RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - The Center of the Universe
Aired: 2026-03-11
Duration: 14:59


=== Cat Allergies and Wild Instincts (09:19) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, hope everyone's doing well.
[00:00:03]  Yeah, someone noticed my allergies.
[00:00:06]  It's not springtime yet.
[00:00:08]  There's still snow out here, so it's not quite pollen season or anything, but I'm taking care of a cat.
[00:00:15]  My cat allergies have gotten a lot better.
[00:00:19]  I guess by better.
[00:00:21]  I mean, I'm not totally losing it due to the presence of a cat.
[00:00:25]  I guess my immune system does it adjust in some way.
[00:00:29]  The allergy is an over-immune system in many ways.
[00:00:35]  Having allergies is a sign of health, is it not?
[00:00:38]  Your immune system is going into overdrive, fighting off something that it doesn't need to fight off.
[00:00:44]  But I used to have just really terrible cat allergies in the sense that I couldn't even function around a cat.
[00:00:53]  I remember visiting someone's house one time in Texas, I believe, which was lucky in terms of the location due to what I'll describe.
[00:01:04]  But he had a cat and I didn't know it.
[00:01:07]  And I just could not sleep.
[00:01:09]  I felt like my throat was cramping up to the point that I might suffocate.
[00:01:13]  And so I just went and slept outside.
[00:01:16]  I just grabbed a blanket and slept on the grass to get away from the cat.
[00:01:20]  But I've been taking clariton and that's helped.
[00:01:24]  That has certainly helped.
[00:01:26]  But cats are weird.
[00:01:28]  There is something just strange about a cat.
[00:01:30]  Cats aren't fully domesticated in the way that dogs are.
[00:01:36]  Because I think dogs genuinely love humans more than other dogs.
[00:01:42]  And it's not like a dog won't get excited when it sees another dog and he'll want to go sniff its butt and powl around and maybe fake fight and things like that.
[00:01:54]  But they seem to have a just genuine attachment to their owners that I think can only be called love.
[00:02:02]  I don't think cats are quite like that.
[00:02:04]  Cats, it is like you have a wild animal in your home, but this animal is so small that it has strategized as such, which is that I'll let this giant animal feed me and I won't pick a fight with the giant animal.
[00:02:24]  But if I were bigger, I would eat that son of a bitch.
[00:02:28]  I think that's how cats think.
[00:02:31]  You're thinking of Williams syndrome.
[00:02:34]  This actually exists in humans.
[00:02:36]  People with Williams syndrome, they have a dog-like face.
[00:02:40]  They smile more.
[00:02:41]  They're just to their detriment, like they're not functional, but they're just really nice and they act like puppies.
[00:02:47]  What is the name of that syndrome again?
[00:02:49]  Williams syndrome.
[00:02:51]  If I remember correctly.
[00:02:52]  Williams, yeah.
[00:02:54]  Williams syndrome.
[00:02:55]  Okay.
[00:02:55]  Interesting.
[00:02:56]  Let me just look that up.
[00:02:58]  It.
[00:02:58]  They basically have a dog attitude.
[00:03:01]  Is what you're saying?
[00:03:02]  Is that yes yeah, as someone mentioned in the chat, so they're just millennials, they're just here to help and be quirky.
[00:03:09]  And yeah yes, it is true I yeah I, it is I I, I think the dog thing is real, though I don't know what you would call it if not love, genuine happiness to see you when you get home.
[00:03:23]  And now you could just say oh, it's some strategy to get foot fed or something which, of course, it is on some level, but I don't know, I think it's a little bit more than that packs.
[00:03:35]  So what would you make of the idea of a cat and a dog uh, loving each other's company?
[00:03:41]  What would that mean?
[00:03:42]  Cats and dogs?
[00:03:43]  What's the line from Ghostbusters?
[00:03:46]  Cats and dogs living together?
[00:03:48]  Total chaos, total chaos.
[00:03:50]  Yeah I, I think it can definitely happen.
[00:03:52]  Is it love, though?
[00:03:54]  Have you seen this?
[00:03:55]  Like they snuggle up together or share food or help each other out?
[00:04:00]  I think cats and dogs are.
[00:04:02]  It depends on the individual, but i've seen affection from both.
[00:04:06]  Yeah, but um, I don't know.
[00:04:09]  I uh, I think dogs understand hierarchy, like they will look at a person think yeah, that's a different species but uh, I love it nonetheless.
[00:04:18]  I think a cat.
[00:04:19]  They've done studies where a cat looks at a person and just sees like a large cat, kind of like this and equal.
[00:04:26]  How do they do that?
[00:04:27]  I've seen that image of like what you look like to a cat and you basically look like a cat.
[00:04:34]  But how would you do that?
[00:04:35]  You can't put a, a video camera, inside their brain and the you obviously could, but that that's the video camera looking at the brain.
[00:04:43]  You can't get inside its mind.
[00:04:46]  Let's say, I don't know how they do that, but it's interesting.
[00:04:50]  I I think it's also interesting to think about the polymorphisms between like large cats, like lions tigers, and then you compare them with small cats.
[00:05:00]  And then you've got dogs, where you've got like wild dogs that roam in Africa, and then you've got like the wolf, which look very kind of similar to a husky.
[00:05:10]  Yeah, i've also heard that like this a small cat.
[00:05:13]  There's supposedly small cats in Africa that have like a huge chase to kill ratio, so they have a higher kill ratio than even like lions, Lions and cheetahs and things like this.
[00:05:24]  They're very successful.
[00:05:25]  Wow.
[00:05:26]  Cats are supposedly like little weapons of mass destruction.
[00:05:30]  They've caused.
[00:05:32]  This cat I'm referring to, I'm not sure she could totally survive on her own.
[00:05:38]  I'm not positive, but I think she would come close in the sense that she's always finding little rodents and then torturing the rodents.
[00:05:47]  So she'll bring in a mouse and like sadistically play with it for two hours before finally killing and eating it.
[00:05:56]  My mother also said that one time this cat, like there was like a little bird in the house and the cat like caught the bird in midair.
[00:06:05]  I still can't even believe it myself.
[00:06:08]  Like I don't know.
[00:06:09]  You have to have a, it's not IQ in the way that we think of it of like, are you a good problem solver?
[00:06:17]  Can you solve math equations or whatever, whatever.
[00:06:21]  It's a sort of like IQ of the nervous system.
[00:06:23]  It's a kill IQ where you can do something that I don't think any human could do.
[00:06:27]  I mean, catch a bird in mid-flight and then eat it like within a few minutes.
[00:06:33]  It's pretty remarkable when you think about it.
[00:06:36]  That is a quite an evil being.
[00:06:39]  I don't know what to say.
[00:06:41]  But no, I've always liked dogs.
[00:06:44]  I've never quite understood cats.
[00:06:46]  And I've probably had a sort of bigotry against cats due to my allergies where, you know, it's almost like Plavlovian.
[00:06:55]  You walk in and there's this cat and I feel like I'm about to suffocate and my eyes are running.
[00:07:01]  And yeah.
[00:07:02]  I'm curious, have you ever been around a Sphinx cat before?
[00:07:06]  What is that exactly?
[00:07:08]  I suppose that is the short-haired cat, almost bald looking.
[00:07:12]  Interesting.
[00:07:13]  Dr. Evil.
[00:07:14]  Oh, okay.
[00:07:16]  I don't think I've ever been around one now.
[00:07:18]  What are they like?
[00:07:19]  Oh, I don't know.
[00:07:20]  I was just curious if people with cat allergies have been around short-haired varieties and had the same issue.
[00:07:26]  Yeah.
[00:07:26]  Richard, you might be interested in wolf dogs.
[00:07:29]  Are you familiar with that?
[00:07:30]  Are they like hybrids?
[00:07:32]  Yes.
[00:07:33]  There's a whole market for them.
[00:07:34]  If you have a big old backyard, it could be someone to look into.
[00:07:38]  They're actually healthier than they're they've got fewer diseases than dogs and wolves.
[00:07:44]  Interesting.
[00:07:46]  You get that hybrid vigor sometimes, actually, between species.
[00:07:49]  It's interesting.
[00:07:50]  Yeah, when the species are inbred, you do get hybrid vigor, but they're not necessarily more fit in the sense that if you put the wolf dog in a wolf pack, well, they're not aggressive enough.
[00:08:00]  They're not high tee enough.
[00:08:01]  If you put them in a dog environment, they're just going to eat your couch and they might bite you and you're going to have to kill them.
[00:08:08]  Anyway, just a little thought on dogs and cats.
[00:08:12]  There is a joke I've heard, which is that when you feed a dog, the dog Looks up at you and thinks, You are God.
[00:08:23]  And then when you feed a cat, she thinks to herself, I am God.
[00:08:28]  And I mean, maybe a little bit over, maybe a little bit exaggerated, but I think that is sort of true about dogs and cats.
[00:08:37]  There was this one time I remember where, I mean, luckily, this is during the summer, but I, it was late and I let my dog Zeus out in just this little backyard that I have here at this place, not big enough for a wolf dog.
[00:08:51]  And it was late, and I just like lay, I laid down and I just fell asleep.
[00:08:56]  And so I am not proud of this fact, but I left him out all night.
[00:09:01]  And so I woke up and I usually, I'm usually awakened by Zeus, who wants breakfast and is ready to go for the day and so on.
[00:09:10]  And I was like, where's Zeus?
[00:09:11]  Where's Zeus?
[00:09:12]  And then I look out and he's there by the door, like lying down by the door.
[00:09:16]  And then when I let him in, he was like, oh, great.
[00:09:18]  Thanks for letting me in.

=== The Great Samantha Power Guilt Trip (05:39) ===

[00:09:20]  He's like, I love you.
[00:09:22]  That was really a great thing you did to let me inside.
[00:09:26]  I was like, I thought he would be mad or something.
[00:09:28]  He had a right to be mad.
[00:09:30]  But there's basically like zero resentment or so on.
[00:09:34]  He's happy about being let in.
[00:09:36]  He doesn't think that you did something wrong.
[00:09:39]  I don't know.
[00:09:40]  It's interesting.
[00:09:41]  But we are just vamping on and on about dogs and cats.
[00:09:45]  This is going to be a casual one today.
[00:09:48]  Already is.
[00:09:49]  I actually want to interview this person.
[00:09:52]  I thought we could do it on today, Tuesday, but I think we might have to delay it till next Tuesday.
[00:09:57]  But I will check back in with him.
[00:09:59]  There's just a little bit of a misunderstanding.
[00:10:02]  I think we can cover some war stuff, but to be honest, I think I would rather cover some kind of meta war stuff, to be honest, because that's something that, you know, we can do that's unique.
[00:10:19]  I think in terms of getting updates on the war, I think there are a lot more kind of mainstream outlets doing that.
[00:10:28]  And so I don't really think we need to do that.
[00:10:31]  But I've tried to understand what Trump is up to.
[00:10:37]  And if you listen to his exact words, I don't think you can reach any sort of definitive conclusion.
[00:10:46]  Because if we go back a few months, we had this notion put forward by JD Vance and company, which is that Donald Trump's not going to get us into any foreign forever war.
[00:11:01]  We don't want the Ayatollahs to have a nuclear weapon.
[00:11:05]  And so Trump puts America first and he strikes and he strikes hard.
[00:11:09]  But it was a sort of strategic strike.
[00:11:11]  And it was a strike in the tradition of humanitarian intervention on the one hand and the war on terror on the other, where it's sort of a police action that the United States can do at will that is not considered an act of war, is not usually voted on by Congress as such.
[00:11:33]  And we kind of get away with it.
[00:11:38]  And there certainly was like a dovetailing of the logic of the global war on terror and the humanitarian interventionism put forward by someone like Samantha Power.
[00:11:51]  Now, these types of people will, that is, terror warriors and humanitarians, will disagree on occasion, but they disagree on occasion, sometimes in important ways.
[00:12:04]  But I don't think there's a philosophical or first principle disagreement between these two.
[00:12:09]  I remember actually when I was a graduate student at Duke and I was teaching, I was TAing, I should say, a course on, it was called Genocide.
[00:12:20]  And no, it wasn't a how-to course or a do-it-yourself.
[00:12:25]  It was not that do-it-your, you know, DIY genocide course.
[00:12:29]  It was not that.
[00:12:30]  It was not.
[00:12:30]  So it was, it was basically a kind of Samantha Power course.
[00:12:35]  We actually read Samantha Power's book.
[00:12:37]  I'm forgetting the title of it now.
[00:12:39]  I think it's out of print, but she wrote it in the late 90s, before 9-11.
[00:12:44]  And it was more of a sort of guilt trip about the West or America in particular for not stopping genocide.
[00:12:55]  So there's sort of a history of these catastrophes, and that included the Armenian Genocide and even Stalinism and the Great Purge and the Great Famine and all sorts of wicked things that he did.
[00:13:09]  And the Holocaust, obviously, and a history of the development of the concept of genocide, little Greek and Latin mix, say an attempt to destroy a group of people or a race and even how that could be applied more broadly, where even if not a single person dies, the destruction of an indigenous culture is a kind of genocide.
[00:13:35]  And that's very interesting that they would put it that way for a couple of reasons.
[00:13:42]  It presupposes that there's a kind of homogeneous ethnocur that's real and maybe even eternal and so on.
[00:13:53]  So that there is a kind of Irishness at the heart of the Irish.
[00:13:57]  And I don't know, closing down the pubs and preventing any acoustical renderings of Morning Milady when the blue moon rises over Ireland.
[00:14:10]  I'm just making up things at this point that preventing the performance of those works would be, would amount to a genocide.
[00:14:18]  And it's very interesting because you hear a lot of that rhetoric coming from the far right and even the center right of, you know, remember we were dealing with, what's his name?
[00:14:33]  Forgetting his name at the moment.
[00:14:35]  He has a Claremont Institute degree or something or connections.
[00:14:40]  And he was talking about how white culture is under attack.
[00:14:42]  He was sort of making a genocide argument.
[00:14:45]  And he was making this argument that presupposes that there's some like whiteness there, but he couldn't, of course, describe it.
[00:14:52]  Jeremy Carl, yes, thanks for coming up with that.
[00:14:55]  I've already forgotten him.
[00:14:57]  But so it was basically a guilt trip about.