All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 20, 2024 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
25:44
The Summit of Richards (Audio)

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comRichard Hanania joins the call to reminisce with Richard about their collaboration in the Alt and pre-Alt-Right times. They discuss, among many other things, the characteristics of the old movement, how the HBD crowd has refused to move on and evolve, and of course: The broadly lower IQ of conservatives as opposed to liberals, which was summed up in the…

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Back together after all these years.
Yeah. I guess I could say I never would have imagined that Richard Anania would be a famous public intellectual.
I could imagine that quite easily, actually.
Well, I mean, I got lucky that all that other stuff took a while to come out, because if that came out before, I would have had no chance.
But yeah, I mean, it's wild.
I mean, we were sort of in the same place, I mean, 15 years ago, 10, 15 years ago, and we were into the same ideas, right?
It was like, oh, we went to Ron Paul, we came out of that era.
Yeah. Yeah.
George W. Bush.
We were about being anti-war and we were about, you know, race science and all this other stuff.
And it's interesting because I think we've had, like, not the same trajectory.
We're not at the same place, but, like, there are parallels.
People always say that on my replies.
They almost give you credit or blame for why I'm so gay.
In fact.
Yeah. Which is usually how it's articulated.
I mean, we invented a new kind of guy.
Because, like, there's us.
I think there's, like, you know, I think Anatoly Carlin is probably in this club.
Jeff Gies, yeah.
Like, people who just see.
They see what this MAGA thing has become.
Right? We're not all in the same place.
We're not all exact same politics.
But, like, I think our understanding of, like, the right and where MAGA has gone is where we sort of converge.
Yes. And at the end of the day, you and I are part of the right on some fundamental level.
And so we sort of hate...
MAGA more, in a way.
Like, I don't spend my time doing the libs of TikTok thing about, you know, I cannot believe some blue-haired leftist in California said this.
That's just boring.
Like, I get it.
You know, I expect them to act like that.
But I think the going after the right, I think, is actually more authentic.
And serious.
It's very easy to sort of excuse people who are more or less on your side or wavelength or whatever and not critically examine them.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I was just, I mean, it sort of became like...
Stupider and stupider.
Like, I don't know, like 2015, 2016, like 2017.
You could overlook the right stupidity.
You could make these equivalencies.
Oh, the left does some things.
The right does these dumb things.
It was really, I think, you know, Trump, the way he acted during COVID.
And then the...
Like, the election stuff.
Because, like, look, if they were an honest movement and said, we're going to have a coup, like, you have a coup philosopher.
You have Curtis Yarbrough.
He's right there.
Yeah. It would be pretty badass.
Right. You could respect that.
These people genuinely think that, like, 2020 is a story of, like, the deep state setting them up.
And, like, you know, and Trump, like, won.
And, like, he's just this moral and, you know, like, these assassination attempts, right?
They're just like, you know, words have meaning.
You can't say this stuff about it.
Your candidate is Donald Trump.
How do you even think like this?
You have no self-awareness at all.
And there was just a brain drain from the right.
It just constantly became stupider.
Well, let's rewind and go back to where we were when we first...
We didn't even meet in person is sort of the funny thing.
We just had a bit of a E...
We met at the Republican National Convention.
Wasn't that the first time we met?
No, no.
We met at the Mencken Club way back in the day.
Ah, the Mencken Club is part of the story as well.
Yeah. So let's go back there because I think a lot of people, many of whom are in the audience tonight, but also a lot of people who will consume this later, I mean, don't know the whole story.
What would you say about the right?
Because I'll just throw in my two cents first, and then I'll let you roll on it.
So when I was at Duke University getting a PhD, and I dropped out of my PhD program, I think we also share that in common.
We have weird, there's weird parallels, our first name.
Sorry, but I did finish my PhD.
Oh, okay.
So you're not a dropout like me.
Okay. But I guess you did go into the media and not pursue an academic career.
So we do have that in common.
But I dropped out, and the right for me was stupid in a very different way.
And I saw it wasn't IQ-wise stupid.
It was delusional.
Delusionally intelligent is one way you could describe.
Neoconservative ideology.
If you want to take their ideology seriously and not just see it as a sort of, you know, fig leaf over pro-Israel policies or pro-Likud policies or something like that.
And I would see this among my own family of, you know, we've got to spread freedom and this is so great.
We went into Afghanistan and George Bush's second inaugural address was just an uncorked expression of freedomism.
You know, every child born on this planet is questing to be a part of a democracy.
And we are a force of God bringing it to them.
I mean, that was more or less what he was saying in that, you know, when you compare it to a Trump speech, I almost sort of admire the oomph.
That George Bush and David Fromm or whoever wrote that.
It probably wasn't Fromm at that time.
But anyway, whatever they were bringing to it.
But there was a sort of alt-right and it did unify around Ron Paul.
And if it had a unifying theme, that is one thing that we all agree on, it was being anti-W, anti-neoconservatives, anti-Iraq War, etc.
And within that big tent, there was a lot there.
So there was a libertarian quality to it, and not just libertarian, a kind of anarcho-cap, anarchist quality.
And I think you're still much more on the libertarian wavelength than I am, but that was sort of...
Part of where you were.
And it was sort of like, well, let's get some HPD in here.
Let's get some white nationalists, you know, kind of under this circus tent of sorts.
And that's what it was.
There really was a, I think this is something that's sort of misunderstood and maybe unknown to like a Groyper or whatever, who's 17 and listening to Nick Fuentes.
There was a sort of anti-Republican, kind of anti-conservative.
I think there's been a...
You know, that's where I'll say this, but I'll let you talk about this a little bit.
That's where we were at the time.
And I think the alt-right was this nebulous formation at the time.
It didn't really have an ideology or any coherency.
It was sort of George Bush is an abomination and we've got to find something else.
Yeah. I mean, I think there was, I think it was maybe a little bit like there was different.
But I think the alt-right website, I think there was an actual coherence there.
It was basically the Jews made Bush do it, and we have all these low IQ races.
I think this is where a lot of people were at.
And you couldn't say that.
You could be publishing in tech, and you had these Lou Rockwell people.
And maybe we accepted a lot of their views of the Fed and the economy and whatever.
But I think it was actually coherent.
I think it was at the time.
There were these Jews.
They had too much influence.
They won't let us talk about these racial issues.
We were early on the woman question.
We were all like, you know, women.
We were before, now everyone who tries to be kind of edgy says, oh, you know, repeal the 19th Amendment.
I mean, we were, I think, way beyond that.
We wanted to repeal voting, I think, not just...
Yeah. But yeah, go on.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, I've gone back.
I mean, I've studied the...
I could say how it looked at the time, but I've gone back and I studied the origins of the Iraq War in a lot of depth.
but I have a pretty long discussion of it in my first book, "Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy." And I think at the time, a lot of us perceived and a lot of people perceive it today that there was sort of this neocon ideology was like actually a real thing.
And then there's people who think it was like, just, you know, all Jewish, kind of like Jewish plot
I don't take either of those positions.
I think it was completely, and this is the parallel, I think, to what happened later in the Republican movement, and I think tells us something about the nature of conservatism.
It was improvisation, right?
The way you look at it, if you look at it month by month, year by year, it was like 9 /11 happens.
People are whispering in Bush's ear,"Let's go take out Saddam.
That'd be a cool thing to do." They want to take out Saddam.
The people who want to take out Saddam are not thinking about building democracy in Iraq.
Nobody is thinking about that before.
Maybe a few people somewhere, but I looked in like...
Weekly Standard and what they were writing.
They were writing about democracy.
And so we go in, we think we're just going to kick Saddam's ass.
And then Bush is like, you know, what the hell?
Like, I have this thing.
Like, what am I going to do?
And there's no WMDs.
And it sort of becomes a post hoc justification.
And then you would go to National Review.
And then they would write these articles like, oh, support our troops.
They're fighting because Iraqis don't have freedom and freedom of the press.
We're going to lose our freedom here.
So it was like, that's stupid.
It was like that.
They had to make up a reason why we did this thing that made no sense.
And I think like- Was it similar with Woodrow Wilson?
I mean, I don't know if you've looked at it.
I think I've- Remember this from reading a World War I book that the war to end all wars and so on, there was an ad hoc quality to it of you have to justify this thing in some manner.
And heady idealism is appealing with Wilson, a former president of Princeton University, no less.
And certainly the progressive era, that was a way of appealing, a way of justifying.
And maybe there was a certain repetition there, you know, 90 years later.
Yeah, I mean, another situation that was analogous, and maybe this is a recurring theme throughout history, the Civil War, right?
It starts.
Lincoln wants to preserve the Union.
I mean, he would be fine with preserving slavery in some states, but by the end, it's the Emancipation Proclamation.
The thing has to make sense.
Why did we have all this carnage?
Okay, we ended slavery in the United States, right?
So this is kind of a very common thing.
But it sort of became an ideology.
Everything in conservatism is sort of like this.
Trump comes down the escalator.
I think what we were thinking at the time, we primed everyone to think about You know, immigration is like a national issue, is like a racial issue or whatever.
And maybe there's like a little bit...
I think we did, actually.
Yeah. This is my thesis, actually, but I'll hear you first and then I'll respond.
I mean, I don't know how important we were because, look, there was like...
The Republican base always hated immigration.
They beat back Bush and tried to do immigration reform in the years before that.
And you're right.
I mean, Jeff Sessions would be the first senator to endorse Trump.
To the extent that Trump had any intellectual support at all...
Mitt Romney was pretty hard on immigration as well.
He jumped on it in 2012.
Also sort of forgotten by people who were like, Mitt Romney, Rhino, or whatever.
He was talking about self-deportation and sounding these notes.
Yeah, exactly.
But I mean, I think the immigration issue is maybe unique, but most other things, like, about Trump, people are just postdoc justifying, like, what, like, Trump's sort of, what satisfies his ego or his personal grievances.
Like, they all hate the FBI now.
Like, why do Republicans hate the FBI?
Like, in Congress, they're trying to hold up, like, buildings.
Like, the FBI, you can't have your new building, you can't have your cafeteria or whatever.
It's, like, only because of Trump.
Like, there was never a history of, like, conservatives hating the FBI.
No. The election denial, again, it's all just Trump.
It's like it became the number one issue.
All these Republican states are like, elections are being...
I mean, I've seen some data that Trump does better among low propensity voters, so they might be shooting themselves in the foot by making it harder to vote in all these states.
Kamala, in Pennsylvania, Trump I saw was up.
By five among people who didn't vote in 2020, but Kamala was up by two for people who did vote in 2020.
Wasn't there, Richard, like they were talking about like, we don't know what is going on in Detroit.
And it was some sort of sub-racial sub-tweeting.
But in fact, like Trump outperformed like Hillary Clinton in 2016 in Detroit.
Like they were accusing Detroit of being, you know, stealing the election.
and there was a sort of racial, obvious racial quality.
They're out of their minds.
Those Blacks were voting for Trump.
That's the kind of greatest irony.
The New York Times had this great piece about this one county in Nevada with barely any people.
Trump won by, like, 70%.
And they chased the, like, the head of elections out because they think Trump should have won by more.
And, like, they voted to, like, harass this werewolf because they thought Trump, like, should have got all the votes.
I mean, it's not connected to reality at all.
And this is sort of, you know, what became, this is what became sort of, but it's like these people 15 years ago, and you talk about this too, sometimes it's the exact same people, right?
They were into W's crusade to democratize the Middle East, right?
They were into all the retarded Trump stuff.
These aren't intellectual people.
I always found it so interesting that the New York Post and the Daily Mail are conservative papers and tabloids at the same time.
The New York Times is not a tabloid.
The people who just read tabloids are the same people who are conservatives just because they're looking to be entertained.
They can be led based on whatever the leader in power happens to be doing.
Yes, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
But let me tell a little bit of a story here that maybe adds another layer to what you're putting forth, which is sort of ad hoc, retroactive justification of a lot of their positions.
It's all about Trump's personality cult, and they'll come up with the morality and policy and politics later, which I think is largely true.
When Trump came down the escalator, he talked about immigration and he talked about it in an emotional, sort of even vicious manner of they're sending rapists and some of them, I assume, are good people and things like that.
And there was a notion of, you know, what is this?
What is happening?
Because after Mitt Romney had lost, there was a consensus in the GOP that we can never do this again.
That we are going to reach out to Hispanics, Indian immigrants.
We're going to be the grand opportunity party, I think is how they were pitching it in an autopsy from 2003.
And then Trump comes in and totally changes the game.
The establishment was...
The Republican establishment was...
Pretty radically against Donald Trump.
Fox News was against Donald Trump at the very beginning, before they became his propaganda wing.
National Review was against Donald Trump.
We shouldn't be that surprised about that.
People like Glenn Beck were against Donald Trump, and they're now Trump fans.
But they were against him at the point, and there was only the alt-right that I think in a genuinely joking manner was pro-Trump.
Basically, they're like, this guy is ridiculous.
He's funny.
They're these anime memes, but he's also racist.
Why don't we just jump on?
There was a little bit of a just dive in headfirst no matter what happens.
Quality to the alt-right.
We had done that to some degree in a much smaller way and with our obviously limited...
We had done that with the Ron Paul movement.
Ron Paul might get 5% here and there at most.
He's not going to really change the game.
Trump was winning.
And so there was this odd circumstance where Trump was reaching people, he was reaching his own fans, creating a personality cult, doing it on Facebook largely, getting promoted by the mainstream media, CNN and MSNBC, who were integral to promoting Trump.
But he needed a sort of ideological arm and the alt-right Which had next to no resources, but tons of energy and hilarity and youthful enthusiasm was like, oh, look, we'll do it.
And it was a unique situation.
And it's a situation that really ended the moment he won the Republican nomination, I think, but definitely the moment that he won the election.
And so you have these...
So I think there is this funny way in which all of the stuff that we were doing, these debates that we were having on small webzines in 2010, are re-emerging in the mouths of anti-Trumpers.
Matt Walsh is an example.
Matt Walsh will say, well, what's really motivating Washington is their anti-white bias.
And he'll even sort of...
Hint at some IQ difference.
I saw Don Jr. tweeted out something.
You tweeted this of like, you know, they're low IQ, basically, when he's talking about Haitians.
He actually, I mean, it was more explicit.
I mean, he's like talking, it's like someone gave him like Steve Saylor bullet points.
He goes, yeah, they're, you know, these are low IQ nations.
He's talking about Haiti.
You invite the world, you become the world.
I mean, the exact phrasing.
I mean, it's exact.
I mean, it was put in his brain.
But it's dumbed down, but I think it's also impossible to say that they weren't influenced on some basic level from that world.
And so you have these odd situations where, I mean, I remember mentioning this to the group the other day, where Laura Ingraham was interviewing Trump, and she was like, we're not going back to those days of endless wars and pro-immigration.
It's like, Laura Ingraham, you You were the police officer on those days.
You were the one denouncing people or getting them fired because they didn't support your endless wars and so on.
And now you're just kind of, you know, high and mighty about it.
There's something deeply infuriating.
But I do feel like the mainstream right has Dispensed with the conservative movement that we were attacking, that you could trace to, say, 1955 to 2005, let's say,
the Buckleyite and with some neoconservative influence.
And they're reiterating the alt-right in a dumbed-down fashion.
And I'm just going to speak personally here.
I think you probably have a similar...
I've moved on.
When I hear this stuff in a stupid form coming from the mouth of some conservative ideologue, I'm just like, I don't even want to hear this.
I hate it.
I've moved on.
But I think it's also sort of not relevant.
When you're going against the grain in 2010 and you're really...
Speaking truth to power, to use that phrase, that's meaningful.
When you're picking up alt-right memes from 15 years ago on behalf of this bizarre, inane personality cult, I find it annoying, to say the least.
But to say we haven't had influence is wrong.
I guess the question...
Was our influence entirely bad?
Or is there some funhouse mirror version of the alt-right, which is now mainstream conservatism, which is now national review?
We won the argument, but we have this skewed, aborted version of what we believed yesterday.
The parallels are amazing.
Another thing that you haven't mentioned, being pro-Russia.
Who was pro-Russia into this?
We were.
Yes, we loved this guy.
They didn't even know who Putin was.
We just knew this guy, and we loved him.
Yeah, it's really, the parallels are crazy.
I mean, Trump, you know, he was a celebrity.
The Prentice was like the number one show in the country or something like that.
And all these boomers, they knew who he was.
And yeah, you would turn on TV.
You would turn on cable news at the time, right after you came in on the escalator.
And it was Blanket.
CNN would cover his entire rally.
He'd be on Morning Joe every morning, just answering every question, going on for hours with them.
You're right.
And so somebody could look at that and say, well, he was just this very famous guy who was on TV all the time, and the Republican base ended up liking what they saw.
But you're right about this sort of online internet energy.
I think maybe one of our roles was maybe causing liberal, because we were out there, I wasn't...
There at the time, but the people who were my spirit was who were out there.
And they were like, you know, oh, this guy's racist.
This guy's a white nationalist like us.
Hillary Clinton and these people would respond like, oh, he's a white nationalist.
He wouldn't denounce just because anyone who kisses his ass is like somebody he won't denounce.
And then I think the conservative base, like the voters, the people who just watch Fox News are like, oh, all these leftists are attacking him.
So maybe there was like this indirect way where like just by becoming the face of Trump because what the media wanted, like, you know, Hillary Clinton has a speech where she talks about Alex Jones, probably best thing that ever happened to.
Alex Jones, as far as being a respected person in the conservative movement.
And so, yeah, I mean, and it's amazing the extent to, I mean, it really is bastardized and stupid.
I mean, you know, people will talk to me and, you know, they will be like, you know, they love like Bronze Age pervert and like the way they judge thinkers and intellectuals.
And, you know, I've had a little bit more recent experience because I was more of a like a...
You know, more of a rightoid, like 2000, even by 2021, 2022, much later than you, of being disillusioned with all this stuff.
Like, these people would be like, oh man, you're, you know, my friend says you're a liberal now, and like he loved your tweets like three years ago, and the only thing they love is like...
You're racist or you're sexist.
I'm more than that.
There has to be some kind of thought.
Anyone can go out there and be racist or crude.
Part of it might be we get bored easily.
I can't sit there for 15 years using the same talking points.
V-Dare recently shut down.
Nothing against them.
You could take an article from 2008 and 2019 or 2020.
Oh, it's the same.
First of all, you should change because the world changes, right?
Immigration in 2000 is not immigration in 2022 when all your Latinos from Trump are having these music videos and obviously something has changed in the culture.
And then there's part of me that's just like...
You know, I'm bored.
It didn't work.
You yelled about immigration and said we should be a white country.
Okay, now you have these black and Hispanic Trump rappers, and all the college-educated whites went to the Democrats, and now whites hate you, and Taylor Swift thinks you're a bunch of scumbags, the most mainstream person in the world.
Maybe rethink what you're doing here.
Yeah, exactly.
Maybe grow.
As well.
And start to question your assumptions as well.
I think you have to do that.
And yeah, I guess it's also, I think, avoiding audience capture.
You either have to be autistic, literally or figuratively.
You know, you just have to sort of live in your own head.
You use reason.
You marched your own drummer.
Or you have to be a sort of arrogant asshole and just say, look, no.
I'm going where I'm going.
You can follow, you cannot.
It's up to you.
I think there are a few people who are like that.
Even ones that I disagree with, I appreciate that.
That they're going to tell me something I don't know.
Or make me rethink something.
▲
Export Selection