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July 26, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
23:56
Barbenheimer

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comNot since Napoleon invaded Russia has so much ground been covered! JF and Richard discuss Elon Musk and the move to “X"; Barbie and Oppenheimer; the Jewish identity of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and how his generation structured the world order; Ron DeSantis and his attempt to recreate the Alt-Right; and more. In the free selection, JF and Richard muse on “…

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I actually tend to agree.
In this line, let's talk about Barbie a little bit.
I have not seen Barbie, but you have.
Yes.
I have to say, Margot Robbie just kind of does it for me.
Absolutely.
She's a little bit crazy, and then she's obviously beautiful.
And so I just I kind of like her.
She's not just a kind of pretty face, actually.
She has this like weird kind of crazy charisma that I like.
So I would see it just on her behalf.
But I actually think the movie looks pretty good.
And the fact that Ben Shapiro freaked out makes me think that it's actually it might be really good.
But again, haven't seen it yet.
But give us your take on it.
So I don't know to what extent do you take spoilers on this show?
Should I be spoiled in this?
Don't spoil it too bad.
Well, my comment on my Twitter clips, and this is one thing I love about the change of Elon Musk to Twitter.
My Twitter clips are extremely popular.
I make tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of views on the top one.
My comment is Barbie has been the most complex movie of 2023.
It is much more profound than even Oppenheimer, which is bizarre.
But that is why your thumbnail that you chose on your sub stack is so evocative to me.
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds written in pink.
But that is literal.
Barbie is a deeper movie about the state of human civilization than Oppenheimer has succeeded to be.
And so basically the structure, and I'm not going to get to the end, but the beginning setup of Barbie is that there is a Barbie world and then there's the real world.
And the Barbie world is the place where imaginary Wars of the sexes are happening.
The males are ultra male.
And when they take power, they are ultra masculine and to the point of ridicule and parody.
And when the females take power, everything is pink and they are overly taking power in a female way.
So basically, the space that they've created is a very special type of physics because there's traveling between the two universes.
It's not really clear.
It's not technical.
You just have to believe that there are two worlds and they kind of travel between the two.
But they've set the Barbie world to be this place where everything is exaggerated.
And ultimately, the Barbie world exists in our minds.
The Barbie world is this war, this culture war that we hold not in reality, but in our mind.
And when we get to reality, we realize that there are so much more things important, love, you know, and no one is a super Barbie and no one is a super masculine can either.
And I think that the message of the movie is so good because it says to the Marxist feminist, you're...
Your illusion of the patriarchy is plastic.
It belongs to the Barbie world.
Leave it behind and become a real human.
And you'll realize that the toxic masculine psychology that you've projected onto males doesn't even really exist.
It belongs to Barbie world just as much as the superficial capitalist exploitation of women belongs to Barbie world.
And it is so beautiful to hear this message.
I was just floored by the profundity of this movie in 2023.
You're kind of...
I feel touched, actually, by the way you described the film.
I definitely want to go see it.
I've heard this from some other people, even Laura Loomer herself.
I was kind of saying it's not a woke movie.
And there's like a reconciliation between a mother and a daughter in the film.
And so, yeah, I think once again, someone like Ben Shapiro, he has a didactic, dogmatic mind.
And so he can't perceive this.
Like, if Ben Shapiro, who is a failed screenwriter, wanted to write a movie...
It would be like some of those Kirk Cameron movies from 10 years ago, where there's someone who doesn't believe in God, and then his dad, like, automatically makes him believe in God.
Which, you know, maybe that could work on some hypothetical universe, but it's actually not appealing at all.
And it's just about arguing.
With someone, basically.
Like, that's the type of movie that Venture Pervid would want.
And when you explore something that is a little extreme or a little fantastical or kind of over the top or maybe something that expresses the kind of darker sides or animalistic sides to human nature, he's just like, no, no, no, no.
That's not moral.
No, no.
That would ruin the economy.
And it's like, you just don't fucking get it, do you?
Yeah.
You just don't fucking get it.
Anyone who says that Barbie is a woke movie, it's an IQ test to me.
They are below 115.
Interesting.
Because they have taken the whole plastic world made by the director and they think this is the movie.
But they misunderstood the very ending of the movie.
At the end...
Barbie gets her meeting with God.
And I'm not going to say what happens, but you have to understand how this meeting with God relates to everything we've seen.
It means that what was experienced in the Barbie world was not real.
The whole woke stuff was not real, just like the whole masculinist overtake was not real.
It was all imaginary and it was representing.
Idealistic versions of ourselves that we should leave behind if we want to reconcile everything in civilization.
From the current Gen Z Marxist revolted teenager with her mother, the male with his wife, and the future mother.
In a way, it's a movie about coming of age.
Because the whole fight that happens between the sexes is a fight that happens in the head of a 20-year-old female, if you will, which I know Margot Robbie is not 20-year-old, but you have to imagine that the movie tries to frame her as a young woman.
And in a 20-year-old's mind, there are all these conflicts, and it's like God tells them, leave this behind, and you'll have...
Reality and reality will come with a responsibility.
And that is what Barbie tells us.
Assume the responsibility of reality rather than the war of your imagination.
Wow.
Also, I would point out that someone on social media made an absolutely good reading.
He pointed out that this is the female Starship Troopers.
It is.
The comedy structure of it.
Like, Starship Trooper is, like, exaggerated and quick comedy of males.
Barbie is the exact same thing, but with the female.
Interesting.
All right.
Well, I'm definitely seeing it now.
If it had bad reviews, I might just kind of go stream it or something, you know, later, just to kind of chow.
I'll sometimes check out a movie and watch it for 15 minutes.
But I think this is worth my time.
I appreciate your comments on this.
I need to see it.
I might want to do a monologue on it or even write an essay.
Yes.
So have you seen Oppenheimer?
I did.
Okay.
So I appreciate your kind remarks about my essay.
So you resonated with a lot of things that I said in that piece.
And as a big fan of Christopher Nolan, I have to say this may be...
Perhaps some of the worst that we've seen from Christopher Nolan.
It's executed beautifully.
You can see the talent of Nolan come true.
But what you said about it being a constant trailer of three hours for something that never comes, that's exactly what captures my feeling about it.
Too much bureaucratic concerns.
You can't make a story and film it like an epic of end of the world type.
Music and montage type of thing and make it about a bureaucratic concern around who gets the security clearance of the American government and a little bureaucratic betrayal in the back.
All of this is way too small for the greatness of Christopher Nolan.
What is your favorite Christopher Nolan film?
Tenet.
Probably.
And then Inception, very close.
Those are similar films.
He builds these worlds that have rules and people talk about the rules of the world as I was criticizing him, but I guess there's not really another way to do it.
And then these spectacular action overlaid on top of that.
I do think that...
His Batman movies were successful.
I really like all three of his Batman movies, including the third one, which for some reason people criticize more.
I think it's great.
I think maybe jumping into another genre kind of saves him from himself in a way.
He's not allowed to indulge in things because he has to make a Batman movie.
I think he could do a really good job making a James Bond film, which seems to be something he wants to do.
Yeah, I think he gets away from the embedded universe things, that that is his true passion.
He gets away from it by doing things like Batman.
Oppenheimer actually carried a little bit of that embedded narrative, reverted narrative, but he did it.
Of course, when you do a historical movie, you have to stick to certain facts.
So he framed it as the whole conversation between Einstein and...
And Oppenheimer and what exactly have they said?
But that is too small to give an ending that's as powerful as I would expect in a Christopher Nolan movie.
Interstellar also was one of my favorite movies.
I liked that one as well.
I still do admire him.
Even though my article was critical, it's weird.
It's critical with admiration.
I'm not...
Claiming that he's a bad filmmaker or not an interesting person.
I agree that the flaws were out there.
Why do you think he made this movie?
Because he's Christopher Nolan.
He could do whatever he wants.
There's been some discussion about the AI question.
One of the things that I mentioned...
Passingly, in my article, we talk about this Oppenheimer moment, but Oppenheimer ultimately wasn't listened to.
No one denies his own scientific brilliance and his quirky way of managing this huge project that maybe only he could have managed all these And no one also denies that he's a deep person.
He thinks about these things.
He's moral.
Whatever kind of side espionage, traitorous things we might talk about, I fundamentally think he's a moral person.
Even if he did have some residue of the communist.
I do think he's ultimately a good person.
But he ultimately wasn't listened to.
Maybe that would have been something interesting to get at.
Because he supported the bombing of Japan.
I actually just saw a video today from 1965 where he was interviewed.
And he was justifying it.
Even in 1965.
So he ultimately supported the use of this weapon, but then wanted serious arms control and was pretty vehemently opposed to the hydrogen bomb.
And so it seems to be this case where he's an indispensable figure in the creation of this weapon.
But this whole idea of an Oppenheimer moment, I mean, we blew through.
That Oppenheimer moment and we've survived as a species.
Exactly.
And I think there's a romantic deception, a conception that the maker, the scientific maker...
of a big danger somehow is better informed or somehow we would have to listen to him.
The same way today, the Elon Musk of this world are putting forward all of the actions necessary to establish centralized control over human behavioral monitoring and AI, and at the same time are telling us that AI is dangerous.
It's like, oh, it comes from Elon Musk.
There must be some deep truth in there.
The fact is, the nuclear bomb Has not been a civilizational threat, and it's been handled in a way that basically does not qualify as that important as this movie would like to try to make it look like.
When you think about it, more human suffering has been seeded on this earth through swords and artillery than nuclear bombs maybe ever will.
That is, you know, nuclear bombs, if anything, have cleaned up war and have settled hierarchies of dominance that people actually respect in the global community, which leads to less war.
Now, and this film is trying to focus on such a small thing compared to the people who have died, that it's like, okay, so I should be heartbroken.
That this Jewish scientist was somehow torn inside of him because he made a bomb for the Nazis, but it was sent toward Japanese people.
And this is supposed to be how I frame Oppenheimer as a victim.
It doesn't pass.
It doesn't pass my kind of empathic filter at all.
It's bizarre for Christopher Nolan to be asking the audience to make that.
This kind of, oh, he's a victim.
And there are so many lost opportunities here because Christopher Nolan got very close to touching the question of the Jews and their relationship with America and its military.
And there are many passages in the movie that do it to the point where I retweeted someone today that said this may be the most semitically critical movie.
Hollywood ever made, and yet it's not enough.
And I agree with this reading.
It is kind of morally neutral on Jews, but it does show that ultimately World War II was a big web of Jewish and terrorists entering in conflict with each of their host nations, including Russia.
Poland, Germany, and America.
And that ultimately, this whole bombing and the result of World War II is very much due to this network of Jewish interests entering in friction with the kind of Christian reminder of the intelligence communities, which is represented in the movie as the lieutenant-colonel Pash.
Who was a very skilled interrogator in the movie and who gets to the truth, who catches Oppenheimer in a lie that was a real lie.
Which is why Oppenheimer, to me, is not properly presented as a victim of anti-Semitism in this movie.
I totally agree with that.
I actually didn't mention Pash, but what you're saying, probably upon second or third watching, he might be...
A key figure in this.
And he was a Russian who was an anti-communist.
And he kind of smoked out Oppenheimer.
Totally.
And I was probably the only one in America in this moment of the movie.
I was probably the only person who was like, yeah, go, Pash, do it!
You caught him!
Whereas the movie tries to paint this as this is some kind of anti-Semitic pursuit combined with the absence of due process.
But I'm like, no.
He lied and he slept with a potential Russian communist spy.
Yes.
Potential?
I mean, yeah.
He did that.
He went to a hotel and had sex with a communist.
I don't know.
It raises questions, let's just say.
Yeah.
Or all those things that Rob, who was a judge who was going after him, just...
And Rob, interesting.
I did not know who he was previously, but I looked at his Wikipedia, and he actually was a fair-minded person who defended people who were subjected to McCarthyism.
But it's just like, what is the difference?
You desperately want to use the bomb on Germany, and yet...
You now are a peacenik vis-a-vis the USSR.
What's going on there, bro?
Exactly.
We're Americans.
And so Christopher Nolan succeeds on this.
So it's not like a terrible movie.
He succeeds at showing a web of very complex interrelationships that ultimately boils down to a form of Semitic control over America that...
That hurts us, and that still hurts us as of today.
That is very well framed.
Yeah, definitely.
And it's also true, it's difficult to see that now because Russia has become a boogeyman, you know, justly and unjustly.
But you have to put yourself back in the minds of these people.
As I mentioned in the article, Being a New Deal pro-communist, from their point of view, whether they're Jewish or Gentile, because you can find both, they didn't see themselves as traitorous.
It was kind of like being pro-Ukraine now.
By putting up a Ukraine flag on your Twitter profile, are you a traitor?
No one thinks of it that way in their heart.
They think of it as we're both on the same side.
It's not like this.
And I think it might have been late Stalinism, but definitely the Brezhnev era, the USSR became neutral vis-a-vis and kind of anti-Israel more or less.
But at the time, Russia was seen as both a progressive country like America, but also the two safe havens.
For Jews.
And for a Gentile, two progressive forces in the world.
With Germany being an unequivocal enemy and maybe Japan being kind of secondary in that.
And the way that these highly influential and highly brilliant, to be fair, Jewish people, their web...
Informed geopolitics to a way that has not been fully recognized.
And I think so many Gentiles are kind of unconscious of that.
And I'm not even being anti-Semitic or something.
I'm just saying that that played a tremendous role that helps you understand, that explains history in a way that just...
Like being like, oh yeah, well, you know, Hitler declared war in the US, so that happened.
We needed the Soviet Union.
No, it's actually deeper than that.
There's like an imaginary structure that informed it.
Exactly.
And if you don't access that structure, the world looks bizarre and feels bizarre.
One of the things that Christopher Nolan succeeds at doing also is this kind of moral on the fence.
This ambiguity of this movie is quite stunning.
I go through the movie, and I think it's ultimately slightly too Semitic for me to appreciate.
I think that he could have been a little more neutral.
But he doesn't go for the violent playing over...
He doesn't go too hard on it.
And when he presents those interests of the American government, a viewer can choose to take the side of Matt Damon and the people who are shown as betraying Oppenheimer.
And he can decide, well, those were true security concerns.
And he gives us the elements to accept this view.
Yes, he does.
He gives you enough to take a critical standpoint on Oppenheimer.
That is interesting.
And I think that's a virtue of him as a filmmaker.
Maybe you could create a follow-up movie called Pash.
Starring Casey Affleck, who I think is kind of a politically incorrect guy.
The performance of Pash in this movie makes me think of Inglorious Bastard and the Nazi interrogator.
But Inglorious Baster went further, of course, because it was fiction, so they can caricaturize the character.
But it's a little bit what Pash was doing here.
He was squeezing out the truth from not much.
Yeah.
By going on a hunch and then kind of allowing the person you're interrogating to hang himself.
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