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July 3, 2024 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
21:34
Absolute Power

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comA wide-ranging discussion! First, the gang discusses Joe Biden and his “sunset presidency.” Is it realistic or delusional to accept that our “commander in chief” is a doddering figurehead, surrounded by a team of highly competent managers? Secondly, Richard addresses the recent Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity…

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The president can't really be prosecuted for war crimes or disasters that occurred during his tenure.
So, I think it was about 10 years ago or a little bit longer, Barack Obama, with a drone, assassinated an American citizen.
This was the Alawaki, I believe was his name.
And that was a new step.
It's one thing for the government to, say, execute someone who's been convicted of murder.
It's another thing for them to preemptively eliminate an American citizen who might threaten them.
And I think a lot of conservative terror warriors didn't really know how to handle this issue.
It was like the guy sweating with two buttons.
It was like, hate everything Obama does or bombastic self-righteous defense of the Constitution or something.
The terrorists must die.
They were just kind of conflicted with it.
George W. Bush, he could have been prosecuted for knowingly lying to the American public or having Colin Powell knowingly lie to the UN and prosecuting this war.
Was there such massive graft in The funding of the occupation that we could have even gone after the top guy at some point.
Well, Nancy Pelosi nixed that.
She nipped it in the bud the moment that in 2006, when the Democrats retook Congress, we're not going to do that.
There's a sort of, I guess you could call it a gentleman's agreement, but you could also call it an absolute power of the president in the realm of foreign policy, that he's not going to be prosecuted for things that he does.
For use of the military, he's the commander-in-chief, for any sort of vigorous action, emergency power.
A state of exception?
What if COVID was much, much worse and we were dying at a clip of 40%?
It was like some horrible, what is it, Legionnaires outbreak.
And the president just sent the Marines into every American city in hazmat suits and they were shooting on sight anyone who didn't comply with the lockdown order.
Or we were engaged in a zombie apocalypse, and if anyone gets bit by the zombie, you've got to kill him immediately before he bites someone else.
You must be cruel to be kind.
The president won't be prosecuted for that.
And there is, I think, even these kind of vague, self-righteous claims of, like, no one's above the law or something like this.
I understand what they're saying, or the people have the power, not the president.
These strike me as just kind of words, words, words.
The government can spy on you.
The government can kidnap you and put you in prison.
The government can kill you.
And it does have ways of justifying that, like the legal system.
The most important thing about that is that it can.
And I don't think the government is going to randomly drone strike dissident voices in a preemptive violent action.
I don't think it's going to do that on a wide scale.
But it did do that.
And it can do that.
And it probably will do it again.
I don't think any of us have anything to fear.
But it's really the point of it.
It's the point of who makes the exception.
Who is exceptional?
The state itself is exceptional.
And certainly in geopolitics, the president is exceptional.
He has exceptional powers.
And that just is what it is.
And you could barely be upset about this decision.
But if you're just claiming, like saying things like the people have the power or no one's above the law, you're just using words, basically.
Words that have very little connection to reality.
What does that mean that the people have the power?
So as Joe Biden said in his response to the decision, what does that actually mean?
It means nothing.
It's at most a kind of justification for the government, or it's just kind of frivolous, puffy nonsense.
Yeah, I think that's Biden's knee-jerk instinct to preserve legitimacy in the institution.
Yeah, but it's everyone's knee-jerk.
Absolutely, yeah.
Way of preserving legitimacy.
I mean, every single politician will say this, certainly including Trump, especially Trump.
Well, see, on that point, what I think this Supreme Court ruling does is it brings an added level of honesty to the image of the president and that, yeah, you actually can do stuff like that, you know?
I actually had a question related to this.
I don't know what your thoughts are, but don't you think it's accurate to say that at the end of the day, the buck really stops with the military?
This is an interesting question that I've asked before.
Where does the buck stop?
In legislation, for instance, Congress You know, initiates legislation.
The president does not.
I think a lot of people think that the president writes the law.
No. Something's initiated.
It passes both houses.
It goes to the president.
He can veto it.
That veto can be overridden by, what is it, two-thirds support in the House?
I forgot the number.
But an overwhelming majority of legislatures.
So, on that sphere, they...
Are sovereign.
They can impeach the president.
The Supreme Court can override both on domestic legislation and obviously on I mean,
you could have a situation where the Congress creates legislation, the president vetoes it, Congress overwhelmingly passes it, and five years later, the Supreme Court dismisses the law on the basis of Marbury.
So... You could make a very strong case that the Supreme Court is sovereign.
So here we're looking at it from a Schmittian point of view, not this kind of like three, you know, limited government and, you know, checks and balances.
Yeah, of course, there's checks and balances.
And of course, the government is limited in some way.
It's almost like redundant to say these things.
Again, this is all just happy talk.
Just words, words, words from people, how they describe the government.
The question is, who is the big daddy?
Who will ultimately say no to something or say yes to something?
You could strongly argue that the Supreme Court is sovereign in that sense.
And that does kind of...
I don't know.
It is a little bit disturbing that these lawyers...
And they're not just lawyers.
They're kind of political lawyers, you know?
In effect, not necessarily in the way that it was defined initially in the Constitution.
But to be a Supreme Court justice, you aren't just a legal scholar.
You're also a kind of political person.
Let's be honest here.
So the fact that nine of them are sovereign is a little bit disconcerting.
Do we live...
Ultimately, at the end of the day, under judicial tyranny, it's an interesting question.
Now, in terms of the president having war powers, I mean, the Congress has the power of the purse, but the Congress is supposed to declare war.
But we all know that certainly, well, across the 20th century, this has been abrogated.
Interestingly, Truman declared the Korean War on the basis of justification of the United Nations.
Which is fascinating.
That I don't think has been done like a major war.
There's been other kind of peacekeeping stuff that's happened.
But Congress is ultimately going to fund these things.
Congress is ultimately going to give authority and The president acts.
And I think this happened in the Nixon administration.
If there's like a 48-hour emergency, the president can simply act.
And I support that.
I understand it.
It obviously can be abused.
But the notion that Russia bombs Hawaii, I mean, this is obviously ridiculous, but The notion that they do that on a Saturday, and so you have to,
like, well, we gotta wait till Congress is back in session on Tuesday.
They got, you know, Monday's the holidays.
We gotta wait, guys.
We can't fire a bullet until, you know, we get this legally settled.
I mean, that is ridiculous.
So I ultimately support these things, even though this can obviously be abused.
And the problem with Trump is that, you know, like...
What he is going to claim, and I imagine this is going to succeed, is that this creating false slates of electors is going to be an official act.
And any sort of communication, or most of the communication he has, because it's a little bit ambiguous, like you could appeal and blah, blah, blah.
Most of the communications he had with Mike Pence, who was the kind of fulcrum of Of the Stop the Steal attempt to overturn the election, the fake elector schemes, all that kind of stuff is going to be an official act.
And I do think he's going to get away with this.
He got slammed in New York State, but I don't think he's going to get hit again before the election.
Could get hit afterward.
What? Oh, sorry.
This is the ultimate end of it.
We assume noble motives.
And yes, could this be abused?
If I just use some ridiculous scenario of Russia invading Hawaii or something.
We expect a president just to be, he's awakened at 3 a.m., they give him a shot of espresso, and he just goes into the war room and is like, fire back, declare war immediately, do this.
That's the kind of noble image we have in our mind of why a president should be absolute and should be sovereign in this area.
We'll handle the legalese later.
We'll get Congress on board on Tuesday once they get back from their 4th of July holiday.
Whatever. We gotta act.
But the fact is, Stop the Steal demonstrates this.
Donald Trump was clearly attempting to stay in office.
Now, I agree, just to be totally fair here, I agree with many of the substantial Criticisms of the 2020 election.
I don't think it was stolen.
They were moving boxes around in Arizona.
That strikes me as tenuous at best.
I agree with the notion that it just got out of hand with Doing all of these mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting and just having the election be for like a month or two months.
Maybe I'm just merely a conservative and I think that 90% to 95% of the election should occur the day of.
If you're an international businessman or a military man, you should be able to, in fact, mail in your ballot.
But that should be minimized.
You should have a reason to do that.
You shouldn't just do that just because it's easier or something.
So I agree with that criticism of 2020.
I do not think it was stolen.
I think also the stop the steal notion and the elector notion was originating...
Stop the Steal was actually a website purchased in 2016 by Roger Stone.
We have Ali Akbar, Nick Fuentes, and Alex Jones being the vanguard of that movement before it got adopted by mainstream people.
I'm sorry.
This is not real.
This is not...
I shouldn't say real.
It's very real.
This is not a noble act by the president to protect the people or the country.
So I have a hard time taking it seriously, but he's going to seemingly get away with it because we assume that the president is going to be a good man who has the authority to act in an absolute manner,
in a totally legally immune manner.
In an exceptional manner on behalf of the nation.
If he's simply doing this crap on behalf of himself, I understand where you're just like, why are we allowing him to do these shenanigans?
Go ahead.
I've spoken for 40 minutes, so I've kind of gotten some ideas out there.
Plenty of food to bite into.
We're in this situation where I think it's not a dissenting voice within the generals where they view Donald Trump as a national security threat.
I mean, never mind that he's a criminal.
I mean, he's an actual insurrectionist, right?
He literally led the charge.
And now you have this Supreme Court ruling, and now aren't the generals going to look at this and think, well, wait a minute.
He was operating with impunity before.
What's going to happen now?
And he's had all this talk of basically disbanding the American empire.
He's kind of implied it strongly with his words on NATO and all that.
Yeah, well, he's implied it.
Now, whether he'll do it.
Now, remember, at the end of his administration, he appointed McGregor as, I forgot what he was, a national security advisor or something, who sent out a memo.
Basically saying we're removing military bases abroad, we're dismantling things.
Through a combination of just active foot dragging, actively ignoring the situation, and through just laziness of we're ready to go home for Christmas, nothing happened.
But there is an example of this guy Is going to dismantle the empire.
Now, he didn't do that during his presidency proper.
That was all that lame duck stuff.
And maybe it was he was just appointing these Kremlin-backed right-wing retards who were doing this crap.
But whatever.
He popped the cherry on that.
And I think of the military men.
They would look at that and just be like, yikes.
But again, they didn't support the coup.
The coup, if we want to call it that, I mean, maybe a coup is better than insurrection, but it was a sort of insurrection.
Like, oh, let's just define those things as like an insurrection is kind of bottom up and a coup is top down.
It was kind of both.
There was a legal theory developed by the Claremont Institute and John Eastman of why this was legal, and Navarro had a hand in this as well.
There was also just a sort of insurrection quality to J6 in the sense that, look, it was out of control.
Look, I'll agree with the conservative rejoinder to what I just said, which is that BLM was a sort of insurrection.
Yeah, it was.
Both of them didn't have a chance to actually take power.
Both of them were spazzing out of people who were self-righteous and deeply emotional.
But again, that doesn't mean it's not a threat to civil order and a threat to political order.
J6 was kind of both.
And the military, quite notably, was not involved.
Interesting little shenanigans going on with Flynn's brother.
I mean, that is fascinating, but the overwhelming reality of the situation is that the military did not march.
You had right-wing QAnon retards march into the Capitol.
You didn't have soldiers march into the Capitol and shoot anyone who didn't comply.
And that is the fundamental reason why it didn't succeed.
But then to claim...
I mean, this is what I get from every conservative I argue with this.
I mean, the analogy I would use is that if I robbed a bank and I pointed a gun at a bank teller, but I was wearing a clown outfit and honking a horn and driving a little mini car or something,
but I still said, give me the fucking money in the vault.
When I was arrested, I could be like...
What are you talking about?
I'm literally a clown.
This is a clown act, in fact.
That's not an excuse.
Just because you're bad at criming doesn't mean you're not criming.
You know, I mean, it's just...
Right. Yeah, I mean, see, this is a kind of...
Male-type divide, right?
There's this martial male type that'll exert power nakedly and openly and honestly.
He'll tell you that's what he's doing.
This was kind of a sneaky way, you know?
Passive-aggressive.
Exactly. This was a passive-aggressive coup.
Probably the first in history.
Yes. It was a weird female suffering from borderline personality disorder.
The first time that has happened.
Most time coups are like totally alpha male.
Like, I'm taking over this shit kind of thing.
This was the first female version of a coup.
Like, is it a coup?
Was it a coup?
I don't know.
Maybe. As long as we're breaking the glass ceiling, right?
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