Richard Spencer engages in a detailed discussion with guest Drew Pavlov about his journey in activism, which began with protests against the Chinese government while at university in Australia. Pavlo shares his experiences with physical assaults and cyber harassment that led to a broader public profile. The conversation expands to wider political topics, including contrasting views on Israel, Palestine, and Ukraine, highlighting diverging political ideologies and affiliations. Drew also discusses his stance on Australia's relationship with China, the role of global allies, the influence of third-world movements, and his nuanced position on nationalism and decolonial rhetoric. As they project future geopolitical dynamics, they touch on Trump's policies, isolationism, and the glaring contradictions in modern American politics. The episode wraps with reflections on the complexities of defining 'the West' in an increasingly polarized world.AI-generated summaryTimestamps00:00 Introduction 01:16 Guest Introduction: Drew Pavlo02:41 Drew's Activism Journey06:17 Political and Social Views08:24 Challenges and Threats Faced15:34 Australia's Political Landscape27:29 Global Perspectives and Propaganda39:45 The Influence of Media and Propaganda41:33 Russian Propaganda and Its Effectiveness42:47 Nihilism in Russian Propaganda44:52 MAGA and American Nationalism54:57 Cultural Assimilation and Identity01:09:09 The Israel-Palestine Conflict01:16:38 The Influence of Tankies in Politics01:17:20 Changing Liberal Perceptions on Israel01:18:57 Iran's Role in Global Politics01:22:52 The Complexities of Zionism and Jewish Statehood01:32:59 The Future of American Foreign Policy01:49:24 Concluding Thoughts and Reflections This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
We're moving towards a live stream format greater than what we were doing before.
This is still members only, but today it's a little bit more inclusive than members only.
This is subscribers only, I guess.
But I wanted to announce what we're doing and let more people join us.
And we have an excellent guest who's just leaving.
So we have no guests tonight.
I've already offended him and he's walked off the show.
We can only look at his library and speculate about all of the books that he is reading.
But as you can see or as you saw, my guest is Drew Pavlu.
And there's his dog.
Looks like he has two poodles.
So welcome.
Welcome, Drew.
Thanks for being here.
No, thank you for having me on.
Sorry about that.
I just had to put the simulcast on full screen.
But no, thanks for having me on.
It's very interesting to discuss.
We do have different views on a wide range of matters, like, for example, like the Middle East, Israel, Palestine, et cetera.
But we basically agree on Ukraine.
So it's, you know, we've got, I think you're also very anti-Trump these days.
So it's interesting to discuss.
Yes, that is all true.
So are those two little poodles you have there?
Yes, they are.
I am dog sitting for two poodles right now.
They're not my own.
I'm dog sitting.
Yeah, I love them.
I love poodles.
I love dogs.
I actually have a poodle mix, a burnado that was given to me for my birthday a few years ago, but I didn't know how nice poodles were.
They're very devoted to you.
He's sort of the nicest dog I've ever had.
Oh, absolutely.
They're such good companion creatures.
That's why I love dogs.
They're very devoted and they're very sweet.
They're very sweet.
I'm a big fan of dogs.
Definitely.
So, Drew, just in case some viewers don't know who you are, could you give us the rundown on what you do and where you are in life and all that jazz?
Yeah, no, of course.
It's a pretty strange and crazy background.
Essentially, when I was about 20 years old, I started protesting against the Chinese government at my university in Australia.
As a result of that, yeah, which like it was just like during the Hong Kong protests and I was a young idealist and I started protesting and at the first protest I ever organized, like basically the Chinese consulate organized a counter-rally and I got like sort of like assaulted, physically assaulted by a bunch of guys in their 30s who weren't even students, like they were Chinese nationals.
And that's what made me, you know, start as an activist.
It was quite funny because even though I basically am just like a, I mean, I literally was just like a random guy, but because I was doing these protests and I was quite, I guess I was quite effective at them and very loud and annoying.
The Chinese government started like a campaign against me and they condemned me in the Chinese state media.
And I was like a figure of hate and the Chinese ambassador to Australia was attacking me and stuff like that.
And at a certain point, they put out a statement calling for my university to expel me as a student.
And yeah, and the university had a budget that was about, I think 20% of the annual budget relied just on Chinese international students.
So they were, they were like really worried that they would then lose that because essentially in the article, the Chinese government was basically threatening to cut like Chinese students going to the university.
And the.
So what did you say?
Yeah.
Well, the university actually tried to expel me.
They spent about half a million dollars in Australian taxpayer money to expel me.
They brought in two of the top four law firms in Australia.
And so that was like my, that's how I guess I first came into the public eye, which was very strange because I was like 20, 21 years old.
I never thought in a million years that I would be like sort of in a sort of public role at that point.
And then I just basically kept on campaigning, kept on campaigning.
I had a small independent run at the last election, at the 2022 election in Australia.
Didn't get many votes, but it was just like, we're kind of, we were kind of campaigning, I guess, against the Chinese government's influence in Australia because Australia's got Australia's closest trading partner is China.
And so there's, I guess, a lot of pressure from big business elites in Australia.
And also, you know, people quite high up in Australian politics, like they just want to sort of like trade with China and avoid annoying their government, et cetera.
So I ran in that election.
But my life kind of took a massive turn because at a certain point in 2022, I was still only like 23 years old at this point.
I was in London and I got basically swatted by Chinese government or Chinese government supporters.
And they basically did a fake email threat in my name, like a bomb threat using Proton mail with the IP address.
And the Metropolitan Police in London, like literally treated it as a serious bomb threat and they arrested me as a terror suspect.
I was held in communicator without any access to the Australian embassy or Australian lawyers or any lawyers.
And I was like stranded in London for six weeks in the end.
It was a really crazy experience.
And then after that, I basically was like, okay, I'm not going to do like sort of in-person protesting anymore.
I'm going to kind of move along to trying to do more of more like, you know, YouTube and Substack and commentary.
Yeah.
And I guess my political trajectory is interesting because when I started all this, I was kind of like a Bernie Sanders fan.
I was kind of like a Democratic socialist.
And, you know, like in 2020, I was like a big Black Lives Matter supporter and all this stuff.
I was like really, I was really, really worried and left wing and everything.
And I think essentially what happened is from the start, even though I identified as like progressive and democratic socialists and all that sort of stuff, I would always from the very start get so much harassment and abuse and swatting and death threats and all this crazy stuff from supporters of the Chinese government, tankies, you know, authoritarian leftists, like basically full hard-blown tankies.
And I think I just came to understand over like a four or five year period, it was a very long and torturous process.
But I think I came to understand that essentially, like, unfortunately, the sort of authoritarian ultra left tanky sort of impulse has unfortunately infected a lot of the center left as well.
And like past a certain point, constantly being abused and subjected to hatred and death threats and swatting and my parents were swatted and my parents had death threats against them and everything.
This isn't even the worst part.
I think at a certain point, Australian federal police called me into their offices in Brisbane and told me that they had actually intercepted a genuine sort of like kidnap plot by Chinese foreign intelligence in Australia.
They didn't say it was Chinese foreign intelligence.
They just said it was like a foreign intelligence plot.
And which is nuts because I was literally just like, as I said, at this point, I mean, still even to this day, I'm just like a YouTuber slash Twitter guy.
Right.
Right.
And this was in Australia.
So it was obviously a really crazy thing to happen.
And just past a certain point with all these people saying, you're the enemy, we want to kill you, celebrating all this stuff happening to me.
I'm just like, no, I don't really identify as the leftist then anymore.
I wouldn't identify necessarily as right wing myself.
I'd say maybe like more classical liberal, maybe like moderate social Democrat type thing.
I mean, I believe in public health care.
I believe in, you know, public goods, all these sorts of things.
But yeah, I sort of have certainly broken with kind of like the activist left because of this crazy stuff.
And I've also been a big supporter of Ukraine as well.
So I've been to Ukraine.
I was there about three, four months ago and I literally went to the Donbass.
I recorded the aftermath of a Russian missile strike on a Donbass town called Dobropilya.
And I walked through a residential tower block that had just basically been completely gutted by like the aftermath of an Iskander ballistic missile strike and also cluster munitions.
And I recorded, I recorded evidence of war crimes there.
And I also filmed myself walking through Hassan, which is like, you know, that's subject to the human safari, which is what the Ukrainians call it.
Essentially, the Russians have declared almost like a free fire zone of much of the city.
And they're just literally droning people throughout the city.
So walking through the, walking through Hassan was pretty confronting.
And so, look, I'm a massive supporter of Ukraine.
Probably the area where you're going to disagree with me on the most is, listen, I am quite, I would defend myself.
I guess I call myself, it's almost like an anti-Zionist in a sense, in the way that like, I guess, seeing the way that so many leftists celebrated October 7th and stuff like that, as a sort of like race war thing where they were like, Israelis are white and we want to do this in America and Australia and all these sort of colonial settler places, et cetera.
That sort of made me very alarmed by like, you know, the sort of decolonial hard left rhetoric.
And I think, I think like, you know, it's become a very much a sort of like, sort of like race communist type identified cause, the sort of Palestinian activist movement.
And in Australia, at least like, you know, there's, there's all these Hezbollah rallies, Hamas rallies and all this stuff, like literally people holding up Hezbollah flags in Australia and stuff like that.
And it pisses me off.
So like, I am, I am quite stridently against, you know, like the sort of like anti-Zionist movement.
And look, I am also somebody who doesn't like anti-Semitism.
I, you know, I, I, I am somebody who, you know, grew up, I had a lot of Jewish friends and, and, you know, I, I, I like, you know, Jewish culture and I loved, I grew up on Seinfeld and stuff like that.
So look, this is, this is probably where maybe, maybe you're going to disagree with me.
That's okay.
We can discuss.
I'll, I'll push on all these things, but, but before we talk about that, I want to back up a little bit.
So what is it that you said that angered the Chinese government to that extent?
That's a good question.
I mean, I certainly was calling for the overthrow of the Chinese communist party.
And look, look, probably the thing that pissed them off the most was, look, I was very progressive at this point and stuff like that.
And I guess I was using a lot of decolonial rhetoric against the Chinese government.
So I was saying like decolonize Tibet, free Tibet.
And I still believe all this stuff.
I still believe that, I still believe that Tibet should be an independent country.
I still think that the Uyghurs should have the right to like have independence and stuff like that.
That's probably the thing that pissed them off the most.
Like, and listen, I was very strident in my activism.
Like I would, I guess I'd get in their faces and annoy them quite a lot.
Like at one point I held up a sign that said, fuck Xi Jinping in Chinese in like, you know, a, a major suburb in Sydney.
And there were guys who like walked past and tried to punch me up and everything.
So I guess I've been very loud in my activism.
I worked a lot with like sort of like Hong Kong dissonance, Tibetan dissonance.
That's probably one of the things that pissed them off a lot.
Like, um, obviously there's like, there's like a very vulgar sort of low IQ sort of like anti-China sort of thing on the American far right.
Like, so I remember like Tucker Carlson had that guy on who was like, oh, I want the American military to, I want the guys in the American military to want to like sit on a throne of Chinese skulls.
And that was absolutely, that's absolutely the opposite of the approach that I had.
Like, cause my whole thing was, I always said, listen, I, I actually liked Chinese culture.
I like the Chinese people.
I'm against the Chinese communist party.
And I, I, um, I would work with Chinese dissident pro-democracy types, um, every single year.
Like, so funny coincidence history.
Like I was born on June 4th, 1989, like June 4th, 1999.
So 10 years to the day of Tiananmen.
So I, I, um, every year on my birthday, like, you know, I'm at Tiananmen square memorials with Chinese dissident groups, the pro-democracy types and everything.
So, so that's probably one of the things that pisses them off the most.
Like I do work a lot with like the actual, actual Chinese.
pro-democracy groups and Tibetans and Uyghurs and stuff like that and I think that pisses them off quite a lot because like I think I think a lot of it for them was a sort of race war thing like I would get called um I'd get called white trash or I'd get called wog, which is like sort of like old time racial slow against Greeks in Australia by Chinese nationalists online and stuff like that.
And they would, I remember when I did this first protest, like they, it was pretty crazy because we got surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of Chinese nationals who were pro-CCP.
We got surrounded on a kind of like small hill and like literally the police came out and there was lines of police to try and hold the groups apart.
And it was it was really unhinged because basically, the leader of the Chinese students told me in front of the police during like negotiations to end the standoff.
He was like, we're not going to let your side leave until you apologize to the Chinese nation.
And like, and like his crowd were chanting out stuff saying like white trash, white trash and stuff like that.
So, I think the fact that like I was like non-Chinese, but working in Chinese.
Now the Z-Tards say you're not even white.
So well, yeah, that's that's a very, dude, this is a very funny thing.
So it's, it's a very funny thing because from the start when I was doing all my activism, um, the Han nationalists, uh, the Trotskyists, the far left people at my university who were attacking me, they would all call me like a white supremacist.
They'd say Drew's like a white racist, blah, blah, blah.
And then because I was like against like Joel Davis and the schizophrenic, like sort of neo-Nazi wingnats in Australia, who believe that there shouldn't even be a single non-white person in the country and stuff like that, just like unhinged stuff.
Like because of that, they started going, oh, we're going to deport Drew.
He's not even fully white.
He's probably Turkish, all this dumb shit.
And I think it's very funny because the National Socialist Network in Australia has probably become probably one of the most active neo-Nazi groups in the entire world.
And they have this thing called the WOG question, where they literally say, listen, we don't think that Southern Europeans or Slavs or Eastern Europeans fully white, but they will be allowed to stay in our pure ethno-state if they acknowledge our hegemony.
This is literally what they say, which is really unhinged.
And so they started doing that shit to me because I was against Joel Davis and Thomas Sewell and I was saying like, you guys are unhinged and, you know, you're unhinged, you're schizophrenic.
Oh, I get it.
Definitely.
Are you Orthodox Greek?
Are you Orthodox Christian?
Yes, that's what I think I remember.
Look, I'm Greek Orthodox Christian, and I'm not like, I'm certainly not like a kind of like Bible beating basher or anything like that, but it's something I identify with.
And I do believe in like the central tenets of the Christian faith and stuff like that.
And we can discuss this because I know you're like a Nietzschean anti-Christian type.
And I think you believe that, I think you believe that Christianity is like a desert religion influenced by like the Yahud and stuff like that.
So we can discuss this.
Yeah, more than that.
But okay, I want to go back just a little bit again.
So what is the situation like in Australia vis-a-vis the Chinese?
Because I think a lot of Americans, we think of Australia as like an island off the coast of Ireland or something, like it's part of the Anglosphere, but it's actually part of Asia.
And you were just saying that China is the largest trading partner.
So what is the situation like in China?
Excuse me.
That was Ferdinand's lip.
In Australia.
Look, very interesting question.
In Australia, I think there is a lot of sort of cultural affinity with like America and the rest of the Anglosphere, simply because at the end of the day, it's an English-speaking, like we're a predominantly English-speaking country.
And there's like the long history of Australia being part of like a Western alliance system, et cetera.
Vaguely Protestant still.
Yeah, it is interesting because it's interesting because we've had a like, this is one of the things that I push back against the sort of like national social network types on in the sense that like, I mean, Australia always had like a very large Irish population and Catholic influence and stuff like that.
And that led a lot to, you know, especially in the early years of Australia's history, like there was never really like hegemony, like a white hegemony sort of thing in the sense that like there was a there was a lot of sort of like sectarian conflict between Irish Australians and Protestant Australians and stuff.
But that's, I guess that's a different question.
The thing with China is very interesting because it's by far our largest trading partner.
And as a result of that, a lot of the top, okay, so like if you look at like the top, top billionaires in Australia, if you look at like the political economy of Australia, people sometimes joke that we've got a kind of third world economy in the sense that we are like 90, I think we're ranked like 92nd according to a Harvard study of economic complexity in the world based on exports.
So we actually rank behind countries like Senegal in the sense that a lot of our economy is basically still based on the export of raw commodities, just like coal, coal, what else?
Like, yeah, like iron ore, all this sort of stuff.
It's predominantly to China and Asia.
Yeah.
And it's predominantly to China and the Asia Pacific.
And it's like the Australian economy is very strange.
It's almost like just a massive mining thing with like a housing bubble attached.
It's a really crazy thing.
We now have a problem where Sydney is literally at the same level of affordability on housing as Hong Kong.
So it's like literally right up there as one of the worst cases of affordability in the entire world.
We've got one of the worst housing bubbles in the entire world.
And look, our economy, because of the fact that it's so much centered around like sort of the export of raw commodities, et cetera, a lot of the top billionaires in Australia, you know, their fortunes are linked to literally trading iron ore and coal to China.
So there's a lot of influence by very, like the business council of Australia, like business interests are very much kind of like, we want to stabilize the relationship with China.
Don't don't like they would, they would acknowledge that like China is not, a lot of these billionaires in the business community wouldn't would acknowledge that like the Chinese government's not our friend necessarily, but they don't want to have a situation where they have to pick between the American Security Alliance and the Economic Alliance with China.
And so they might be forced to choose at some point.
Like, I mean, how does China view Australia?
Does it, I mean, it's not Taiwan exactly, and it's very different.
Taiwan doesn't have many natural resources, I would imagine.
It has manufacturing.
So it's sort of a totally different situation.
But I mean, does China see Australia as in its sphere?
This is a question I haven't really thought about.
Look, it's a very interesting question.
And sometimes people ask me, like, what's the worst, worst case scenario for Australia?
And it's not that I think that like, you know, the PLA is literally going to be landing on Bondi Beach.
I think the worst, worst case scenario for Australia in the next 20, 30 years is potentially if America turns really inwards in terms of isolationism, that we already have a very loud and vocal sort of part of our political elite.
It's sort of like a boomer leftist type part of the elite that wants us to essentially completely crush, like completely abandon the American Security Alliance.
And they will mobilize all the familiar arguments, you know, like look at what they're doing in the Middle East with Israel, Iran, and all this stuff.
They're so evil.
Some of them will mobilize conspiracy theories about, you know, Gough Whitlam's dismissal in like 1972, saying, oh, it was the CIA, which I don't think is true.
But it's kind of like a boomer ex-hippie type.
But it's people like the former Prime Minister Paul Keating.
It's people like former Foreign Minister Bob Carr.
They're quite influential and intelligent, sort of like very top level sort of former political elites.
And they've formed like basically a lobby group where they want to cut off the relationship with America and go all in with China.
And asking what is the worst case scenario?
I think the worst case scenario is if America were to turn inward, if Taiwan were to fall to a Chinese invasion, I think the worst case scenario would be that sort of section of the political elite would then gain the ascendancy and then basically say, we will pursue a policy of Finlandization with China.
And it's not, this is the crazy thing is that this is actually like, this is not even outside the realm of possibility.
There's a guy called Sam Rogervan, who's like, I think he's like a top sort of like security sort of intellectual in Australia, writes books about like, you know, Australian national security and all this stuff.
And he's kind of more identified with the progressive side of Australian politics.
And he literally said that he once had a tweet like back in like 2018 saying like, is Finlandization really that bad?
And is that really such a bad outcome for Australia?
And I don't think that they realized like what that entailed for Finland during the Cold War was they had to basically remove books critical of the Soviet Union from their libraries.
They had to basically engage in massive amounts of self-censorship.
Their political system was under a lot of pressure by the Soviet Union for like decades.
And I think that is the worst case scenario for Australia, like a Finlandization type scenario.
And I think the fact that like it's, we already know like the Chinese government's very active in Australia with like United Front groups and stuff like that.
There was literally a kidnap plot against me.
We know that they actually like legitimately hunt Chinese dissidents in Australia and like try and hurt people and stuff like that.
And so I think like a worst case scenario is a really scary one where, look, to be honest, like in such a scenario, I'd probably be forced into exile.
Like I don't know if I could actually like live in Australia.
And listen, it's gotten pretty bad to the point that like the Australian Federal Police literally told me like there was a kidnap plot against you.
We literally, we intercepted this.
We literally had to raid somebody living in Australia.
We raided their residence to stop and interfere in this plot.
But to this day, two years later, no one's been arrested for that.
They literally raided the person involved in the plot, but no one was arrested.
So that shows you where we are at.
I think it's a little bit similar to Britain in that the police, the police and security forces and stuff like that seem to be very wary of, it's kind of, it's almost like sectarian politics have come into it where like, they're very wary of making arrests and actually properly cracking down on these people.
Like there was literally a kidnap plot against me.
No one was arrested, even though they knew about it and raided somebody.
I think they're worried that by doing things like that, they will increase sectarian tension in Australia because we do have a very large Chinese Australian population.
And listen, the vast majority of that population are like non-political.
They don't want to be involved in these questions of like, you know, China versus Australia, et cetera.
But we know that the Chinese government does try and interfere with this community.
They dominate WeChat.
I mean, WeChat is literally at the end of the day, a Chinese government run platform.
And so they shake the discourse of what a lot of Chinese Australians read every single day and use on their social media and see in their news.
And it's a, it's a pretty worrying thing because I think we're at the stage where the political authorities are very wary of taking actual proper steps to like crack down on people who are like literally doing kidnap plots and stuff like that, because they're worried that it will lead to like, you know, sectarian conflict and stuff like that.
I was listening to, you probably know this guy, but you know, that guy, he's like a academic at King's college, London, I think a military war studies academic.
And he's been predicting like that.
There are a lot of elements that are, there are a lot of elements that typically are aligned with like, you know, a coming civil war.
Like a lot of those elements exist in Britain.
And one of the things that he was, Oh, civil war in Britain.
Or are you talking about a civil war?
Oh, it was a civil war.
And, and listen, I'm not sure how, like how, how accurate this guy, because like he made some comment during the course of his podcast appearance where he said like, you know, the West is going to be crushed in Ukraine.
So that immediately raised alarm bells.
I'm like, okay, he could just be, he could just be like a Z-tar who's being like alarmist and stuff like that.
But he raised one point where like, you might remember this, but there was a case in Britain where there are essentially a bunch of guys that like manages the airport who are like, like, Muslim British guys.
And they like bashed a couple of police officers and like stomped in their head and stuff like that.
And it was like, it was like a year and a half later, two years later, there still were not like proper arrests made because they were like worried that it would lead to sectarian tension.
So there are sort of elements in Britain where like, there are, there's worries by people in the police.
Like if they go in and arrest people who've done these things and it's going to lead to civil conflict and stuff like that.
I'm worried that we're getting to that point in Australia when it comes to, um, not just as well, like, like CCP, interference operations and stuff.
But I think also with like Islamist Australia stuff.
So like we've had like pretty hardcore pro Hezbollah rallies and stuff like that in Australia, uh, marches by Hezbollah guys.
And, um, like there were mosques in Western Sydney that were holding, uh, memorial requins for like Nasrallah and stuff like that.
There was, there was an ISIS hate preacher in West Sydney who made a speech and he, he's a really hardcore extremist type.
Like one of his, it was literally his best friend went over and fought for ISIS, died and died in Syria.
I think, um, they were born in Sydney, um, they were born in Sydney, died in Syria.
Um, and his best friend, it was a very famous, infamous case in Australia.
his best friend, um, held up a severed head and God is like four year old Australian born son to hold up the severed head on camera in Syria.
And this guy with him, he did, who's like an ISIS hate preacher in West Sydney.
He literally defended that to the Australian media saying like, I see nothing wrong with that.
And he's never been arrested.
Yeah.
I don't, he's never been arrested.
Nothing like, and so, um, there was a point after October 7 where he was giving like a kind of like speech to his sort of, uh, followers.
And he said stuff like there's, there's like a sort of, uh, there's a controversial hadith that own that is only really understood.
I mean, it seemed to be a very extremist hadith that like the majority of like, so like Muslim scholars reject, but it's, it's, you probably have heard it.
It's like in the end times, the Jews will hide behind the Garkand tree.
tree and the rock and the even the Garkan tree and the rock will call out to the Muslims, oh believer, come out.
There is a Yahud behind me, come out and kill him.
So he was giving that speech to his followers, basically saying, in the end times, go out and kill Jews.
And like, like Australia, Australia is not like Australia where Australia is not like America where there is like, you know, very strong free speech protections.
People get arrested for free speech violations all the time in Australia.
For example, I got a $30,000 fine against me in Australia because I held up a blank sign against, like I held up a blank sign outside the Chinese consulate in Brisbane, like sort of protesting, like just mocking their censorship, holding a blank sign.
And I got like a 30K fine against me, like because I fought it in court and then I lost and then they ordered me to pay the fight, court fees and stuff like that.
So it is a bit of a two-tier policing system where like literally I got a 30K fine for holding a blank sign.
And then this guy was literally telling his followers, like, in the end times, go out and kill the hood.
And nothing happens.
So I think it's very worrying in Australia.
I think we're getting to a point where there's pretty bad sectarian tension.
There's a lot of, and I think the police and the authority, like the state doesn't really know how to deal with it.
Yeah.
So do you think that these tensions that you've been outlying sort of created a an atavism almost in terms of your support for Ukraine?
And I guess what I'm, what I'm saying is you're, you're rubbing shoulders with the Muslim element and so on.
But there's a real looming threat of China, I think in a way that there's not one in the United States.
Back, my parents' generation and my grandparents' generation, they would have nuclear bomb threat drills in lower school, like those things of like hiding under your desk if they drop an H-bomb or all of that.
And there was more of a sense of a red menace, I think, with those generations.
I think it's interesting that so many of these sentiments have flipped in the sense that I think it's fair to say now, and I never would have guessed this, that being pro-Russia or being anti-confrontation with Russia, let's say a Cold War with Russia, is absolutely right-wing coded.
Yeah, absolutely.
It would never have been that way just a few generations hence.
That was absolutely, I mean, not that the liberals didn't fight the Cold War or in fact, fight a hot war in Vietnam and so on.
I totally get that.
But there was also a degree to which being anti-communist was right-wing coded.
And I feel like maybe with you, you're in a different situation than a lot of Americans.
A lot of Americans think, oh, Putin's a fun guy and he rides around shirtless and Russians are trad and not gay and blah, blah, blah.
And that's it.
That's literally what it is for MAGA people.
Like majority of them, it's literally just like, they saw that retarded advertisement, you know, the military recruitment ad, and it was like that guy who was doing push-ups for the Russian military.
It was very funny because it turned out that that guy in particular was actually a former gay porn model or something like that.
But like Ted Cruz saw, remember Ted Cruz saw that ad and was like, oh my God, like this just shows this is why they're so much better than us because like they're, they, they are not woke and they've got like, you know, the irony, of course, is that he was really turned on by that ad.
That's why he went to the bottom.
But that's what it is for them.
Like they got, it's crazy, but they actually got one-shotted by the stupid Russian propaganda that like, oh, we're actually right-wing and trad.
And we both would know this, but they tailor their messaging for different audiences.
So when they want to mobilize third world resentment against Ukraine, they do that beautifully.
Like they, they've got Julius Malemma in South Africa chanting, we are Putin, we are Putin.
So like if you are somebody who has a brain, you can see that they're like not trad pro-West or whatever at all.
They very much mobilize Third World's resentment so much against the West.
Yeah, no, sorry.
Sorry for distracting you though.
I was just saying, like, I feel like the even you might not articulate in this way, but a looming totalitarian threat, I think, has made you, a former Bernie Sanders type, embrace the West in a way that you don't see that here.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's true.
I think that's probably good accurate.
Yeah, because it's real.
And I think it's not real for so many Americans.
I think we're getting dissociated from reality, but we're also getting dissociated from the myth of the Cold War that America is standing for anything.
I mean, at one point, Jordan Peterson basically said that Putin sees wokeness encroaching.
It's not really NATO, or maybe it is NATO.
NATO is just armed wokeness.
So it's like gays with guns encroaching into Russia, and he needs to rescue Christendom and stops here against Ukraine.
And that was his way of articulating something that I think is very, very common.
Whereas earlier, the notion of being an American, I mean, the Soviets, yeah, you'd more likely call the Soviets wags or whatever.
I don't really use that term, but you know what I mean.
And they were some Asiatic totalitarian.
And we're the Iowa farm boy standing tall against, you know, everything.
It's unholy.
Yeah.
It's very, it's, it's very strange.
And I think what this means is that essentially, like, the Russians have just mastered propaganda.
And I think the funny thing, the sad thing is that in terms of information war, like their information war is like literally a thousand times effective than their like actual real world military operations in Ukraine.
Yes.
Because like they like, dude, it's been 11 years and they're still they still haven't conquered the entirety of the Donbass.
And yet they have actually somehow managed to cleave off like a huge portion of the American right wing into thinking that like, oh, we're, we're the, the so-called bulwark of the true sort of like white Western world against like, you know, like the globalist libtads who are importing like Muslims.
Like this is how they present it, right?
It's actually a funny irony because if you look at it, like Putin is way more receptive to Islamism than like any actual Western leader.
Like like, you know, like there was a, there was like some stupid propaganda Third World of slot that he did a couple months ago.
And like Sheikh Suleimani, that guy that Nick Fuentes tried to do the Christian Islamist alliance with, like, it's so funny.
This guy, he's like a Pakistani guy living in Britain.
He shared it.
And it was like, it was like, it was like Putin kissing like a gold Quran, like in with Kadyrov in like a Chechen mosque.
It's like, it's like, can you imagine if Kierstan did that?
Like, holy shit.
Like every one of these sort of like MAGA, MAGA people would literally have a brain aneurysm if Kierstan was kissing a gold-plated mosque.
I know it's like kissing a gold-plated Quran.
But Putin literally does that.
And he literally has quotes saying like diversity is part of Russia's strength and all this stuff.
But it's, but he's saying that Russians aren't white is also an interesting thing.
This comes from this former diplomat during the Obama era.
He's actually from Montana.
He's kind of, he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, in my humble opinion.
I'm forgetting his name at the moment, but he's been very popular and he's taught at Stanford.
Someone will figure out his name in the chat.
But he claimed in a Washington Post interview that Putin held up his hand and he says, you think we're white, but we're not white.
We're nothing like you.
And maybe that's more propaganda or maybe that's something that Putin genuinely believes in the sense that a combination of KGB inculcation, Cold War history, and even third world ideology leads him to believe that he genuinely is not like the golden building, a billion, as he calls it.
The white people who are just so happen to be rich and it's all the game is rigged on their behalf and blah, blah, blah.
But yeah, I mean, I want to go into that.
I think that's so true.
Yeah.
I think it's so.
So I think it is absolutely third worldist ideology.
And like, it's amazing.
If you consider what actually is the distinguishing feature of like Russian nationalism for the past couple hundred years is that like they, it's like anti-Western sentiment.
It's, it's that, it is, it is about the fact that like, you know, Russia is not the West.
Russia is its own sort of like civilization.
It has its own, it has its own ethos.
It has its own special civilizational mission.
That's how Dugan talks about it.
He says, we are like, we have a special civilizational mission.
And you had, you literally had Dugan, there's an amazing thing where at one of these conferences, he was saying, like, like, our war is not just a war for Russia, it's a war for all of humanity because we've given so many opportunities to like boys from Nepal and boys from Latin America and boys from like the Middle East and stuff like that to come and fight for us as like sort of like high-paid soldiers.
It's amazing some of the ideology.
It goes very deep.
There's early Soviet cinema.
Circus, I believe, is the one.
Luckily, we have my friend Boris here who will correct me when I mangle Russian words or misremember various diplomats.
But there's actually a famous Soviet era cinema in which a white woman with a black child escapes to the Soviet Union.
And it's almost like BLM propaganda or something.
It's very funny, but it's like the black child in racist America, he's hated, but now is a Soviet citizen and he's embraced.
And it's very fascinating.
They pull on a thread that's actually very deep.
But I want to talk a little bit more about the propaganda thing because I do find this fascinating.
And I totally agree with you.
I think Boris might disagree with me here, but anyway, that Russian propaganda is quite sophisticated and is quite successful, in fact.
And so by the way, can I say one thing?
Yeah, go ahead.
I actually want to clarify very quickly as well.
Like, I'm certainly against the sort of like, like, you know, the WingNet National Social Network guys in Australia who are like, oh, the world question, like, or the Baltic question, or like, no, so no, like the Slav question.
I actually think like Slavic people are like fully European.
And like, I do think that.
Yeah, obviously.
I do think that like Russians are like, the funny, the funny reality is that like, like, if you look at Putin, he's a white guy, obviously, but it's just, it's just like a funny thing because like it's third worldist ideology.
That's the thing.
Yeah.
I just wanted to say that though, but yeah.
I completely agree with you.
Yeah.
I disagree with Vladimir Putin on many things, including this question.
But I guess, you know, we have this idea of Cold War era espionage happening at the highest level and Philby being an example, this sort of art historian working in the highest levels of intelligence and so on.
But I think, and then there's some other cases where there is just direct involvement in either an intelligence agency or a mainstream media.
But I think what they realized early on has been the most powerful.
And that is, I don't know if you remember that unsuccessful Indiana Jones movie called Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
But it was the one that came out around the time you were born in 2008 or something.
Or when you were, I guess you were 10.
Wow.
Yeah, I would have been.
Okay.
I was a full adult.
So anyway, so Indy is fighting the communist in this episode.
And the woman who is this Georgian, you know, evil villainess, they found this alien skull and it can kind of talk to people in this way.
And she says, you know, we will reach every dog skull.
Oh, no, no problem.
You know, we will reach every man, woman, and child in America, and we will make you think like us.
You will dream like us.
You will be us.
And it's this terrifying notion of like radio waves coming going across the Atlantic Ocean into Oklahoma or something and turning people communists.
And so it's a kind of metaphor for propaganda, but I think it's a very good metaphor for propaganda because you can go into high level places and you might very well get arrested or killed doing that.
But going into low level places is open season, basically.
And so you, you know, a lot of people, you'll hear this from the tanky left or the right, where they'll be like, oh, they bought some Facebook ads in 2016 and it was like Jesus Christ arm wrestling Hillary Clinton.
Oh, that's so, it's so stupid.
It's not stupid, actually.
That's how you reach people.
And that's also the tip of the iceberg in terms of influence.
And so even, you know, there's like an RT model.
And I went on RT a number of times back in the day.
And I basically, they would have me on to say what they wanted me to say in effect, which was American foreign policies, terrible, Iraq war, bad, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But basically, they would allow you to say almost anything so long as it could be conceived as anti-NATO.
So it's like, you know, I disagree with Obama and Libya.
So that's sort of anti-NATO.
Or, you know, the Iraq war and the neocons.
Oh, you hate them?
Ah, that's kind of anti-NATO too.
You know, we'll fold it in.
So, but you could also say, I believe in aliens, and that's kind of anti-NATO.
Or I'm transgendered.
And that's kind of anti-NATO.
Like any, there was total tolerance so long as it could be directed towards that end.
And a similar thing with tenant media, which followed up RT, and which I think was a very small thing, granted, but it was the tip of the iceberg of how they think.
And so it's like you can go and bribe a diplomat in the State Department, or you can find this official in regulations and sneak in guns or whatever.
You can do all that.
Or you can actually affect people at the root level of a society and do it in a kind of funny way.
Like it's not the voice of America way where it's like, let's play Elvis Presley or rock music, America, great freedom, yeah, yeah.
That's kind of above board.
You can affect their minds quite subtly.
It's the nihilism.
Yeah, nihilism as well.
It's so different to, as you say, like the American model where it's like blue jeans and Elvis Presley and like making a natural positive case, like, you know, our system, democracy is the best.
The amazing thing about Russian propaganda, and this is probably why it's most effective, is the nihilism inherent to it, because they don't even try and say that they're better than anybody else.
They just say everybody else is just as, just as cynical and evil as us.
And like, you can't believe in anything and you can't trust anything you see.
And they just, they also just take the pre-existing divisions that already exist in society.
So this is what the tankies make fun of.
They go like, oh, well, wow, like, is it really true that the Russians invented, you know, like black nationalism in America, for example?
Of course not.
Of course not.
Like, like, cause, you know, one of the things that they did was that they were funding like black nationalist movements in America or like they were funding, they funded farmers or whatever they were doing.
Yeah, yeah, that sort of stuff.
And people rightly go like, well, it's not like they invented that.
Of course they didn't invent that.
This is a pre-existing division that exists in American society.
They acknowledge that and they actually play on that.
So that is certainly the thing that makes it so much more effective than other forms of propaganda.
They don't even try and make a positive case for their system.
They just look at your society, the pre-existing fault lines that exist.
They play on those pre-existing fault lines.
And it's all about nihilism and cynicism.
You can't believe anything you hear.
There is no such thing as good in the world.
There's no such thing as, you know, it's literally just pure nihilism.
And that's what it works because there are already those existing divisions of society.
There's already like a level of demoralization in the public and all this stuff.
And they just, they play, it's a, it's a much more effective strategy for subversion than just like, because imagine if they come in and they go like, you know, like we are, we are a better model.
You should follow our ideology, which is like, you know, Russian third world.
Which is what they did.
They would be like, you know, the kitchen speech with Nixon and Khrushchev.
It was like, we can make more blenders than you can.
Yeah, exactly.
We're going to crush you.
And so on.
They don't even bother suggesting such nonsense anymore.
Nothing.
It's instead, it's like reality isn't real.
Like, you don't know.
Yeah.
It's like very deep.
I think the only way that they actually try and say that they're maybe better than America or better than like European cities is like, there's that, there's that genre of slop content.
And it'll be those kind of like accounts that are like, like in Invincible West or whatever.
And it'll be a guy running it from Pakistan or whatever.
And like, they'll like take a, it'll be like Radio Genoa is actually a better example.
And it'll be like, they'll take a photo of like the widest, richest district of Moscow.
And then it'll just be like, you know, girls walking down the street and they'll be like, what do you notice?
And then they'll take like a photo of like and then they'll like juxtapose it with like the most multicultural area in like England, like Birmingham or whatever.
And it'll just be like guys walking down the street who are like Muslim.
And then they'll be like, what do you notice?
It's like, dude, you could go to Chechnya and like do the opposite.
That's probably the only one area where they like try and actually say like, we've got a better, when they try and do that whole, we are more traditional, we are more, but that, that, as you, as you trad the hot girls, like all hot chicks trad in Russia.
That's a minority of their sort of propaganda approach.
I think the majority of it is more just like pure nihilistic slop.
Like, if you think you're better than us, no, you're actually just as bad as us, all that sort of stuff.
Yes.
But what, what does the West have?
So I, and let me sort of set the ground for this bigger thought, because one of the things that drove MAGA people up a tree were rainbow flags in embassies.
So it'd be like the embassy in Romania and it would be like a transgender celebration or BLM.
And I sort, I mean, I basically get it and agree with their like, you know, being perturbed by this at the very least.
But I don't think they're fully thinking it through because I do think that that was public diplomacy.
And I do think that that was largely successful public diplomacy and that the rainbow flag, as cringe as it is, also suggests many things that straight people want, which is that, you know, freedom, movies, blue jeans, U2 albums.
I've been going back to the 80s for these deep cuts here, but also just the ability to make money, the ability not to be beholden to some oligarch and a bureaucrat or get drafted in the army, et cetera.
It's a metonymy, I guess, or metaphor of a much bigger thing that actually still is attractive.
Yeah, if you're like a woman growing up in a society that's like still pretty feudalistic and, you know, you're subject to stuff like arranged marriage and, you know, there's a lot of direct like authoritarian control over your day-to-day life.
It probably is like, they're probably not thinking literally about, you know, drag queen story time when they see that.
They would see a rainbow flag as like, as a symbol of you can choose what you want to do in your own life.
And I understand that too.
Listen, I do think that a lot of woke stuff is annoying.
I think it's annoying that they added the triangle to the pride flag.
I think they should just go back to the normal flag before that, before they added like, you know, the triangle and brown, all this stuff to it.
I think it's interesting.
Like, for a lot of these mega guys, I think they literally think like, and I said this to Richard Hanani, and I think he's like taken up the theme a little bit too, because it's a funny line, but it's basically like, they think like, oh, because the West has drag queen story time, we should support Russia.
And it's like, no, that's actually a retarded reason to support Russia.
Like, I'm not a big fan of drag queen story time myself, but I'm not going to then go out and like literally support the enemies of my civilization that literally, like, they literally on state television in Russia every day talk about nuking London and nuking all these Western cities.
I'm not going to support that because of fucking drag queen story time.
So that's the annoying thing.
That's like the element to it that becomes annoyingly suicidal.
It's almost like that part of the far left that I hate too, which is like, it's like a sort of like suicidal approach.
Like they, they hate themselves.
They hate the West.
They don't want it to exist.
And then you see that now as well on some a big part of the far right where it's like, like, you know, that guy, it was, I think his name was like Darren Byler or something like that.
He was appointed to a senior position at the State Department by the Trump administration.
Like Darren Beatty.
Yeah, Darren Beatty.
He literally has posts.
Very dangerous character.
Very unhint.
So he literally has posts saying like, I want, he was essentially saying that like we shouldn't support Taiwan because China, like Taiwan has gay marriage and therefore like China should invade it.
It's like that's like an actually like I'm obviously I'm obviously like, you know, being a bit hyperbolic in characterizing his views, but that's essentially yeah, he basically thinks like that.
So I think that's a really evil, sick way to view the world because it's actually kind of like a mirror image of the kind of like far left tanky sort of self-hatred thing where it's like, we are inherently evil, therefore an outside power should come and destroy us.
And it's actually wrapped in nationalism.
It's just this funny thing because, you know, it's like, I can even, in certain moods, I can get into a anti-American sort of like new right French philosophy or something in the sense that, well, you're making a lot of points.
It's sort of an aristocratic lament, like the revolt of the masses lament about democracy and gross capitalism and fat freaks shopping at Walmart on Black Friday.
I mean, I get it.
I totally.
I 100% get it.
But I'm not American.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Sorry, not to, not to cut you, but like, I'm not American, obviously.
And like, despite what I've joked about that I am American, but like, I'm not American.
Like, it can be annoying when we get some elements.
But when we, when we get elements of American culture that are annoying, like, for example, like when we get like these huge F-150 trucks that like Australian streets, like are literally just not even built to have these trucks on them.
And like, like stuff like that, I can get, like, I get that sort of like French thing where it's like, ah, Les Walkies Me, like, like the Americaine.
It is annoying.
Some elements of American culture are a bit annoying.
I can understand that.
But again, it doesn't, it's not justifiable.
Like, it's not justified, like, literally kill Western civilization, kill everybody because, like, I don't like F-150 trucks down small Australian streets, you know?
Like, yeah.
Right.
I know, I totally get that.
But I guess to go back with it, is, is that Darren Beattie, again, I think Darren Beattie is a highly suspicious person, to put it mildly.
But someone like that, they wrap up this sort of half-baked American anti-Americanism within their nationalism.
And I guess what I'm getting at, it's getting at something that's really wrong and so on.
So like, MAGA, make America great again.
Well, what do you mean by that?
When were we great exactly?
How are you going to do it?
And what they, it seems like so many of their policies are contradicting these kind of halcyon days of Americana, like the 1950s and the 1980s.
What was America doing in the 1950s?
We were paranoid about Russia.
We were expanding abroad.
We were fighting wars in the Far East.
What were we doing in the 1980s?
Well, we had kicked the Vietnam syndrome by then, and we were moving towards a global platform for what it means to be American.
And all of this sort of woke stuff or liberalism was born at that time.
So to re-articulate what I'm saying here is that Trump seems to represent this end of the American century while endorsing the American century in this unconscious way.
I know I'm making this terribly complicated.
I know Nietzsche said the intelligent man is the one who can clarify a complex idea.
The fraud is the one who makes a simple idea complex.
So I'm trying to clarify here.
But I guess what I mean is, If you look at the instincts of MAGA, it's basically fuck the world.
They genuinely don't care if Ukrainians are bombed.
And it's like we can use that money here at home, even though they've just hated it.
Yeah, I know.
They don't even want to do that.
Yeah.
But they genuinely hate the rest of the world.
They genuinely don't like any sort of projection of power, et cetera.
And yet they want to kind of go back to a time when we could do that.
It's like, I hate to break the news to you, but we are not more respected on the world stage now that Trump is tariffing everyone, including islands full of penguins, that Trump is abandoning,
at least ostensibly abandoning many partners that he has a, that we've had longstanding commitments to, that he's engaging in creating alligator alcatraz for guys who mow your lawn.
Like you're not great again.
That's not a, none of those things are a sign of greatness.
So you're hearkening back to this thing that you're actually like actively destroying at the same time.
It's a very, it's ambivalence, I guess, or a kind of inner contradiction to that question of what MAGA wants.
America's never been a little nation state with borders where we, yeah, it's never been that in our entire history.
It's been a frontier society, and then it's been an imperial society beginning in the 19th century into the 20th century.
So what you are doing is ending American greatness.
Now, you're not doing it terribly successfully because Ukraine is still kicking and America, you can still buy whatever the hell you could ever imagine at Target due to globalism and so on.
But, you know, you're pushing towards an end to something.
And so you're not fully reflecting on what it means to be great.
And so someone was saying MAGA's boomer logic, it's not.
It's something else.
Boomer logic would be like, we're spreading democracy to the Iraqi women because America's the best and everyone wants to be an American.
Oh yeah, everyone longs for freedom in their heart of hearts.
You know, here's my Bible.
That's boomer logic.
What we see with MAGA is something different.
It's very provincial.
It's very provincial.
That's the American heritage thing.
It's very disturbing to me.
I've talked about MAGA as a third worldist movement and I actually genuinely think it is.
So it's interesting.
You say like, what does MAGA mean?
And I think the core animating feature of like, I think the core animating thing of MAGA politics is basically, you know, like it's demographic anxiety.
They want to make Australia, they want to make America more white.
So I've had like sort of people on the far right try attack me going like, Drew, how can you say that MAGA is a third worldist movement when we're trying to get rid of the third world?
That's what they all say to me, the far right when they attack me.
And this is the thing, though, right?
Like one of the key distinguishing features of what has made the West so powerful in like in modern history is that it's, I guess it's almost like the old Roman Empire was able to expand citizenship beyond just a very small tribalistic kind of conception of it.
And so like if you look at studies of like, you know, weird psychology, which is like Northwestern European sort of psychology.
And I think this is actually like one of the most admirable things about, you know, white people.
It's funny because I'm not like Northwestern European.
I'm not like full-blood Aryan or anything like that.
I admire this about like the sort of like Anglo sort of WASP type thing is that it's very non-racially tribalistic at all.
It's actually one of, it's probably the culture on earth that is most accepting of outsiders.
And that is probably what has made it the greatest or made the West so powerful in the sense that like it has been able to incorporate so many different, like instead of just being, instead of just collapsing into like race war, like it is able to absorb people into, you know, a greater conception of nationhood and citizenship and stuff like that.
And so it's like they see that and they hate that element to it.
And it's like they don't want it to, they don't like that element of sort of like wasp Anglo type of culture, which is very much accepting of outsiders and very much non-racially tribalistic.
They almost want to have the same mindset as like Yemeni tribespeople or like Pakistani tribes people, like very, very poor feudalistic societies that are very much centered on basically clan ties.
And Fukuyama talks about this.
Like one of the distinguishing features of like modernity is you break down kind of clan ties and you're able to build up like a sort of civic conception of nation, national nation.
And like, and the countries on, the countries in the world that have, that don't have a sort of civic identity and just have pure race-based sectarianism, they're shitholes.
Like they actually are shitholes.
And one of the reasons I don't like Saran Mandani's sectarian sort of outlook is like it is actually quite foreign to America to sort of cut down every single person based on just their race and religious identity, et cetera.
So I don't like that animating impulse on the left either.
It is like a sort of identity politics project on the left.
Well, he thinks in terms of the communities.
It's a very, it's a kind of uniquely New York thing.
But yeah, it is.
It is.
To some degree, but I think it is, it's sort of bigger than that as well.
Like, I let me push back a little bit here because.
So I do want to say as well, like, I'm not a full-blank slatist, of course.
Like, like, I saw some, like, one thing that pisses me off.
Like, this is a big debate in England at the moment.
Like, like, and people bring up Rishi Sunak.
I think Rishi Sunak is like culturally very English.
Obviously, he's a different ethnicity to English.
And I've seen like, there's a lot of debate in England.
There was a guy who was a senior advisor to Tony Blair.
He's ultimately a billionaire, I would also say.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That is a culture.
Yeah, yeah, true.
But there was a big thing.
You might have seen this on Twitter the other day.
It was like a former senior identity.
It was a former senior advisor to Tony Blair and a senior advisor as well to Julie Gillard, an Australian prime minister.
And he was basically saying, like, there's no such thing as the English ethnicity.
The concept of an English ethnicity is evil.
I think that type of blank slatism is retarded.
I don't like that at all.
I think that's stupid.
All I'm saying, though, is that it, like, when I talk about like going beyond pure tribalism, though, and having a much more civic nationalist sort of conception, when I'm talking about that, what I'm talking about is like, it's very much a different sort of conception to like the JD Vance.
You know, J.D. Vance's thing in his speech where he was like, you know, I, my, my ancestors are buried in the grave plot in West Virginia.
And like, like, and Tucker Court talks about that as well.
And like, it's a very, it's almost like a sort of necropolitics, very, like, very like depressing outlook where it's like, like, the whole of society should be restructured on the sense that like, you know, we should all just be living down the street from like, you know, where our grandparents are buried.
Like, we should not have mobility.
It's a very provincial.
It's a very sort of like, it's very much, yeah, it's, it's different.
As you said, it's very different to the sort of American frontier spirit.
So that's what I'm, when I'm talking about a more civic nationalist conception, I just definitely want to clarify.
I'm not talking like the sort of like Libtard blank slatist conception where it's like the idea that there's even an English ethnicity is evil.
Like, I'm just sort of saying like, I'm pushing back more against like the sort of like little England provincial mentality where it's like, J.D. Benz is like, if you don't, you know, that thing Josiah Lippincott and like Captive Dreaming will always do on Twitter where they're like, oh, you don't have an ancestor who fought in the Civil War.
Therefore, like, fuck off.
You can't talk at all about American politics and stuff like that.
Like, like, Trump didn't have an ancestor who fought in the Civil War.
Like, Trump's family literally came to America after the Civil War.
So, yeah, like, that's what I'm trying to get at.
But sorry for cutting you off.
Well, no, no, it's fine.
I mean, Roman paganism was in many ways tolerant and inclusive, but in other ways, not.
And it's important to sort of understand what it was, because it wasn't like the Wiccan woman down the block who owns a used bookstore.
And yeah, I know, you know, everything's cool.
Like, you know, like, oh, there's Jesus and Buddha and like, and like the witches of Odin.
And like that, that's total silliness.
There was absolutely a hierarchy in the pantheon and Jupiter was on top.
But that didn't mean that you couldn't like organize through subordination other gods within that realm.
So I guess what I'm, what I'm saying here is that yes and no.
I mean, like, because it's, there's a certain white supremacy or wasp supremacy that was at the heart of Americanism in the sense that, yes, we were expanding behind, beyond our borders.
Yes, we're going to tolerate like a Greek Orthodox Christian and a Jew and an atheist even, but you're all sort of Protestants at the end of the day.
Like there, what I mean is you can't get away from, there has to be something holding it together.
I mean, Samuel Huntington talked about tomato soup and you can kind of put some salt in there and some croutons and maybe some cheese or cream, but it's still tomato soup.
Like it's a little bit, it's not exactly a melting pot in terms of blending.
It's a slightly different metaphor.
I do want to clarify, I disavow white supremacy and all this stuff.
Oh, I never accuse you of avowing.
I'm just looking at reality.
But what I was going to say, right, like, I think the problem is cultural relativism.
So I think the problem is that migrants come to Western countries today and we've become so demoralized and self-flagellating and, like, we just hate our own culture so much and all this stuff that there is no expectation that people, you know, become part of the greater whole.
So there is no such thing as a greater whole anymore.
And I think that's the big problem, right?
I think, and I've said this, right, like, I am certainly somebody.
Like, I'm in favor, like, I'm against the sort of, like, Joel Davis where it's like you can't have even a single non-managerie.
genetically pure eye in your country like that's retarded i think like i i favor some degree of migration and cultural diversity and stuff like that and pluralism but i think there should be a unifying feature of society i think there should be a unifying culture that people assimilate towards like and i've said this before like greeks represent like 1.5 or 2 of australia if we represented 50 of australia i would have gone to a fully greek school i would have never assimilated i would have been growing up in a fully greek neighborhood only speaking greek and i would have probably had like race resentment towards
like like all this stuff right so i think part of it is like like i want to say like i i i'm not like i'm certainly against like sort of like white children i'm against like um i'm against like uh like the whole thing where it's like you know 90 everybody only 99.9 pure aryans can live in the ethno-state like i think that stuff's retarded but but at the same time i think people there needs to be a common project that people are assimilated towards and i think right that's a big problem in england like when you see stuff like for
they bought based on current demographics, English people are going to become a minority in England.
And then some people on the left are like, well, it doesn't matter at all.
It literally doesn't matter at all.
And I think that's stupid because like, at the end of the day, there should be a country called England for English people.
I think that people from a non-English background can, ethnic background can live there and assimilate towards Englishness and become English culturally, et cetera.
But there should at the end of the day, be a country called England for English people.
And I think this idea where you can just literally swap out everybody and everybody's blank slate.
I think that's part of silly.
So I hope I've been able to clarify my position where, where I'm like, I am a civic nationalist.
I'm certainly against sort of like white, white chauvinism and stuff like that, but I'm certainly also against like blank slateism to the extent where it's like, you can literally just swap out everybody and you can just have like literally some people, you see some people in the far left who are like, yeah, the great replacement is real and we want it.
And that's stupid and insane and psychotic.
So I'm against that sort of stuff.
I hope I've been able to clarify.
Well, yeah, I understand where you're, you're, you're, you're kind of on the fence in a way or compromise.
I get it.
But I, but that's probably how most people think in fact.
So I don't, I don't begrudge you.
Like, like, like, like, like, look, I think part of the problem, right.
Is that I've look, I sort of I'm Greek, right.
But I'm Greek by ethnicity, but I certainly, I think I've basically become pretty assimilated into like, sort of like white Australian sort of identity in the sense that that if I went to live in Cyprus, I would feel like a foreigner there in a sense that, I don't speak Greek, I think like, I actually,
get Greeks sometimes say to me, like, because I'm a big supporter of Ukraine, and there are a lot of like Greeks who have like this sort of like communist third world, this conception where they hate NATO, and they're like, they'll say to me, like, like, you, Malacca, you are against the Greek nation, you are supporting like the whites, you've become too westernized and stuff like that.
The thing is, I literally am very westernized in my outlook and stuff like that.
I don't know where I was going with this, but essentially, like, I guess the thing is, like, because I've become so Westernized, I probably have internalized that sort of like, um, that sort of like wasp thing where it's like, I don't, I do get uncomfortable with racial tribalism and stuff like that.
I don't like racial tribalism.
I would like to have a society where people of different, like, like we have a strong American or a strong English culture, but people of different groups can live in that society, assimilate towards that, and they don't think of themselves as separate, like Zaram Mandari, and they don't mobilize race resentment and stuff like that.
I would like to have a non-racially sectarian society and stuff like that.
Yeah.
But so Mumdami, I think, also believes in this maybe uniquely New York thing of the New York City.
So it's like you have all, and these cultures are sort of defined by food.
And that's why you see that in all of his ads where he's now eating rice with bare hands, which is, in my opinion, a bit off.
But he doesn't, I don't know what to say.
He wants to like build more of these communities.
That's what America is.
It's a bunch of people who don't quite get along.
I guess we're all New Yorkers, as they like to say, but none of that makes sense outside of some sort of tribalism, outside of the fact that you don't like each other and you don't want your daughter to marry a Muslim man or you don't want your Jewish son to marry a atheist chick in Williamsburg or whatever.
It only makes sense based on tribalism.
And yet it's sort of this soft kind of, oh yeah, you, you know, you eat halal meat, you know, I think, I think I understand the mindset because I want to.
You eat burritos or something.
It's just, it's just not, I don't know.
There's no, there's no there to what he's doing.
I think I understand the mindset because I once came from that kind of like left-wing blank slatist like approach where like, I think like five, six years ago, like it's funny because like back then, you know, I was 18, I was much more immature and everything.
And like, like when all these leftists started attacking me saying you're a white supremacist for opponing the Chinese government, I think like my approach when I was like 20 years old, because I was much more immature and younger and stuff, like I tried to like out left them.
And I used to be like, well, I'm not white.
I'm actually Greek, which is people of color and stuff like that, which is like, it was all cope, you know, it was cope.
I was trying to like, I guess I was trying to like, you know, it was like virtuous thing.
You was like trying to get like oppression points almost sort of thing.
And I think, um, but I think I understand the mindset because back then when I had that type of mindset, I used to think like, oh, like, you know, if these societies were like much more diverse, there will be less racism.
But it's, it's actually the opposite.
Like, I actually think as they become more diverse, there's more racism.
There's more sectarianism.
Especially if you don't have a conception of assimilation, you don't have a idea that, you know, our culture is good and people should assimilate towards it.
I think it just, like, then you just literally get Yugoslavia inside your country.
And that's not a good approach at all.
So I think in my own naive, like sort of like leftist internationalist worldview when I was like 20, like if you ask me, I think I actually can kind of understand how they think because I once thought like that.
I think, like, I think I thought like racism is bad, therefore, therefore, like, you know, mass migration will lead to less racism.
And it's like, no, dude, that's actually not going to be the case at all.
I think actually, unfortunately, like you look at countries like Britain, there's going to be massive amounts of really psycho scary, terrible sectarian conflict and race-based conflict.
And I don't like that.
I don't like race wars.
I don't like race riots and stuff like that.
I don't like that to happen.
And if we have like complete open borders, I think that partly is an inevitable outcome.
There will be a lot of sectarian conflict and rioting and racism in society, unfortunately.
All right, let's shift the subject of the conversation to Israel.
So yeah, that's a big thing.
Okay.
Well, I tweeted this out and I've said other people, I've seen other people tweet this out as well, where, you know, because everyone lines up in a kind of curious way on all these questions.
And if you're pro-Ukraine and pro-Palestine, you're a libtard.
Yeah.
It's like left, it's like left in anti-imperialist type stuff, anti-authoritarian.
Supposed to be.
Maybe.
I disagree.
Let me finish.
Yeah.
Okay.
So if you're pro-Palestine and pro-Ukraine, you're a Libtard or Richard Spencer, I guess.
You're one or the other.
If you're pro-Palestine and pro-Russia, you're a tanky.
If you are pro-Ukraine and pro-Israel, you work at a think tank in Washington, D.C. You're like David Froom.
You're like an Atlanticist.
Yeah, exactly.
And then if you are pro-Russia and pro-Israel, you're pretty evil.
You're manga, though.
Because that's manga.
Yeah, look, and that's pretty much a Kahanist kind of worldview.
And listen, I'm very much against Kahanism.
And look, look, I think Israel should exist as a country.
And I think that basically makes me a Zionist, right?
But at this end of the day, I'm certainly not one of those...
And there's like a lot of like Russian Israelis who are like pro-Putin and really extremely authoritarian and psychotic.
And like, I think that's really bad, obviously.
And I think, and look, I've criticized Nenanyahu's foreign policy in the past because like he's been very pro-Azerbaijan, which is like, I think Azerbaijan is a terrible government.
They've been ethnically cleansing Armenians.
He has in the past made overtures to Russia and China.
I think perhaps less so because I think it's pretty clear in Israel right now that Russia's promoting like a lot of this like psychotic pro-Hamas Hezbollah propaganda shit online and stuff like that.
But in the past, they certainly have made a lot of overtures and stuff like that.
I do want to say there is that sort of American boomer, like there's two wings to it, right?
There's the evangelical type ones where it's like Ted Cruz where he's like, oh, like, you know, I literally support Israel based on Genesis.
Like, listen, I'm a Greek Orthodox Christian, but that's not my conception at all.
I try and leave religion out of it because I think it is like, you're never going to be able to convince people by going like, oh, you know, this supernatural claim entitles me to this land.
I'm never going to make that argument, right?
The other thing as well, there is like this sort of old school kind of American boomer right wing thing where they're like, Israel is our greatest ally.
And like, you know, I will die for Israel.
And like, you know, Ted Cruz was saying that thing where he was in his tuck.
Like, it was, it was so annoying because like, I fucking hate Tucker.
I've literally protested against him in person when he came to prison.
I fucking hate Tucker.
He's so disingenuous.
I thought his position on Israel.
And I think his position on Israel is like very disingenuous because I think, I think it's more coming from a sort of like Nick Fuentes type place, but he's like too scared to outright go that far.
But anyway, but like, like it was annoying.
He's gandering to Nick Fuentes' audience is what I see.
Yeah, exactly.
I want to say though, like Ted Cruz really fucked up.
He made such a ass of himself in that interview, right?
Because, you know, there's that part of him where he was like, you know, the number one thing I wanted to do when I got into the Senate was defend Israel.
Like that stuff is stupid.
That stuff is really dumb.
I actually think at this point, it literally is fueling anti-Semitism.
And I would literally say to other people who think that Israel should exist as a country, stop doing stuff like that.
Because it actually, like, every time, every time somebody like that in America does that, or like that Brian, that congressman who went to Congress in an IDF uniform and stuff like that, like people like Nick, Nick, people like Nick Fuentes come when they see that.
Like it's bad.
You're giving them so much ammunition.
Stop doing that.
So listen, my approach to it is different.
One part of it is that, listen, I probably am a bit of a philosophy.
I like Jewish people.
I've had a lot of Jewish friends growing up and stuff like that.
I like Jewish people.
The other part of it as well is that I look at the issue and it's like all the people who really support the Palestine issue, the anti-Zionists and stuff like that, it's like the Jackson Hinkles of the world.
It's these people who are like very much third worldists and like they, you see so much race resentment.
And like there was a beautiful one the other day, like where Amel, there's this, there's this like sort of like punk rock band in Australia called Amil and the Sniffers.
And they're very popular.
And literally our prime minister, our prime minister has met with them before and all this stuff.
And they were at Glastonbury and they had a, the lead singer was saying something.
It was really, it was really low IQ.
Like she was basically saying like the elites and the education system don't want us to talk about Palestine because when we talk about Palestine in Australia, then we think that we are the, she literally used the word whiteies, which I thought was so embarrassing because she was like, us whiteies are the colonizers to the indigenous people.
And Palestine reminds us of that issue.
And that's why they don't want us to talk about Palestine.
And so they sort of like link it into this sort of like broader, we hate set the colonialists.
And by that, we mean white people.
And like, I've seen people literally say, like, I remember after October 7, there were like, there were like these like unhinged mentally ill white leftists who were like, some people were trying to mock them and say like, well, if you support October 7, America is technically like a sort of settler society.
Do you want that in America too?
And one of them was trying to be consistent.
I think her name was Gretchen or something like that.
She's like someone who had like $50,000.
And she was like, listen, I wouldn't enjoy it, but if Native Americans rose up and wanted to kill me like on October 7, I would hide, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't like say that they don't have that right.
Like I would accept it.
I'm like, that's mental illness.
So part of me is like, I see very much so that like, it's mobilized this kind of like, you know, France Fedon style, anti-West, like anti-white people sort of like very much a race war, genocidal mindset.
And I saw all these people like they, listen, when October 7th happened, I was just on Twitter the whole day and I saw like, I saw like the piles of bodies of like old grandmas that they had shot up at a, at a bus stop in southern Israel.
I saw the aftermath of the Nova Music Festival where it was like literally just hundreds of teenagers at a music festival and like literally just, there were just bodies, bodies piled on top of each other and stuff like that.
And like, I saw these people go like, remember that famous tweet where that lady, I think she was literally like a Somali American.
And she was like, what did y'all think decolonization looked like?
Vibes, papers, essays, losers?
That was such a, that, that tweet is now like a load-bearing tweet in my worldview.
It literally, that tweet alone has like, like become very much something that I think of in terms of my worldview because it kind of let lie like that so much of this sort of like identity politics stuff on the far left, which is all decloning and stuff like that, they're like, this is what we want to do to you.
And I don't like that.
So what I would say to you and your audience, Stricher, I know you're obviously coming from like a sort of like more right-wing background and stuff like that.
And I know you're, you're, we've got different views on a lot of this stuff, but this stuff on the left, like the anti-Zionism, honestly, the vast majority of them, the reason they don't like Israel is because they think Israelis are white.
And then they're like, I, yeah.
Okay.
I agree with you.
And whenever I hear Jackson Hinkle bash Israel or some other crazy person, I like Israel more.
I agree with you.
But there's actually, I think you're engaged in a little bit of self-deception on a few different levels that I'll outline here.
Okay.
So I'm interested.
Yeah.
First off, the tanky is a bit of a straw man.
Tankies are like 1% of the population.
That said, though, I think they've infected a lot of center-left politics, though, unfortunately.
So I think Zoran is a good example of that where like Zaran himself, maybe he's not outright a tanky, but I think he's been influenced by it.
But yeah, that's my view.
But anyway, Zaran, I'll grant you that, actually.
He's a fairly unusual politician.
That's why he's making waves and so on.
And I'm not even so sure about that because he also has a Disney background.
So I don't know exactly what it makes.
That's true.
That's true.
But I guess what I'm saying is that there's been a sea change among liberals.
There was a recent poll about Israel and the perception of liberals over the past three years has catastrophically changed.
It's gone down 50% or something like that.
So it's not just like Haas from Twitter.
It's also a educated woman who is an Episcopalian who are really turning on Israel.
So that's true.
That is true.
That's true.
That is a change.
And the other thing that I've noticed, because I was, I graduated from high school when you were born or something like that, But is that even back in the day during the Iraq war, Israel was never discussed.
And if it was discussed, it was discussed only in positive terms.
But in terms of like, is the Iraq war good for Israel?
Benjamin met Netanyahu might be saying that, but that was not like, I've seen people use that point a lot, like, oh, Netanyahu recommended the Iraq War.
Like, he wasn't promised at the time.
He was a private citizen when he testified.
But yeah, sorry, go on.
Regardless, he recommended the Iraq war.
That's true.
But now it's very different.
And I feel like, you know, the Iran nuclear weapon thing, yeah, maybe they would nuke New York City or whatever, but it's a war for Israel.
And I find it hard to even conceive of it otherwise.
Listen, when it comes to Iran, though, like I know this might sound difficult for you to believe, because obviously, like you look at my Twitter, I'm very much pro-Israel and stuff like that.
I know this might sound difficult for you to believe, but look, when I see Iran, like I've been I've been anti-Iran since I was anti-China.
Like, I guess the way I see things very much these days is that there's kind of like an axis and it's really Russia, China, Iran.
And they work increasingly together.
And we both know as well that Iran has like armed Russia in Ukraine.
They did a lot of technology transfer to help Russia build up its drone systems.
Like if Iran had not done that, the Russian drone systems, you know, that they're using in Ukraine to devastating effect to kill so many Ukrainians, it would not be as effective.
So part of me as well, I can understand, obviously for Trump, he's not doing it for Ukraine.
They're anti-Ukraine.
I understand.
I understand that Trump is pro-Israel and he's anti-Ukraine.
That's true.
Look, the way I see it, though, is I'm not, when I see them bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities, though, and I know you might not see this, you might think this is not critical because you look at my Twitter and people say you're a Zionist shield.
But for me, when they bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities, I'm literally celebrating as somebody who's like, listen, they've declared war on the West in the sense that they supported Russia invading Ukraine.
They support China as well.
They're part of the civilizational axis that's opposing the West.
And so for me, it's not even really like, for me, when they're going against the Iranian regime, I'm not even really necessarily thinking of it as like, we must protect Israel.
That's the number one priority.
I'm sort of thinking of it like, this is one part of the three-part sort of tripartite axis.
I guess you can consider DPRK too.
And it's like, then like, they hate us.
This is a disgusting regime that at the end of the day, like they do all this in psychotic Islamist third world slop against us.
They are literally supporting Russia slaughtering Ukrainians.
And so I just literally see it more as like, this is good for the West.
What's bad for the Iranian regime is good for the West.
That's how I see it.
And I know people might say, oh, well, Drew, you're pro-Zionist and stuff like that.
You're just saying that because at the end of the day, you want to support Israel.
To be honest, look, I'm pretty pissed off at Nadanahu.
I'm pretty much at the end of my rope when it comes to Netanyahu.
I think like they shouldn't be doing what they're doing in Gaza right now.
Like they've done a pretty terrible war there.
But when it comes to Hezbollah and Iran, like the Iranian proxies and all this stuff, they are at the end of the day, part of this sort of like new world alliance against the West.
And whatever is bad for the Houthis and Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran, I generally think is pretty good for the West.
I understand that.
So during, I think we have an assumption that Israel is part of the West.
Yeah, I think it is.
We assume that, but do they assume that?
And to be fair here, there's no different.
There's different currents.
I think there's different currents.
Different currents, yeah.
And to be fair, you know, if you walk down a street in Tel Aviv, it would resemble a Western city to some degree.
Now, you could sort of say the same about Tehran in a surprising way, but I'll leave that aside.
But that actually is true about Tehran.
The funny thing is I actually think this might get people thinking that I'm an idiot or I might get attacked for this, but I actually think Iranians are pretty white.
Pretty much their orientation.
The word Iran means.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, like, it's funny because they're kind of wearing it on their sleeve.
Yeah.
It is actually, it is actually very funny because like it's quite interesting Levantine populations.
I've seen, there was this guy who was a Syrian al-Qaeda propaganda, it's one of their top propaganda.
And I saw a photo of him and he had like ginger hair and he was wearing Western clothes.
And I looked at him was like, this dude could literally be like a dad in America.
And like, you can sometimes see this, like in Levantine populations, sometimes people will look less European, but sometimes you look at people and like, they look almost completely European, which is really interesting.
So yeah, so that's interesting about Levantine peoples.
That is interesting.
But I mean, the whole point of Zionism is that these European Jews can't get along with Europeans.
I mean, otherwise, Zionism has no point.
Zionism was never defined as a outreach towards the West or outreach of the West towards the Middle East.
It was defined in the exact opposite manner of we don't want to assimilate into German society, say, and they don't want us either.
And it's just been heartbreak for years.
And we need to go home again and reenact the book of Judges or something by creating this new country.
So it's, don't you think like the trick that the devil is playing on conservatives, including yourself, is to even imagine Israel as part of the West when it's fundamentally opposed to the West?
Look, look, two things here.
Like one, I'm sympathetic to Jews wanting their own state, considering their experience in World War II with the Holocaust and mass murder, extermination, stuff like that.
Look, it's a very sad story because if you look at like, say, World War I, German Jews were extremely assimilated.
They volunteered in the German army to like a degree that was higher than other parts of Germany.
And a lot of these guys were still in the end slaughtered and persecuted and their descendants as well by the Nazis.
It's a really strange story because if you actually looked at the history of German, the Jewish population in Germany, there was a very big movement within the Jewish population there to become assimilated and become German Jewish.
And a lot of the Jewish people who got persecuted weren't did not even think of themselves as non-German and stuff like that.
It's a very sad story.
So, part of it is that I feel sympathetic to them wanting a state given that really sad, tragic history of brutality that existed.
The other part of it as well is that I just think as well, like if you look at the history of Western civilization, I think Jewish people have always been part of it.
Like, I think that's very much the case.
I think there's been massive contributions in terms of, you know, like literature, art, philosophy, science, et cetera.
And also, here's another question as well.
Like, you get this sort of anti-Zionist leftist Jews sort of like in New York City, right?
And these guys will support Zaran and stuff like that.
And they'll literally say like, so I'm interested.
Like, are you kind of like a neo-Bundist type guy, Richard, in the sense that like, you know how they're like the sort of like leftist Jews who are like, they're like, our home is wherever we live and we don't want to have a state in Israel.
And I understand.
I mean, I'm not on any, I'm not on any side in terms of their business.
I mean, but yeah, like Sam Cedar, I think I was talking about him on the podcast last Thursday.
I would imagine that Sam Cedar understands himself as Jewish.
I don't think he's like a secret Zionist or something.
I think he thinks that home is where you hang your head.
Why do we need this country?
But it also, like, even the notion of a safe haven raises a lot of fascinating questions.
A safe haven from what?
A safe haven from whom?
Hold on, let me finish.
Yeah, let me finish.
So like after the Second World War, one of the ironies of the Second World War is that Europe became more tolerant.
We're not going to do the fascist thing anymore, but it became more ethnically pure.
Tony Jutt, who's a left-wing or liberalist.
I like that historian.
He's an interesting historian.
I like it.
He nailed this on a macro level.
Like Germans, even German expulsion from the Soviet Union made Germany more German.
And Jews had been killed.
Many had exited towards the Middle East.
And so you would have this kind of crazy situation where the fascism sort of won in some weird way.
And don't take that too seriously.
This, you know, you understand in a kind of metaphorical way.
But it's like most Jews now are going to be living in the United States.
So when people like Ted Cruz, and they'll use a biblical argument, he who blesses Israel will be blessed, et cetera.
I'm not using that argument.
Yeah.
But he'll also use the argument like that.
Like after the Holocaust, we've got to have the safe haven.
From whom?
from you?
Are you an anti-Semite that you're going to kill?
So what does that tell you about their basic conception?
I think you have to understand that, Richard, as well, like, I mean, two things here.
One part of it as well is like half the population of Israeli Jews who live in Israel are actually not Ashkenazi.
They're Mizrahim.
So they're descended from populations in North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and stuff like that, where they were essentially ethnically cleansed and expropriated.
You know what Zaran's family experienced in Uganda with like idiom in essentially expelling all the Indian migrants?
That's basically what happened to like almost the entire Jewish population of the Middle East and North Africa.
And a lot of the time, like they don't have other forms of citizenship.
They don't have like, like, there's this, there's this like strong narrative on the left where they're like, oh, there's no need for Israel because all the Jews can go back to Brooklyn.
It's like half the population of Israel, the half the population of Israeli Jews are guys like Ben Gavir, who are actually like, his family got kicked out of Iraq.
They were Kurdish Jewish people.
And the sad grim irony of all this is that it's actually the Mizrahi Jews who've been expelled from the North Africa and Middle East and everything.
They're actually the people who are probably the most supportive of things like Kahanism and the most ultra authoritarian and actually like mindsets that are pretty foreign to Western, you know, the Western ethics and philosophy.
Like Kahanism is a horrible doctrine that is like very much like not, it cannot be possibly reconciled at all with like sort of like the like sort of like ethical structure of the West and like, you know, the influence that has been passed down from both universalist humanistic ethics and the Enlightenment and stuff like that.
Part of it, I think, is the experience of having been expelled from the military in North Africa and also decades of terrorist attacks and massacres and stuff like that.
The other thing as well is that I also can understand why that a lot of Jewish people would think that there should be at least a form of like a state for Jews in the world, considering like the very long history of persecution that has existed, right?
Look, I sort of see this thing in the same way that like, you know, that book Amy Tur wrote where she talks about like upwardly mobile minority groups.
And it's not just Jews.
You see this where like, you know, Chinese minority groups in Southeast Asia, you actually see this with Lebanese in West Africa, Indians in East Africa, which was Zaran's family.
You know, a funny dynamic is as well, like partly also Greeks.
Greeks are sort of diasporic people who have, especially in Australia, like went into small business and did pretty relatively well.
I think there are as many like Greek billionaires in Australia as like Jewish billionaires, you know.
I think part of it is like, you know, it's a diasporic people and they were historically forced into professions that, you know, like especially in Europe, they were forced into like, you know, the professions like, for example, money lending and stuff like that.
They were literally banned from other professions, et cetera.
And I think what Amy Chua talked about in that book is that like minority groups that are sort of like that do well in business and kind of like are upwardly mobile in a socially economic way, socioeconomic way.
And there's model minority groups across the world that you can look at like this.
They often become objects of resentment in those societies and then can then be targeted with terrible violence and stuff like that.
And it's not just Jewish people, like Chinese people were masquered in Indonesia in the 60s.
And there is like a, like, look at what happened in Uganda where all the Indians were expelled.
So I think part of it is like they don't have states.
I mean, the Indians have a state.
Greeks have a state at the end of the day.
A lot of these, a lot of these, this is the thing.
A lot of these diasporic peoples do ultimately have a state.
Like Greeks have a state.
Lebanese have a state at the end of the day.
So I'm sympathetic at the end of the day to a Jewish state existing.
But it's not just, but I think it would be hypocritical if it was like the only state that I wanted to see created or exist.
But that's not my record, right?
Like my record is I support a Tibetan independent state.
I support a Kurdistan.
I support the creation of a Uyghur independent state.
I support Taiwan as an independent state.
I support Hong Kong becoming an independent city state.
So I think for a lot of people like Ted Cruz, where it's like, I can understand why it would seem suspect and weird if it's like, this is the only state that they want to defend existing in the entire world.
Listen, for my record, I actually am somebody who has like a very long history advocating for dependent state and all these other groups as well.
So I guess I do come from a sort of genuine perspective where like I do think nation states are good and should exist.
And I do feel sympathy for them as a diaspora people who felt a lot of persecution throughout history.
Okay.
I definitely.
So I think it's interesting.
I get it, but yeah, it's certainly, I think it's very different.
My mindset is so different to like a sort of like Ted Cruz American boomer, where it's like, I will literally, like, I will literally die for Israel and it's like the greatest country in the world.
Like, I think that shit is cringe.
I think that shit's cringe.
And I've actually never been like that.
It's more just like, I think if you actually look at my record where like I've been fighting for an independent Tibetan state for like half my life, right?
Like I, it would look hypocritical if it was the, if I was the, if Ukraine, if Israel was the only thing I cared about.
But listen, like, I'm just as big a guy on Ukraine.
I'm just as big as a guy on so many different issues.
So it's different.
I think, I think it is different when it comes to this issue than some of the American boomer stuff.
Project forward a little bit, and I'll bring our conversation to a head and to a close with this.
Yeah.
Project forward a little bit in terms of Trump's first year and what that means geopolitically.
And just to get you sort of thinking a little bit, I definitely feared a war in the Middle East or basically I feared what happened with Donald Trump over the past few weeks.
Now, we seem to have averted outright.
Well, we're at war with Iran in effect.
Iran's at war with Israel in effect, but we seem to have avoided the worst.
I did think, I did always think that I never thought it would be boots on the ground.
And I thought that sort of Tucker argument was pretty disingenuous, but I do see your point.
It is kind of a state of question.
We got close to it, but also like America is at a stage where I don't know where we're going to put boots on the ground.
Like we're not, we don't put boots on the ground in Ukraine.
We don't do a no-fly zone in Ukraine, which I 100% supported.
We like to sort of bomb and run.
And I'm not sure America really has the will to do what we did 20 years ago now.
I think you can make of that what you will.
It's sad in a way.
I didn't support the Iraq war.
It's sad that George W. Bush fucked over American foreign policy for like generations, essentially.
That's a good way of putting it.
Yeah.
But what do you think is going to happen?
Because you have all these like sort of multiple pivots.
I think, to your chagrin, I think that there is no doubt that the attack on Iran has benefited Vladimir Putin directly.
And that's one of the reasons why he has hung his third world alliance high and dry and is basically not going to support Iran and is going to maintain a sort of strategic neutrality or even strategic towards Israel.
That is interesting.
That is very interesting.
I see that.
Yeah.
But how does this cut, like, where do you pivot?
I mean, someone like Elbridge Colby wants a pivot away from Ukraine, but not towards the Middle East either.
He wants towards China.
But this is the interesting thing about Elbridge Colby.
Like he has hundreds of tweets basically saying like, like basically calling into question whether it would even be worth defending Taiwan.
So it's really interesting.
Well, what does he want to pivot towards?
I know, exactly.
I think it's interesting with Elbridge Colby because he's tried to position the defense of Taiwan as something that can be acceptable to meka people by making it extremely transactional.
So saying stuff like, he literally made a post saying like, if we defend Taiwan and Taiwan falls, we should be prepared to pre-rig every single TSMC plant with explosives, which is fucking nuts because that is like literally, that's like golden propaganda for China in Taiwan because they can then go to Taiwanese people and be like, listen, like, why are you going to ally with people who don't even think that it's possible to defend you that?
Yeah, exactly.
Like, like, why would you want to ally with people who are prepared to scorch earth your country?
They're not even positive that they will defend you.
So it's golden propaganda for China, which is a disaster.
And you've got Darren Beatty.
Darren Beatty literally had tweets saying like, we should not defend Taiwan because they've dragged queen story time, which is insane.
So it is really disturbing.
And MAGA is just such a weird thing, hey, because like you look at, you look at the big spending bill, which is crazy.
And like, it will objectively make America a poorer and worse country.
It will objectively fuck over the American economy.
And you had that really disgusting sort of salt, like disgusting cynical tweet by Jenny Mence, where he basically said, like, it literally doesn't matter if we throw like millions of people off Medicaid because ICE funding is going up.
And that was kind of like, that was kind of him going like full Pakistani tribal mindset where he's like, he's like, literally like, I don't care if my country is poorer and will be worse off as long as we have like less white people or whatever.
And you have Nick Fuentes, you know, when Nick Fuentes goes like, I literally want to have a lot of people.
Or just sadism.
Yeah, but go on.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And, and, you know, that whole Nick Fuentes thing where they're like, I literally want to have a lower GDP if it means less Indians and stuff like that.
That's what Jenny, that's what like Nick Fuentes.
So it's a very like third worldist mindset where like they actually want America to be like a smaller, weaker, poorer country.
So long as it's more like racially pure.
And that is like something that's like more reminiscent of like literally the politics of Idi Amin than like, you know, anything more reminiscent of like a Western country.
And it's very strange because their foreign policy, like they've basically, they have basically fucked over every country on earth other than Israel.
And look, even with Israel, like there are a lot of Israeli sort of pundits and foreign policy people who are like pissed that Trump said like, turn back the planes.
Cause that day, that day where he said they don't know where the fuck they're doing.
I think Iran had killed like five people in a residential complex in Tel Aviv and Israel wanted to like, like the mood in Israel was like, they wanted to go back and like fucking punish Iran for that.
And Trump said, turn the planes back.
And so even they feel pretty betrayed sort of thing.
So as you said, it's kind of just like, it's just, well, it's like a worst.
It's literally just worst of all worlds.
Yeah.
It's just fucking because even the, the big, the one big, beautiful bill is genuinely cutting Medicaid.
That is our socialized healthcare for poor and rural people while also expanding the budget, the budget.
And it's almost like even the Ukraine funding of, if you're not truly in it to win it, you, you are sort of perpetuating pain.
Well, that's what they're doing in Ukraine.
Yeah.
And then with Israel, you know, Trump is so mad at, at Israel for, they don't know what the fuck they're doing, but then you are on their side bombing a sovereign country's nuclear facility.
I don't, it's, it's just so, I don't know.
I don't know where this leads.
The easiest way of interpreting it is simply that it's incoherent.
Yeah.
Incoherent.
It's just like, just a general vibe of like retrenchment and pretty much isolationism.
It seems, I don't know.
It's really the Iran, the Iran strikes were really interesting because there were some commentators.
I mean, some commentators read the whole thing as, you know, you know how Trump in the lead up to them was talking about like, we're going to give them 60 days to negotiate and stuff like that.
Some people read that as he was really with Netanyahu the whole time.
And he was deceiving the Iranians to lull them into a false sense of security.
But I actually think it's much more likely.
There was another read on it where some people were saying he actually at first was pissed off about Israel attacking Iran directly.
But then when he saw the success of them, when he saw that like Iran didn't have a superiority and stuff like that, and they were kind of collapsing, he then kind of just was like, you know, why not go in?
It was almost like an opportunistic thing.
And I think it probably is more likely that it was the latter, given Trump is pretty incoherent and he seems to make up a lot of stuff on the fly.
I think it was probably more likely that he just saw that Israel was doing pretty well.
Like, because it's funny, there was a lot of like third world coping and stuff like that and slop where they were like, oh, you know, like Tel Aviv is burning, half of Tel Aviv has been destroyed.
Like the reality is that Israel was actually crushing the Iranians.
Like their military apparatus was really weakened very quickly.
And I think it was probably more opportunistic by Trump.
So it just, it doesn't seem like there is a coherent doctrine.
It's just a general vibe of like retrenchment and isolationism.
And I posted this last night.
This is the funny thing, right?
Like if they wanted to do true populism, if they wanted to do, actually, if they wanted to pursue actual popularism and actually popular MAGA populist movement, what they would do is they wouldn't have a kind of Bernie Sanders 2015 style grand bargain where they would be like, remember when Bernie Sanders was like, oh, open borders.
That's a Pope brothers idea.
They would basically be like, listen, we're going to close the borders, but at the same time, we're going to increase, we're going to put money into healthcare.
We're going to, we're going to almost do like the Bernie Sanders 2015 program.
I think that's what, that's what real popularism would be.
If you look at the polling in the American public, they basically want a lot of social democratic policies, I think in economics, but they want to close the border.
If that's what I would do, if I was the president, that's what I would do.
I would just be like, listen, we're going to close the border.
And we're going to do sort of like, like we're going to do, you know, investment in the country's infrastructure and public healthcare and public goods and stuff like that.
That's what would be popular.
But that's not what it is.
Instead, it's just this worst of all worlds where it's like, we're going to like basically We're going to spend more money on the national debt while cutting benefits, but we're going to radically increase enforcement of yard workers and throw them into camps.
And it really is just, but we're going to increase legal immigration like H1B.
I mean, it really is the, it's incoherent.
It's the worst of all popular world.
Literally, literally the worst of all possible worlds.
Yeah.
Literally the worst of all worlds.
And look, look, if I was somehow like, if I just was magically the president, what I would do is I'd literally do the Bernie Sanders 2015 program where it's like, we're going to close the border, but at the same time, we're not going to just take 10 million people off Medicaid.
We're actually going to expand public, you know, investment in public goods and stuff like that.
I think that's what, if they were real popular, that's what they're doing.
Anyone who did that in American politics, I think would actually be like unassailable.
I think that'd be so popular.
It would literally be a dynasty forever.
It would be like, that would be the FDR.
I like this theory that American politics works on sort of like generational style alignments and, you know, like they had the big FDR alignment for 30, 40 years.
And then you had, and then you had the kind of the Reagan alignment and the current system of alignment is kind of breaking down.
And people are looking for that new alignment.
I think that would be the new alignment.
If, if, if someone came in and they were like, listen, we're going to do massive investment in, you know, infrastructure and public healthcare and all these different things, but we're going to close the border.
That would be so unbelievably popular.
And the funny thing is a lot of Hispanic Americans actually would support that.
A lot of black Americans would support that closing the border.
What they don't support is just like the sort of unhinged guys in masks going around and just literally black bagging people.
And it's funny because even like, even Curtis Yarvin was like, like, and he's the biggest guy ever, but even he was like, don't do black bagging because it's fucking, it just scares people and it's deranged and makes people scared.
And you're not going to co-op parts of the elite by just black bagging people.
People get scared.
So it literally just makes no sense.
It is just incoherent, low IQ slop.
And it's sad.
Like it's such a waste of like, it will cause generational pain.
I think for America, it's actually very, what a, what a sad thing that like, what big the big, beautiful bill will do.
It'll literally cause generations of, it'll cause decades of harm to America.
It's a disaster.
If you were American, would you be, would you have voted for Kamala Harris as I did?
i would have voted for kamala so i did i did endorse it but look it's very difficult for me because i i guess i'm kind of i guess my sense would be sort of like richard hanania's stance where it's like it's kind of like democrats the party of elite human capital i do agree with that but i really don't like the zaram wing i really hate the zaram wing like the zoram wing is kind of like a race war wing.
It's like kind of like a race war communist wing.
And I really, really don't like it.
And like, my sense is like, my sense is actually like the old Anglo-Wasse tolerance sort of thing, where it's like, I don't want there to be race war.
I don't want there to be race whites, right?
Let's have a level of tolerance.
Let's have like, you know, an idea of a national, you know, national unity, civic nationalism, stuff like that.
I think people like Zaran, they're actually almost just as focused on race as people on the far right.
It's really deranged and kind of scary.
Yeah.
What were you saying about that?
Like, there are all these indicators of a civil war and great prejudice.
Oh, sorry.
Politician, analyst.
Let me quickly Google the guy who says that British Civil War.
It's interesting.
You should maybe interview him on your show or something like that.
I would like to, yeah.
We're at King's College London.
So it's a shame because I was actually agreeing with so much of what he was saying.
But then David Betts, David Betts.
So I was listening to his podcast and I was agreeing with so much of what he was saying because I think there is so much sectarian conflict in Britain.
And I think there are a lot of terrible indicators of like state failure in Britain.
But then he just like, he just like popped in this like little Zetard thing where he was like, oh, and like the West is going to be decisively, catastrophically defeated in Ukraine.
And that's going to lead to like civil wars and what's going on.
I don't think we're going to be catastrophically defeated.
I think these, you know, these civilizations die by suicide.
And I think ultimately the domestic policy is going to dictate foreign policy.
And it's not going to be the other way around.
It's not going to be a Putin takes Kyiv and Americans become humiliated and then descend into civil war.
It's that we no longer believe in ourselves.
We no longer believe in the West.
We're caught between third world MAGAism and third world Zoronism.
And there's no real West to defend because, you know, Zoron, someone pointed this out.
Zoron never, I think you pointed this out.
Zoron never once tweeted about Ukraine.
Never.
Yeah, never once.
You don't have to, I guess, but it is quite telling in that he tweeted about almost everything else.
And he's a politician in America.
He doesn't care about Ukraine.
And he might sympathize with Russia as like the third world taking revenge on America's puppet.
And so there's no more West to defend with any of these camps, with third world MAGA, third world Mundamiism, et cetera.
Look, look, being sympathetic to Zoran, I think it's probably more likely that he has, he probably would just have the generic sort of like liberal view, you know, like the Palestine-Ukraine flag combination.
I think that's probably more likely, but it is very telling that he's not.
But he didn't tweet it out.
Yeah, he didn't care at all.
And look, the interesting thing with Zoran is like, to be honest, there's a lot of topics he hasn't covered.
Like, like, even like, I researched, I wanted to find out if he'd ever talked about the Uyghur Muslims.
Like, I've got thousands of tweets talking about the Uyghur Muslims.
He had like one single one where he misspelled the word.
So it is interesting.
Like, for him, it's just like, it's just like Palestine is this all-consuming obsessive issue where it like represents kind of like race war against the West.
I think that's what he believes in.
And there was a really, there's a really good account in Britain called Kunli Drakpa.
And he wrote, he made this amazing meme where he basically was like, which way America?
And it was like, he was basically saying like, this is the Latin Americanification of American politics, where it's like, it's like Zoran is a sort of like Lula type faction where it's like, it's like sort of like random, like sort of like third worldist type sympathies.
It's very much sort of like baked in race resentment and stuff like that.
But then you also have like on the sort of MAGA side, MAGA is kind of increasingly resembling like sort of like Latin American authoritarian Cordelismos type slot politics, where it's like, it's like it's looking like something out of like, it's like it takes most of its direction from like Bukele, which is like, at the end of the day, like at the end of the day, like El Salvador is like a third world country that's quite poor and dysfunctional.
I get that he's done pretty well getting the gangs off the streets, but like you shouldn't, America should, America's the most powerful country in the world.
Why would it take direction from El Salvador?
It's crazy.
That's insane.
Or Hungary or any of these places that they now love.
Yeah, it is.
Dude, Hungary, the two, the two countries they look to are Hungary and El Salvador.
It's like America is infinitely greater than Hungary and El Salvador on every single metric by far.
Why the fuck would you look at it?
And the only explanation is that it's a very provincialist, kind of like very small worldview where they don't like America being a big country.
They don't like America being a powerful country.
They very much, I think the JD Vencing, where it's like, I just literally want to be left alone near the graveyard of my grandparents.
That's a very sad and miserable, like depressing worldview.
That's a very depressing idea of politics.
Like just be left alone in a little village next to your grandparents' gravestones.
I'm sure, I mean, some people want to do that.
Sure.
I mean, I don't want, I'm not somebody who's a Blake Slatist who thinks like every single small town in America should become, you know, infinitely open borders sort of thing.
But still, still, it's a strange worldview where like the height of politics is just being around the corner from your parents' grandparents' gravestones.
That's a very strange worldview.
Right.
Well, let's do it.
Let's do this.
I actually need to go to the last few innings of a minor league baseball game where my kids are, where they will be firing a firework.
So there's nothing more American.
Oh, that's good.
That's good.
Oh, did you, actually, one last thing.
Did you see that Zaran?
Zaran voted against making baseball the official ball sport of New York?
I saw.
And it's like, why?
I don't even know why.
I don't even know why.
That's just pure animosity.
And dude, it's funny.
It's funny because look, when it comes to sport, I love soccer.
I've never even watched the baseball game in my life.
But like, if I was a migrant to America, I wouldn't be voting against baseball because that's your culture.
I know.
It's just such an easy win.
It's a home run, so to speak.
So strange.
Yeah.
No, it's clear.
It's clearly some deep resentment that he would be.
But anyway, I'm going.
So I want to go see these after the fireworks after the ninth inning.
But I'm sorry we ended on a bit of a downer note, but I feel like the, like, I do, maybe you'll agree with me.
I feel that it's hard to define the West now.
And I feel like magnetism is here to stay.
Yeah, look, it's a very, it's a very depressing situation where it's like, I don't think that the left or the right are offering any actual good political program right now.
It's pretty depressing.
It's really depressing actually.
Definitely.
But there's always some good things about life that keep ourselves.
Nobody should kill themselves.
Nobody should kill themselves.
I agree.
I agree.
But I'm really glad we did this.
And I've been wanting to do this for a while.
And I really enjoy your whole timeline, even when I disagree with you here and there.
But I think you're doing great stuff.
So thanks for being on here.
And hopefully we can do it again when world events bring us together.
But thank you very much for being here.
No, thank you, Richard.
Despite having like very vastly different political backgrounds, it's an interesting discussion.
And like, obviously we debated stuff like Israel and anti-Semitism stuff, but it was an interesting discussion.
I appreciate the discussion.
And thank you.
We'll do it again.
Yeah, I'd love to.
All right.
Thank you, man.
Thank you, Drew.
And guys, I will be back and we'll do a normal members only once I'm back next week.
