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Nov. 8, 2024 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
23:58
Trump's Multiracial Fascist Coalition

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comRichard, Mark Brahmin, and the gang reassemble to take stock of the 2024 election. Exit polls show that the GOP really is a “,multi-racial” voting block. What does this mean? Is the myth of the “coming Democratic majority” really over? Is a “browner” electorate a more reactionary electorate? In the sample provi…

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This is sort of just off topic, but I was wondering, Richard, if you have any response or at least saw this kind of Asian guy critiquing Nietzsche as being the philosopher of incels.
It's just this...
I think I retweeted Athenian Stranger on this.
I just find this guy...
I find him annoying.
And... It's not that it's all bad, but I mean, let's just go to it.
I'll show you.
The guy Jonathan Bai, his last name is Bai, which is kind of funny in itself.
He's some student at Columbia who's Asian, and he's kind of dressed up the way you're dressing.
Yeah, he's dressed up in a very smart, kind of tweety look, and he's obviously rented out.
This place.
And so he's like, I think this guy probably has money and he's like forcing people to watch his philosophy lectures.
And I sense, is he from Columbia?
If I were just to guess, I would say he went to the Committee on Social Thought at UFC.
But he didn't?
He went to Columbia?
His bio says that he's, yeah.
Okay. It's a math Olympiad, so there you go.
I mean, I don't want to bash him too hard because I'm not against getting this stuff out there.
There is just this sort of fake quality to what he's doing, though, where he's not really adding anything to the conversation.
And Athenian stranger, who's much more of a sort of...
Died-in-the-wool Nietzschean scholar of sorts and things like that.
He says that he listened to his whole hour-long lecture on Nietzsche, and he said what I'm saying right here.
I'm, in a way, echoing him.
It's like, I'm very happy that young people are reading Nietzsche, but there are just so many errors that it just becomes a little bit unbearable.
But let's listen to this.
Because he lived the life of a loser.
And when you look at who is attracted to Nietzsche's ideas today, I'm not talking about the academics.
I'm talking about the real people in the real world who uncritically embrace all of Nietzsche.
It's never the ubermensch.
It's never the blond beast.
It's never the jock.
More often than not, it's people like Nietzsche.
Sickly, marginalized, unattractive, resentful.
Is he describing himself, though?
I mean, this is the problem where he's really...
Kind of the worst person to be making this point.
Well, and also, what jock is reading up on philosophy?
What jock is reading anything?
Well, the answer to that rhetorical question is the Athenian stranger.
I don't know, Jonathan.
You're probably not the best vehicle for this point, which...
It has a sort of kernel of truth to it.
You know, like, there's a bunch...
You've seen those images of, like, BAP meetups, and there are these, like, weird Indians and, like, Mexican people, and they're just like, yeah, BAP!
It's pretty funny.
And the Gropers are the same way, much worse.
I've never seen really unattractive or I've never seen certainly an ugly person come to any of our gatherings, although they're small gatherings.
But I'll talk a little bit more on this, but let me.
Sickly, marginalized, unattractive, resentful.
So let me be clear on what I mean that Nietzsche is a loser.
I'm not talking about his early years, which seemed fine, except for the early death of his father and brother.
I'm not talking about his...
Fantastic early philological career where he was made the youngest professor.
I'm talking about the mature Nietzsche, the Nietzsche who wrote books like these.
I'm talking about his chronic sickness that eventually became insanity.
I'm talking about barely scraping by with a university pension.
I'm talking about his rejection by multiple women that turned someone who was an early supporter of women's education into a cartoon misogynist.
I'm talking about a man What happened to Socrates,
Jonathan? Also, did Socrates, did he have like a big palatial estate outside of Athens?
Is that what I remember right?
He owned a country club or something.
It was called Mar-a-Lago outside of Athens.
That's where Socrates lived.
Because he had a real successful business career.
Isn't that right?
I mean, does anyone edit this stuff?
I'm having the same exact impression of Athenian Stranger.
This is just so clanging.
It's like someone singing out of tune or something.
It's really annoying.
I mean...
Nietzsche was the youngest professor appointed at Basel, and everyone had great hopes for him.
And he was too visionary for them, for those academics.
And so he had to scrape by.
I visited his boarding house in Switzerland.
It's actually a beautiful spot.
I mean, it's a great place to be poor.
Yeah, it's almost like he had to break free from the chains of academia in order to create visionary philosophy.
And he suffered in order to produce these amazing works.
And he also faced down rejection.
And he published, thus spoke Zarathustra on his own dime.
And it sold dozens of copies when it began.
And by the time of his death in 1900, it was a deeply influential book and has been profoundly influential to philosophy, literature, even popular culture.
I mean, he inspired the Superman comic book, no doubt, to some degree.
And yeah, it's like the ultimate Chad move.
And yeah, he had issues with Paul Ray and Lou Salome, but don't we all?
How many chicks are you banging, Jonathan?
How many chicks did you bang this week, Jonathan?
My guess would be Goose Egg.
Just saying, my man.
Well, that's the impression I got.
It's like this little monkey in this suit that our people developed, speaking our language, surrounded by the intellectual works of our people, with this nasty little man resentment at our innovation.
He's like a Chinese fake Rolex watch.
It's just the same.
It's just expensive.
He's selling it in Times Square or something.
I mean, I've even heard some of this criticism from, like, normie mutuals of, like, you know, well, yeah, a lot of these philosophers were, like, incels and societal outcasts.
I mean, yeah, but that doesn't really change the fact that they highly developed modern thought.
Van Gogh also wasn't a billionaire.
Like, last time I checked, he, like, suffered tremendously and killed himself.
You know?
What's your fucking point?
I mean, like, you know, he's amazing.
He brought up, he was like, you know, during the end of his life, he had to fund his own publishing house.
I mean, Karl Marx spent most of his career get leeching off of Frederick Ingalls.
His ideas inspired revolutions across the world, so what does it really matter?
Exactly. And also, two points that I'll make here.
So, first off, Nietzsche did actually serve in the military, and he served honorably, if not triumphantly.
So, is our bar really like, you have to have killed 20 men?
To be considered heroic or something?
How many men have you killed Jonathan?
What do you expect from him?
It's just such bad faith.
It's such a bad faith discussion.
And secondly, to be fair to Jonathan and to say that there is a kernel of truth in what he's saying.
So in Genealogy and Morality, Nietzsche makes all of these points.
And he makes an ad hominem argument at the end of the day about how...
Could you imagine a philosopher, a married philosopher?
Could you imagine a philosopher who's a lover?
And there actually is a sort of resentment in philosophy that is channeled into greatness.
A resentment of not getting the girl, of not being successful.
I mean, what is Plato's Republic if not...
In a way, a sort of conspiracy of people who are out of power.
In Plato's case, maybe someone who took the other side in the Peloponnesian War, just throwing that out there as speculation.
But that's...
It's a good point, but it's an interesting dynamic point when Nietzsche makes it, as opposed to Jonathan Bai.
Because Nietzsche's point there is that, first off, you have to see the resentment within philosophy itself, because you have to look at the philosopher and not just philosophy.
But also, there's a sort of overcoming or inspirational point to that, which is that...
Even, you know, maybe especially someone who doesn't get to bang Lou Salome can actually transform that resentment and unfulfilled passion into groundbreaking philosophy or painting or even engineering or something like that.
All sorts of things.
So it's like Nietzsche's making a productive...
A dynamic point.
Whereas it seems to me like Jonathan is bashing fans of BAP or something.
Fair enough, I guess.
But it's just...
Well, it also seems that he's using it to discredit Nietzsche's ideas.
So it's just a kind of classical ad hominem attack, right?
Yeah. Well, let's look at his ideas.
What is the guy saying?
Who actually cares?
Do you care that Tchaikovsky was probably gay?
I mean, it's interesting.
It might even tell you something about his music or even his operas that have characters in them.
It's an interesting fact that a biographer could look into and interpret.
I mean, that's all fair and good, but who cares?
We certainly don't care.
Nietzsche makes ad hominem attacks against Socrates, of course.
But nevertheless, maybe those are kind of the least fair of his attacks, except I think he's getting at something deeper with Socrates, and we go into it in the book.
Yeah. Well, it's reinforced in his philosophy.
It's not merely an ad hominem.
Yeah. Yeah.
Exactly. Exactly.
I don't know if we want to listen anymore.
I'm just going to get mad.
If Nietzsche tells us that every philosophy is an intimate confession by their philosopher, what I hear in Nietzsche's confession is seething, unrelenting anger at an unreceptive world.
And I think that's directly linked to the two ways in which his ideas are actually flawed.
It's related to this first point that he exaggerates will to power.
Because remember, Nietzsche himself tells us, the master does not think about power.
In fact, the master doesn't really think, period.
It's the slave.
It's the priest.
It's the people who don't have power on the sidelines.
Those are the ones who are conniving.
Those are the ones who are resentful.
Too many errors going on here.
This is not right.
I think Nietzsche is self-critical enough to kind of see this about himself, even.
You know?
Yeah, that's true.
But just to go to what he actually said, that's a...
It's not the worst thing I've ever heard, but it's actually a misrepresentation of the argument in the genealogy of morality.
Explain. Well, the master, he celebrates his own power.
I mean, this is the whole division between good and bad and good and evil.
It's not like the master doesn't think about power.
The master thinks what is good is...
To quote Conan the Barbarian, to slay your enemies and dance to the lamentations of their women, or whatever he said exactly.
So you're saying that the master contemplates and he's saying the master does not?
Of course, yeah.
He just celebrates power in itself.
But Nietzsche's whole point is that will to power is everywhere, so you have to see the will to power in morality.
And so that...
You know, the mouse that's killed by the hawk or something, it will use morality because it can't use physical force.
So it will say, what you're doing, you're killing me, hawk.
That's immoral.
So think about that, hawk, before you kill another mouse.
That's the way that morality itself is a weapon.
And it's directed against...
Someone who's physically powerful.
The other thing too is that Nietzsche represents effectively a kind of anti-philosopher, right?
So he is ultimately against his own class of philosophers.
So the criticisms he's making of Socrates, for example, and of philosophy in general are ultimately criticisms that are implicitly directed back at himself.
And I think that that's something he must have been fully cognizant of.
He is ultimately the anti-philosopher.
He definitely is an anti-philosopher.
I think that is...
He's bringing to a close the history of Western philosophy.
And it's becoming self-conscious finally and sort of ending.
I totally agree with that.
And also an anti-priest.
But in order to be an anti-priest, it's a kind of paradox.
You have to also...
Be the priest, right?
In order to dispel the magic, you have to do magic yourself, right?
You have to understand the magic.
In order to end philosophy, you have to be the philosopher.
I totally agree with that characterization.
The other thing about him, and I went into this again when we did these lectures on Nietzsche's, we need to return to Nietzsche.
It's like there's this irony within Nietzsche that I don't think Jonathan Bai is appreciating, which is that yes, the trans-evaluation of all values in the ancient world and the revolution represented by Christianity,
it was in a way a sort of disaster.
I mean, there's no doubt that Nietzsche appreciates the blonde beast and sort of takes the side of the blonde beast.
After all, it's Rome versus Judea.
It's the master or Arian
And we know which side Nietzsche is on.
That being said, Nietzsche always has a synthetic quality to his thought.
And he also says that...
Because of this revolution of morality, we became deeper.
Whatever the origins of morality might be, and the origins of morality are resentment and punishment and a mental attack where a physical attack is not available.
It still was a development of self-consciousness and self-awareness.
Because we've gone through this history of Christianity, we've been deepened by it.
And so there's this synthetic turn he has to his philosophy.
But just to address what Jonathan Bye said right here...
Nietzsche has never said that masters don't care about power and that it's only slaves who are conniving.
That is a mischaracterization, a misreading, a misunderstanding of Nietzsche.
And you should not be lecturing on Nietzsche if you are off on this really basic point.
On this point, my memory may be less strong than yours, but to the extent that you're correct, what you're saying is correct, and I trust that it is, he must be taking the error from, because Nietzsche does have this, does have a passage or two about how evil of some type is sort of the origin of intelligence.
So you have the priestly type who is physically weak.
And his intelligence, its origin is this kind of resentment of the strong physical type that doesn't necessarily require his mind to be dominant and so forth.
Right. He might be deriving the error from those passages.
Sure. And I think Nietzsche was only such a masterful psychologist of resentment because he was also a creature of resentment.
And you hear that through the seething anger, through his work and through his pages.
So I think the exaggerated emphasis on the world to power tells us perhaps a bit less about the Christian psyche and the psyche of Nietzsche himself.
I think the same goes for his heroic individualism.
I'm just going to stop it there.
There's so many errors.
Richard's too offended.
I'm sorry to be this mean and racist, but like...
This guy is the equivalent of a fake Rolex sold in Times Square.
A Chinese made.
Is he promoting himself?
Someone was tweeting that he's part of the Teal Network.
I would not be surprised if that's the case, but this is just awful.
These arguments, there could be some interest in muting Nietzsche.
Well, but they're sort of emphasizing Nietzsche, I guess.
But he's saying, okay, this is what I think I just took from those few sentences, which is that Nietzsche's critique of Christianity is that it is all will to power, as if will to power is a bad thing.
Nietzsche's worldview is that will to power is Everywhere.
It is everything.
He is talking about an essential life force, which is will to overcome, to either subordinate yourself to a higher force and be taken along with it, or to oppose and resist the force, or to, in fact,
overcome it, or absorb it within yourself.
His concept of will to power is universal.
It's cosmological.
So he's not using will to power as a critique of Christians.
So if anything, if this does come from the Teal Network, this is some sneaky way of promoting whatever neo-reactionary Catholicism they're promoting or something.
It's the most common mistaken assumption, I think, about what the will to power is.
They just think, oh, it's the desire to wield power over others.
End of story.
Which can be one expression of it, but no, the will to power is something cosmological, as you were saying.
Yeah, and amoeba has a will to power.
Exactly. Your genes have it.
I mean, yeah.
And the Christian has a will to power, right?
Yes. The Christian has a will to power.
It's an indirect, disingenuous will to power relative to the Viking, right?
But... I think the other thing, I don't know if he's already made the point in the clip that you've played so far, but he's saying that the reason Nietzsche was so obsessed with power is because he lacked power himself, right?
And he also uses this to make a criticism of the followers of Nietzsche who were powerless people, and that's why they were obsessed with power.
As we've already discussed, that's not the reason Nietzsche was obsessed with quotation marks around power.
He was defining phenomena.
He was saying this is the way the universe works.
It's a will to power, right?
But I think, I mean, you could say that people who are, some people who are attracted to the concept of a will to power are people who are interested in power, looking to gain power.
That would make sense.
This is like those guys that buy the 99 rules of power in paperback at Barnes& Noble or something.
They're like, this is how I become an evil CEO and fuck over my investors and screw my secretary.
I think that there are some...
You know, if there is a good point to tease out of this, I think that there are people who are like that, for example, who are looking at Nietzsche as a way of, you know, solving this problem of them not having power,
right? Yeah.
I'm not going to listen to more of it.
Someone in the comments is suggesting we call this video the bi-science.
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