Richard Spencer argues the Iran war will de-escalate not due to American virtue, but because a "fat and lazy" populace refuses to endure high gas prices or prolonged conflict. He contrasts this decadence with WWII European sacrifices, labeling Trump's rhetoric a "pale counterfeit" of Bush-era nation-building while dismissing critics like Tucker Carlson as propagandists. Spencer posits that a cold "world war" between the West and East has existed since 2014, concluding that de-escalation relies on this perceived American unwillingness to fight rather than diplomatic success. [Automatically generated summary]
I just wanted to jump on quickly and offer some hope, some hope.
Hope is maybe the most evil thing in the world, perhaps, but some wishful thinking as well.
And I am a bit of a contrarian.
I get called that a lot.
And whenever I see that there's groupthink going on and interpretations or opinions just simply become clichés, I start to look at it, look at the situation from a different viewpoint.
My antennae go up, so to speak.
And this is happening with the Iran war.
So as I am talking to you, it is 440, 35 on the East Coast, 235 where I am.
And Donald Trump has just announced that the Iran war is almost complete.
And, you know, stocks went up immediately and so on.
So now you can take that for what it's worth.
Is it totally delusional or just simply bullshit or people grasping for straws?
All of those are reasonable conclusions to come to.
But I wonder if it's sort of right.
And let me just say a couple of things to get started here.
I am 100% against action against Iran.
I don't support any of these things.
I cut my teeth in my 20s being oppositional to the Iraq war.
So there it is.
I am not trying to apologize for Trump in the slightest bit.
And I think the war was delusional.
And even Trump's recent comments are equally delusional, though in a different way.
So this is where I'm coming from.
But again, my contrarian antennae went up really over the weekend.
You know, Tucker Carlson was praying and casting away spells.
And the guy from CNBC, Kramer, what's his name?
He's sort of famous for being a contrary indicator.
So whenever, you know, he tells you to go buy Therano stock days before Elizabeth Holm gets indicted or something like this.
He was pumping up the housing bubble.
He was pumping up the dot-com bubble, et cetera, et cetera.
He's just a buffoon or perhaps a propagandist for Wall Street.
And so, you know, when he's telling the plebes to buy, all the big whales are selling, or he's just merely stupid, whatever.
But I feel like some of these things are contrary indicators.
And Kramer recently said that, you know, the escalation is impossible or something like this.
So I am going to rethink things.
And I would say that I think there is a possibility that the Iran war will de-escalate.
And I think we might actually get out of this.
Why We Might Get Out00:09:11
I'm not saying that because the United States is virtuous.
To the contrary, I'm saying that because the United States is vice-ridden, fat, decadent, and lazy.
So let me just explain the argument.
At no point in my lifetime or really recent American history has bold declarations of blood, sweat, and tears ever really worked with the American people.
Even the two world wars in which we engaged in horrifying, bloody conflicts like the D-Day invasion in Normandy, etc., even in those two wars that we look back upon as, you know, a place of heroes, we entered these wars very late.
We entered these wars after getting attacked, and we were in the wonderful position of sort of tilting the balance or even mopping things up.
We did experience D-Day in the Second World War, Battle of the Bulge, etc.
We never experienced things like the Battle of Korsk or some of the more horrifying episodes of trench warfare in the First World War.
We got a taste of it, no doubt, but we didn't experience the sort of decimation experienced by Germans, French, Russians, and British as well.
So that's just not what we lived through.
Now, it's splendid isolation.
We're separated by two oceans.
We want to stay out of those wars in Europe.
But again, my whole point here is even in those conflicts, we did not experience nearly the suffering as European powers.
Now, my second point is that looking back at the global war on terror, which has been the paradigm since the end of the Cold War, the promise was always that you can fight Osama bin Laden by going shopping.
Just go to that amusement park, go spend some money at Wet n Wild, and freedom wins.
That was basically the pitch of George W. Bush.
Now, there was a lot of fear and paranoia around that time.
When you turn on Fox News, they would have like a side or Chiron, I guess is what it's called, of the terror alert level.
And, you know, is it red or yellow or orange or green?
What did those colors even mean?
We had all of those kinds of things.
So there was a bit of, there was certainly paranoia in the air.
But in terms of the direct call, call to action by leadership, it was fight the terrorists by go shopping.
In other words, you won't be affected by this.
And to such a large extent, we weren't.
Now, I know you can say, oh, the world's gone to hell and all that kind of stuff.
And you'd be right in certain ways.
And there's no doubt you're paying more for gas and some of these things like housing have gone up tremendously.
Most all consumer products have not gone up.
They've actually gone down.
In fact, you can go buy a television set for less money now than you could 10 or 20 years ago.
So yeah, things are bad, but you have to understand the way in which they were bad.
And at no point did we experience anything approaching, approximating breadlines or rationing or anything like that.
The Chi-America relationship of buying new iPhones and television sets, et cetera, just kept on ticking.
So I just simply don't think that the American public is willing to undergo serious suffering.
Now, is there going to be inflation in some way?
Is our reputation abroad going to be ruined?
Sure.
Yeah, that's already happened.
We somehow get through these things.
But in terms of you are going to go to fill up, say, a small sedan with a 12-gallon tank, and it's going to cost $80.
I'm sorry.
I just don't think people are willing to do that.
I just don't think they are.
I think they would revolt or something would happen.
It would be devastating politically.
Trump does recognize this.
And I think he's not really willing to go through with it.
Now, another argument that coincides with this is that there was a petty idealism, sense of responsibility, and general goodwill involved in the early stages of the war on terror.
Now, I know I didn't support any of these things either.
And I know we like to look back on them and denounce George W. Bush and company.
But whatever their deep, dark motivations were, whether those involved securing oil or securing Israel or just getting money for the evil military-industrial complex, you can make some strong arguments in all three of those cases.
However, putting that aside, there was a genuine idealism in the sense of you break it, you buy it.
We're going into Iraq and we're going to build a democracy.
People are going to go to college.
There's going to be a functioning parliament.
We are going to transform the world because we are the greatest world power that ever lived.
And not just the greatest, not just the strongest, but the most benign, the most good-hearted country ever.
All those other empires were evil, but we're not.
We're nice.
We're Americans.
I know this all sounds cringe, and I am saying these lines rather sarcastically.
However, that propaganda was underlined by actual policy in the sense that we genuinely did try to reform Afghanistan.
We genuinely did try to nation build in Iraq.
Trillions of dollars were spent doing those things.
It was real.
With Trump, it's like a pale counterfeit of the war on terror.
He said unconditional surrender.
Iran's going to cry, uncle.
We're going to annihilate their navy.
Blah, blah, blah.
All this tough talk.
But there actually hasn't been any idealism involved.
And thus, Trump could very well be in a position to declare mission accomplished.
Sorry, I got a phone call right there.
Donald Trump might very well be in a position to declare mission accomplished on the board of an aircraft, on board an aircraft carrier, and actually mean it in the sense that he is going to pull out.
Again, I am offering a little bit of contrarianism, a little bit of wishful thinking, a little bit of hope.
I'm just saying that it is possible to get out of this thing.
And I'm not just saying because, you know, like, oh, cooler heads will prevail or we're all good people.
No, I'm saying that Americans are fat and lazy.
We're not willing to even fight World War II all the way to the degree that Germans and Russians and Brits and others were.
We're not even willing to do that.
We're not willing to pay $100 at the gas tank.
We are only willing to undergo foreign adventurism when we are told that our contribution to said war is to buy shit.
I mean, it just is what it is.
That's the country we live in.
That's the population we live in.
This is, you could say, a failing of the virtue and honor of not just the elites, but also the American people.
And I would basically agree with you.
But from my perspective, it is a bit hopeful in the sense that Iran won't turn into a total catastrophe.
West Versus East00:04:02
It's already disastrous.
Already we have created pain and suffering and death, no doubt.
But everything could be worse.
Think it's bad now?
Yeah, it could get a lot worse.
It could get a lot worse for this, for both the Americans, for Iranians, for people in the Middle East, for Europeans, etc.
So that's just my thought.
Now, an interesting rejoinder to what I just said, this little bubble of hope that I'm putting forward, is that an international conflict is already underway.
You know, there's an interesting question of like when World War II started.
And if you ask that question to a historian or even someone who's just finished high school and actually paid attention during class, they would say, ah, it started in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
That's when the war started.
Boom.
Well, okay.
I mean, that is the correct answer, of course, but things are deeper.
There's always a background.
You could argue that the war started in 1914 and that the interwar period, 1919 through 1939, was a kind of interregnum, a waiting period for the war to get going again.
There's a lot of truth to that.
Those are sort of background causes, not proximate causes, but there's a lot of truth to that.
Interestingly, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, I believe.
So that's well before Hitler came to power.
And then the Japan-Sino war launched in 1937.
So the makings, the kind of puzzle pieces of a world war were actually in place.
Now, you could then take the lessons from the Second World War and look forward and say, look, the current world war is already ongoing.
Maybe it started in 2014 with the seizure of Crimea.
Maybe it started in 2004 even with the Orange Revolution.
Maybe.
There's certainly background.
But the lines of demarcation are already in place.
So it's the West versus the East.
It is NATO, the United States, Israel versus the East, and that includes Iran and Russia, most obviously, but also includes China.
China signed a treaty, an agreement of unending friendship or words to that effect with Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.
So you could make the argument that we're already in a world war, but it's just not hot, at least in most parts of it.
It's hot in certain places, obviously in Ukraine, obviously in Iran, but we don't see the kind of societies en masse going to war like we saw in the Second World War.
We might, or it might look altogether different, but a world war is on.
Interesting perspective, might prove true.
I do think that the world could break into that sort of East-West division as I just described.
But the reason why I talked to you today was to offer a little bit of hope, Pollyannish blindness and naive wishful thinking that we might actually get out of this precisely because Trump is a shallow retard and Americans are fat and lazy and not willing to go to the mat for anything, in fact.