridiculous road to Damascus conversions every six weeks.
You know, I'm a pagan Nietzschean.
Six weeks later, now I'm a devout Catholic.
Six weeks later, now I've joined the Orthodox Church.
It's just like, do you understand the magnitude of these declarations you're making?
You know, I remember that, like Thomas Carlyle says, the most important thing about a man is his religion, right?
But these people wear them like clothes.
Yeah.
And they declare them to the world, and they change their avatars, and they get into all of the, quote, you know, all of the ortho bro talk.
And then six weeks later, they're onto something else.
Yeah.
So anyway, go ahead.
Yeah, if I may jump in.
Of course.
So I think that...
You know, the criticism of Nick that he's only appealing to a Zoomer audience, I'm not even sure that he would receive that as a criticism.
I think he would be like, well, you know, they're the new generation.
They're the young blood.
So they're the relevant audience.
And he's not totally incorrect in that assessment.
I mean, you know, ideally you want to be speaking to the youth or the next generation.
You want to be influencing the next generation.
So I think he's...
Correct in that regard, to a degree.
I think he has successfully alienated other groups, though, which is probably not ideal.
But maybe it's something that as he matures, he'll be able to make adjustments.
I don't know.
When it comes to Nick, I'm pretty ambivalent in terms of how his movement in particular turns out.
It could have some positive side effects, I'll admit, because some taboos, I think, need to be shaken.
And I think that maybe it allows people like us to come in and be like, okay, well, here's a more reasonable approach to things, right?
Where we're not necessarily going to be insulting these sacred cows, but we may be saying, well, listen, They are sacred cows that should be looked at in a critical way and reassessed, right?
So I think that, you know, I mean, that's one...
There's a possible positive kind of side effect, I think, to a movement like Nick's, potentially.
But what we're describing, though, in terms of the generation gap, you know, I think it is a kind of cliche that, you know, the generations will be...
At odds with one another, and they'll disagree or not see things the same.
Now, of course, I mean, ultimately, ideally, there's a kind of continuation between the generations, even a veneration of elders and wisdom and this sort of thing.
And maybe you find that in more traditional societies.
But I think that it's not even...
I don't think it requires us deciding that we have to go back to medieval Europe to...
You know, adopt more of that kind of psychology in the modern world.
I think that there is a healthy aspect to that.
And I think it's ultimately a balance.
I mean, evidently, our ancestors failed in some things, so the past does require a kind of critical analysis to see where things went wrong.
But at the same time, I think that there is, you know, people who have lived in the world longer than you...
No more, or wiser.
I mean, they might have ultimately come to wrong or incorrect conclusions, but I think that one of the problems, because the way that I see Nick's movement is I see him, I think he's having success, but he's basically having success off a cliff.
I don't think it ultimately goes anywhere good, is my feeling.
And again, it might have...
It might have beneficial effects to movements that Richard and I are promoting, but I think that for his own movement, I think it has a kind of disastrous future.
In a way, I'm kind of giving free advice here, but I know it's also advice that they won't take, which is because they'll see me as concern trolling.
And I think that there is a kind of...
When you do get advice from especially someone who might be a rival or you might perceive could be a rival, they could even sort of unconsciously give you bad advice.
So I understand the instinct for them not to want to listen to me.
But when I see...
You know, some of these young Zoomer guys who are kind of e-celebs or, you know, leaders in this, in our movement or sort of adjacent movements is probably the better way of describing it.
There is a lack of wisdom there, ultimately.
I think Richard has to step away for a second.
Okay, so yeah, but that's fine.
He's just going to be gone for 10 minutes.
But, you know, I'll let you speak in a second.
I see you jumping on AA.
But one thing I've noticed is that, you know, they'll, I mean, it'll be like some 24-year-old guy, and they haven't read Nietzsche, they haven't read the philosophers, but they are themselves a philosopher, or consider themselves to be philosophers.
And they don't actually, you know, they haven't read them, they don't understand it.
And you see them, and you see yourself at that age.
And you understand why they're thinking in the way that they are, but they just haven't gone long enough down the road to kind of reach better conclusions.
And maybe they're not objectively better conclusions, but you see where they are, and you're much further along.
You've already kind of considered the things that they've considered and sort of gone through the sort of logical considerations that they're going through now.
I think you understand my point.
But anyways, A.A., why don't you jump in?
I mean, just on that last point, Mark, it's like, yeah, I made all my mistakes and I did all my reading and I did the whole Richard laid out earlier on where you go back and you kind of teach yourself the classics type thing.
I mean, a lot of learning is learning that you do to yourself, right?
Not necessarily a formal education.
It's just the reading that you do in your own time.
But also, as a young 20-something, I was absolutely insufferable.
I mean, even more than I am now.
If you think I'm a wanker now, you should have seen me when I was arrogant.
I was when I was 20 or 21 or something.
But the difference was I wasn't doing that in front of an audience of thousands.
And the effect of an audience...
It means that you're much less likely to back down.
Some of the books I've written in the past have been about thinking fast and slow and Jonathan Haidt and the way that most of our thinking is intuitive as opposed to reasoned out.
One of the persistent phenomena is confirmation bias.
Once you have a view, And you're seen as being entrenched in that view.
It's very difficult to back down from it.
Well, of course, it's much easier to do that if you've never really told anyone about it.
If it's just your own notes or if you just kind of privately think, oh, well, maybe I'm not that much into Karl Marx or something as I was a few weeks ago.
But if you're doing it in front of an audience of like 20, 30, 100,000 people, It's a lot more difficult to kind of change your mind.
Yeah, and also their bad ideas go viral, right?
So they'll have a bad idea that will go viral, and they'll see it as related to their success and popularity.
So the instinct or desire will be to double down on these sort of bad ideas because they see it as kind of primary or part of their success, right?
So the early success becomes a kind of curse, potentially, right?
Now, theoretically, I think that some learning can also occur then as well.
But I think that often, you know, a guy like Nick, you know, probably he would listen to a podcast like this and be like, you know, who the fuck are these guys?
I've made millions of dollars.
I'm the leader of, you know, DR or whatever, right?
So I'm right.
They're wrong, right?
And that would be sort of the conclusion he'll reach.
So maybe you understand what I'm saying is that that ends up being a kind of curse for the guy.
He no longer thinks that he can learn anything and that he kind of knew everything out of the gate.
Just to be super serious a second though, Mark, the thing I really worry about, I don't want to come across like an old woman or something here, but I mean, okay, so he's a, you know, there are these...
Fairly naive kids who are making their mistakes in public and they're not quite sure what they're doing and they have a certain degree of success that they can get drunk on.
Now, you know, the government, the regime, as we call them, you know, the US government, the British government, who basically have an agenda.
I mean, I've read their intelligence documents.
I've read, you know, what they're pushing at the moment, which is basically the idea of quote-unquote far-right extremism.
You know, in some sense they want to create kind of moral panic around these things.
And one of the things I worry about basically is that, and I'm not suggesting here that Fuentes himself is a malicious actor, by the way.
I'm just saying that The things that we've been describing have a real use for the government because they can, I mean, let's say in a sea of people making kind of online content, okay, you've got one who's got no filter.
You've got one who's basically a clown, right?
Well, they can reach into that sea of people and just elevate the one that fits their narrative, the one that's the most edgy, the one that's the most extreme.
And that's the one that they're going to feature on their documentary.
That's the one that they're going to put on their website and in their intelligent documents and so on.
That's the one that's going to make it into the soap opera that's worrying about...
There was this ridiculous storyline in a soap here about black pill in cells.
That's how they talked about it in the show.
And I just wonder...
I just worry about the structural role.
That somebody like Fuentes plays for the system, because ultimately, if you understand the way the government always operates, it basically elevates somebody like that to bring in some sort of ruling that they want.
In this country, it's called the Online Harms Bill.
In America, they'll find a different way to do it, to get around the Constitution or whatever.
In Europe, it will be something even more draconian.
And they will use people like Fuentes to justify those sorts of crackdowns.
I mean, in a way, if it wasn't him, it'll be someone else.
I just find it a little bit frustrating that, you know, considering all the stuff we saw with some of the events in 2017 and even 2021, it seems like nobody's just learned anything at all, that you still get this.
You're basically gifting them the exact narrative that they want.
And, you know, I just wish it could be otherwise.
Yeah, I mean, to your point, whether or not the government is looking at a guy like Nick and saying, OK, well, let's allow this movement, you know, to grow or let's kind of, you know, even support it in this way or that.
You know, we don't know if that's happening.
And I tend, I actually don't.
Have any reason to believe that that's happening.
You know, something that Richard and I have talked about is that I think that, you know, Nick, but we would say this also, Richard and I would say this about Christianity in general, right?
Which is a kind of more radical thesis, I suppose, but that it ultimately represents a false opposition or kind of false opposition.
I think this is, Adam Green has kind of come around to this position as well, it seems, maybe simultaneously or at the same time that we have.
But so I think that he's unwittingly in that role, but I don't think that he is consciously in that role.
But ultimately, it doesn't matter whether he's unwitting or he's conscious, only that he's, you know, serving a kind of negative or bad end that ends up ultimately being a kind of synthetic opposition might be a better way of describing it.
So I take your point.
I mean, And I think, though, and this is sort of the piece of advice that, again, I can be confident in giving and know that they won't take.
So therefore, I will give it.
But the Christianity thing, too, I mean, he's, you know, I mean, when you think about the way that Nick uses Catholicism right now, he's kind of...
The manifestation of Catholicism is absurd, right?
It has nothing to do with Christianity.
It has nothing to do with Christianity on a scriptural level, but let's say you're a Catholic and you're less concerned about Scripture.
Ostensibly, you're following the Pope or you're following the Church more generally.
It has nothing to do with the Catholic Church.
You know, his whole movement would be viewed as completely repugnant by mainstream Christianity generally, right?
It has nothing to do with Christianity.
But by him using Christianity as a kind of instrument in his movement, it does give it a kind of mystical power that I think has at least a kind of short-term benefit.
One of the benefits, too, is I think it's allowed, you can call this a benefit or a flaw, and I think it is ultimately a flaw, but one of the things that it does, too, is it allows his movement to become more multicultural, and it allows him to talk.
You know, it allows him to relate to guys on Fresh and Fit, for example.
I guess one of the guys is a Muslim.
But if it's about God, you know, if it becomes a movement about God basically against the Jews, which is how it's kind of manifesting, it seems, then it may also become a multicultural movement, right?
I think that's happened.
You know, so now I think Nick will say, well, you know, I'm personally against race mixing, and he might ultimately have a kind of, you know, a separatist agenda.
I don't know exactly how it manifests itself.
I know that he's called himself a majoritarian in the past.
That, I think, is an incoherent view.
I mean, it's that, you know, you're either a separatist and you want an ethnic state or you're not.
Or you're a multiculturalist ultimately on some level, at least as it concerns states and territories, right?
But that's not necessarily connected.
You could have a different sense of peoplehood where you have a sense of separation as certain elements of Judaism have that separation or that sense of peoplehood.
You know, that position ultimately, a majoritarian position is not, you know, it's not really a tenable position.
I mean, it's, you know, demographics change one way or the other, right?
So demographics will either become less white or they'll become more white, right?
So to say you're a majoritarian is, you know, maybe it's a kind of, from his perspective, it's a kind of rhetorical device.
But ultimately, it doesn't, you know, because his movement is...
Catholic or Christian, it's not a racialist movement.
And he does indicate that that is his sort of highest banner, is Christianity.
And Christianity is not racialist in any way.
I mean, in fact, his movement is kind of manifesting in a way that's kind of true to the creed of Christianity in the sense that it is It's multiracial, and it has a kind of exoteric anti-Semitism that's not a genuine anti-Semitism.
Now, I think in Nick's case, it could be a genuine anti-Semitism, which would also not make it a Christian movement, right?
Christianity is not an anti-Semitic movement.
That's just false when you read the Gospels.
Jesus is trying to convert the Jews.
It's true, there are Jewish bad guys in the Gospel, but the good guys are also Jews.
They're the apostles through Jesus and everything, right?
And it's understood as a kind of continuation of Judaism.
It's the new covenant.
But in any case, so his movement is not Christian by any like...
Meaningful metric.
And yet, on another level, it is, in the sense that it's multiracial, right?
It's not in terms of its ethos of behavior and conduct, it is not Christian.
But in terms of developing in a multiracial direction, it is Christian.
So my advice, actually, to him, because I think that he is a talented speaker, And I think he is charismatic.
I mean, evidently, he's a person of certain talents.
My advice to him would be to tone down that Christian element.
I think it can only be a liability in the long run.
Now, I think that he's gained some energy from it.
I think he has this sort of zeal at core that are Catholics, right?
So the idea that he would move away from Catholicism, Right now is probably just something that's unthinkable.
That's the core of his movement.
And he probably understands it as the core of his movement.
But if you took like this sort of, you know, if you understand, I mean, already you're dealing with politics.
You know, they say that there are things that you're not supposed to discuss in polite company, that cliche.
One is politics, the other is religion, right?
So you're kind of opening two fronts.
You're fighting a two-front war when you're both a religious movement and a political movement.
And I think that one of those fronts is kind of unnecessary.
But the position that he's in, because his brand of Catholicism is so weird and so obviously not Christian, at least on a kind of ethical level.
And yet it is Christian in these other ways.
You know, Paul also was an incel.
You could make an argument that Christianity does promote insults, right?
And it's multiracial, so it is Christian in those ways.
But it's so weird, and they're kind of so much in their own little weird echo chamber, that it's, you know, I mean, people, we can think of a famous example with Romney, where people were, you know, Christians were kind of looking askance at him because he was a Mormon.
Now take that and times it by like a thousand with this sort of weird, you know, Catholicism that Nick has generated and you see the problem, right?
It makes him politically unviable, this weird.
But it's a double-edged sword.
I mean, I would...
Well, it is.
I admitted that, Nick.
Well, I'm taking the Nick position here.
I admit that.
I'm taking the Nick position.
I think it should be if he doesn't want to accomplish what we want to accomplish.
Even though academic agent and I, we have disagreements or something, but I would actually put him in the crowd.
He wants political success, though, Richard.
He does.
And I think he's tapping into something.
I mean, as stupid and unsuccessful as the Ye movement ultimately was, it did tap into the contradictions of the Zoomers in so many ways.
The black rap star being a Nazi and ultimately being this pious Christian, even though he's...
Last week he was involved in some drug-fueled orgy.
It kind of got at that contradiction that you kind of need, actually, to be successful in this way that they want to be successful, which is popular among these Zoomer morons.
That's what they want.
That's not what we want.
And so I would tell him to tone up the Catholicism.
And I think that...
I mean, I might have my own hidden motivations for suggesting him to do that.
And now he's going to wonder who's giving him the bad...
Now he's going to wonder.
Guys, I'm going to have to jump off, but just before I go, I saw an image of Fuentes doing the rounds, of Fuentes standing in the middle, surrounded by like...
Rather large black women flanked by either side.
What was that about?
Big but beautiful is the term.
Big but beautiful.
Oh yeah, right.
What was that about?
Because that happened just this past week.
Was it you, Mark, who shared that image?
Yeah, so it's related to this.
Richard was describing it earlier, and I don't really know much about this show, but it's of that category that Richard was describing earlier, where it's...
These guys, they get a bunch of girls who are kind of dolled up and guys kind of give them manosphere talking points and talk about how their body count is going to make sure that they end up only fans or whatever the case may be, right?
Some, you know, very kind of...
Only fans is the ultimate.
You'll only have fans at the end of the day, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
And so it's one of these shows of that...
Of that sort of low level, I think we can fairly say.
And it's Fit and Fresh.
This one's called Fit and Fresh, and it's kind of the more diverse version of the more popular one that you see that goes viral on Twitter.
What is it called?
Whatever?
Whatever, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's kind of like the non-white.
Version of whatever.
Or one of the guys is a Muslim.
I don't know from what country.
He's dark.
The other guy is a black guy.
And the fit guy is Muslim, apparently.
But they talk about how women, you know, if they're thoughts, they're going to be consequences, this sort of thing.
But I think they generate a ton of views.
It's something that, you know, I mean, they're sort of breaking these taboos.
But the latest taboo is talking about the Holocaust and talking about Jews, right?
Um, so, uh, Nick was on there, uh, because Nick is part of this sort of, he's, he's, I think he, he's still kind of a black sheep in this sort of constellation of like e-celebs, but he's like in there.
He's like a player in the sort of e-celeb game.
And, uh, but, and, you know, he says controversial and taboo things.
So that, that's a way of, it's a, it's a double-edged sword.
It's a way of drawing audiences, but it's also a way of potentially getting deplatformed or censored from a platform.
And I don't know what's going to happen with Rumble.
Even on Rumble, I think that they would have to be careful about having the sort of the I mean, to me, the image of a skinny, kind of twink-like Nick Fuentes.
Yeah, it's kind of like a reverse image of the blacked kind of thing.
I won't even go there further.
But doesn't this get at the contradictions of it all?
The Zoomers aren't having sex, yet they're exposed to sexual imagery beyond the imagination like no generation before.
I mean, they're living On the internet, they're living in a constant sex dungeon, yet they're not achieving orgasm with another human being.
It's like they're Christians and they're demanding purity and shaming women and all this kind of stuff, yet they're ultimately Sexless and thus kind of understandably attracted to this notion of a girl with the big tits and booty and who's available.
I mean, it's getting at the contradiction that is their existence.
And so that's why I think it is successful.
I mean, it's absolutely stupid.
I'll watch a clip here and there.
Patronizing this kind of content.
But it's real for them.
This is the authenticity that they have.
It's like a Hitler-loving Catholic woman shamer being blacked by a big booty train.
You know, like, that's it!
Do you think the attraction goes the other way?
Do you think the booty train is like, ooh, this is quite a little Nazi.
They're like, he bad!
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