Richard Spencer talks about the disintegration of America and the prospect of salvation. Alexandria is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Timestamps00:25 Coping with America’s Decline00:49 Christian Nationalism and Its Contradictions03:24 The Absurdity of Modern Nationalism03:51 Disintegration as Liberation04:42 A New Approach to Coping06:25 The Antichrist07:24 Peter Thiel’s Radical Christianity08:57 The Role of the Antichrist09:59 Conclusion: Embracing the Antichrist 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
To be a little speculative here and introspective and self-critical, I think what we're doing in the book itself comes out at a very interesting point in history because I think in some ways we're coping if we're honest with one another.
And I think we're coping for America, actually.
And I think that everything that's happening on the right wing is on some level a cope with the reality that this thing is failing.
You aren't going to be as productive and powerful as your grandparents.
And what are we going to do about it?
I think what is going on with Christian nationalism or nationalism, et cetera, is to just double, quadruple down on what they think got us here.
You know, there's this sort of interesting fact that I've heard Eisenhower, who was president at a time when 97% of the population went to church, would end speeches with good nights.
He didn't say God bless America.
That came in the 80s when there was already a little bit of a tottering situation going on.
And now we have like JD Vance saying, I just want y'all to, you know, say a prayer for the brave ICE agents who are murdering people out there left and right.
Like they're overtly being Christian, which in this sort of Freudian way indicates that they've already lost it.
Eisenhower wasn't an atheist or something.
Eisenhower didn't feel it to be mildly necessary to say, God bless America or something like that.
It's like a man who tells you, you know, one thing that I know about my wife is that she is faithful.
She would never conceivably have an extramarital affair.
There's one thing that's true.
It's that.
You clearly know that she's fucking around.
When you say something, you're almost indicating its absence.
This quadrupling down on America or whatever.
What in the fuck are you even talking about?
You know, what is this?
What is this Christian culture we live in?
It's hard to pinpoint.
And even when you can pinpoint it, it's hard to, from a traditionalist standpoint, endorse it.
I mean, this culture is degenerating, obviously, and our power is degenerating.
And so I think that's one sort of cope.
And I think our cope is a better cope.
It's a more productive cope.
There is a level of fantasy or LARP or whatever you want to say about what Mark and I and everyone here is doing, really, but I'm just talking about the book in particular.
Isn't this sort of ridiculous?
You're reviving ancient gods and things like that.
I think it's less ridiculous in the sense that America and the world that we grew up in doesn't work anymore.
And it's kind of a joke to be an American nationalist.
What are you a nationalist about?
Walmart or something?
I mean, seriously.
Walmart nationalism.
Like McDonald's or like, what is it that you are actually praising about this country that you complain about constantly?
OnlyFans nationalism?
That's like more like grounded in a way than being a Christian nationalist.
And so I think we have this amazing opportunity precisely because of disintegration.
Like disintegration is liberation in the sense of we've been tied up, we've been shackled with these ropes of America, the Constitution, you know, liberalism, capitalism, democracy.
We've been, those are these ropes that we've been tied up with.
And the fact is, these rats have been chewing at the ropes.
The ropes are, you know, a bit mildewed and kind of decaying.
And at some point, you can get out of them.
But so our, yeah, we are sort of coping.
We're coping with the loss of something.
But I think we recognize that this thing is disintegrating.
But our cope is a more productive and realistic cope because we're saying we are not going to quadruple down on what brought us here because what brought us here brought us to here.
If you go back in time to, I don't know, 19th century Christianity, whenever, I don't think puritanical Christianity where we're stoning abortionists and adulteresses and everyone lives in some like tiny town and is dressed in black and no cleavage is available.
If you actually do that, you're going to press play on the recorder.
You're going to end up here.
Everything that happened led to here.
And if we go back, we're going to end up here again.
It's going to be our great grandchildren or maybe it'll actually be us.
Maybe things happen so quickly now with the internet and social media that it'll just be us.
Thinking About the Antichrist00:04:48
So we don't want to do that.
So our cope is better in the sense that it's more productive because precisely because it's new, we're trying to diagnose exactly why we're in this predicament and never to repeat that.
So in a way, we're criticizing our ancestors even.
We're saying, you took a wrong turn at some point.
And we're going to try to correct that.
We don't judge you.
We don't condemn you.
We understand actually why you did that.
And that's why we're not doing it again.
So I think, again, just to sum up really quickly, we have this potential within disintegration.
And what's coming up?
What is the most, what is the thing that is now talked about regularly in conservative circles, liberal circles, et cetera, that you could not imagine ever being spoken about?
I'll just tell you because it's a rhetorical question.
The Antichrist.
Maybe some people talked about like, you know, oh, George W. Bush is the Antichrist.
Like someone, you know, I'm thinking of some of those stupid liberal sites during, well, they were correct liberal off-post during the Iraq war days.
But they didn't think about it seriously.
They might as well just call him a bastard or something like that.
You know, you're the Antichrist.
It wasn't a real thing.
With Peter Thiel talking about this on this lecture tour, some internet personalities talking about this, people are really thinking about the Antichrist.
And I think we should be thinking about the Antichrist as well.
According to Peter Thiel, it's going to be Greta Thunberg, who is this like liberal nationalist white girl, you know, who's going to make you be based and trad.
And she's going to reduce bourgeois development or she's going to reduce technological development because according to Peter Thiel, we need to leave this mortal coil.
Transgenderism isn't radical enough.
We need to use technology so that we can remove the body from the equation and reach a kind of purified essence through something that is radically puritanical technology itself.
It's radical logic on some level.
That's what computer programming is: radical logic.
So we can kind of escape the body and reach this radical thing.
The Antichrist is Greta Thunberg because she's going to drag us back.
She's going to be like, no, you're going to grow organic eggs.
You're going to live in this town and not use planes or trains or automobiles so that the earth can start cooling again and healing.
She's going to bring you back to tradition as opposed to this bourgeois progressivism that he thinks is God.
Accelerationism into a future where you no longer have a body.
You're just a pure soul.
He is a Christian.
He is.
It's heretical.
It's kind of kooky.
99.9% of Christians don't think like that, but he is using Christian logic.
But he's also raising this idea of the Antichrist.
And I think we should be thinking about that idea of the Antichrist because who is the Antichrist?
666?
That's the epic version of the number of man.
Six.
It's not seven.
It's not the Sabbath.
It's not Saturn.
It's not Yahweh.
666 is Aryan.
We need to be thinking about birthing the Antichrist.
That is our job.
We need to be thinking about this terrifying entity that is going to confront America.
It's going to confront people like Peter Thiel, who went infinite acceleration and progress to soulness or whatever.
He is going to radically reject everything about America, everything that went wrong, everything that's liberal.
That is who he is.
The Antichrist is going to be our Savior.
And we need to start thinking about him and his coming and working every day to bring him into the material world.
The opposite of Jesus.
Someone is also as terrifying as Jesus, but he's terrifying to the people who love Jesus.