RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - A More Private Equity
Aired: 2026-04-01
Duration: 19:06


=== Conservatives Dress Like Liberals (11:47) ===

[00:00:00]  Is that the whole idea of drinking apple cider vinegar when you wake up and it improves your metabolism or something?
[00:00:08]  Is that just like an old wives' tale?
[00:00:11]  Or wasn't Jordan Peterson like eating bacon and drinking apple cider vinegar and then he died?
[00:00:21]  He claimed that the apple cider vinegar like put him into like a coma for like days or something.
[00:00:28]  Wow.
[00:00:29]  But was he only doing vinegar basically?
[00:00:33]  Oh, he was.
[00:00:34]  I think he was on a carnivore diet that his weird daughter put him on.
[00:00:38]  She calls it like a lion diet where you only eat beef and salt.
[00:00:41]  Like, you don't even eat other.
[00:00:43]  They're not lions.
[00:00:44]  It's literally just like beef and salt.
[00:00:47]  And then he said, and then I had like a sip of apple cider vinegar and I was like comatose for three days.
[00:00:55]  That is, he literally, wow.
[00:00:58]  He's really neurotic.
[00:00:59]  I definitely, I'm more or less a believer in the primal diet.
[00:01:05]  I know you are a Pete.
[00:01:08]  Aficionado or a member of the Pete cult, RFH, but I'm more of a.
[00:01:16]  The primal diet always made a lot of sense when I read about it.
[00:01:20]  It's been a long time, like 15 years ago.
[00:01:23]  It appeals to, I would say, right wingers and racists for very obvious reasons.
[00:01:30]  I have a paleo background myself.
[00:01:32]  That was like the first thing I got into.
[00:01:36]  But there's actually quite a bit of overlap between the two.
[00:01:40]  Even if the macros are very different in what they believe, you're eating a lot of kind of the same foods, and both of them really demonize.
[00:01:50]  Well, I guess people call it seed oils, but when I was paleo, we called it vegetable oil.
[00:01:55]  Right.
[00:01:56]  So they're both very against that.
[00:01:57]  And they're both very pro coconut oil.
[00:01:59]  Yeah.
[00:02:01]  That is interesting.
[00:02:02]  I mean, it does, there is a right wing quality to primal dieting in the sense that you're trying to get back to like a hunter gatherer type.
[00:02:12]  You know, way.
[00:02:16]  And so it is kind of inherently conservative.
[00:02:19]  Yes.
[00:02:20]  So I.
[00:02:21]  It's very popular in libertarians as well.
[00:02:26]  Definitely.
[00:02:28]  You know, that's where this high protein thing came from.
[00:02:31]  The libertarians did the high protein thing.
[00:02:33]  They birthed.
[00:02:34]  Yeah.
[00:02:36]  RFK, rather.
[00:02:37]  It kind of, that's why everything's protein slapped onto it now.
[00:02:40]  It's like a, there's like a whole like politics of meat that like, Radfems have been talking about.
[00:02:46]  There's a whole book called This since like the 70s.
[00:02:49]  But yes, the whole like protein obsession absolutely is very conservative and right wing in nature.
[00:02:57]  Yes.
[00:02:58]  Because boomers like to grill.
[00:03:01]  So they like it, it appeals to them, it's pandering to them.
[00:03:05]  And then, as I said, there is something, a kind of libertarian, alt right, not necessarily even Christian, I would say, right wing mentality.
[00:03:18]  Where you sort of like the idea of like going, you know, the way of the ancestors basically, and that is the primal diet.
[00:03:26]  Yes, it's also very rebellious, which they like too, because the government was telling you, don't eat red meat, vegetarianism is good, so they love being like, no, I'm gonna eat bacon all day.
[00:03:41]  Yeah, there is a lot to that, yes, there's no doubt about it.
[00:03:46]  Um, we were actually talking.
[00:03:51]  Last night, about this, the conservative brain, and how, and I think I've joked about this before.
[00:04:00]  A few times, but how concerned, you know, sometimes these cliches are accurate.
[00:04:07]  Like when people say, oh, like conservatives, they're just 10 years behind.
[00:04:11]  Or, you know, I remember saying this back when I was blogging for Talkie Mag or AlternativeRight.com or something where it was like, conservatives will oppose something and then they'll lose in their opposition.
[00:04:28]  And then five years on, they'll claim that it was a, Conservative thing all along.
[00:04:33]  So, civil rights, best example of that.
[00:04:37]  All of these voters who came to the Republican Party precisely, solely due to opposition to desegregation, they obviously oppose civil rights.
[00:04:51]  National Review opposed it, although in a bit more tenuous manner.
[00:04:56]  And they lose this battle.
[00:04:58]  And then, five years later, National Review is like, well, you know, the conservatism of MLK and The Civil Rights Act is truly a libertarian document when you think about it.
[00:05:08]  And it's not like they're entirely wrong, but it's just this self serving way in which they act and think.
[00:05:18]  And gay marriage was another one.
[00:05:20]  So they were just like, laughing, oh, gay marriage?
[00:05:23]  What's next?
[00:05:24]  Are you going to marry your dog or whatever?
[00:05:26]  And then they lose the battle.
[00:05:27]  And then five years later, it's like, we need to bring gay citizens into the communion of marriage.
[00:05:33]  Like, you know, it's a conservative policy, like that we always support it.
[00:05:38]  They're just.
[00:05:39]  They just always do this.
[00:05:40]  Like every issue is like this, actually, with conservatives.
[00:05:45]  And, but I think there's something much deeper going on as well that I can't fully explain because what we were talking about are more recent trends.
[00:05:57]  So I'm old enough to remember because I've been an adult for 27 years, 29.
[00:06:06]  Wow, three decades of adulting.
[00:06:09]  Yeah.
[00:06:10]  And I'm still bad at, um, Filling out forms and so on.
[00:06:16]  But anyway, so I can remember back in the early 2000s when, like, anti vaccination ideology and JFK conspiracy theories,
[00:06:34]  if you held those views, you were 100% someone who lived in, like, Whitefish, Montana and owned an independent bookstore or, like, made your own granola.
[00:06:47]  Or, you know, we're like a former hippie.
[00:06:51]  I mean, it was, it left coded like without even any question.
[00:06:56]  The JFK, the phenomena that when it was really intense was with Oliver Stone's movie in the 1990s, was 100% liberal coded.
[00:07:06]  And vaccination stuff that came out with Jenny McCarthy, and it was, you're like a cool, slightly weird suburban housewife or something.
[00:07:19]  And you're in, like, I'm not vaxxing my kids.
[00:07:21]  Why would you do?
[00:07:22]  Put chemicals into their body?
[00:07:24]  What else do you feed them corn syrup and corn starch?
[00:07:29]  It was so left coated.
[00:07:31]  And then 20 years later, all of these things are right coated.
[00:07:35]  And I don't, it's so many.
[00:07:38]  I mean, these are all anecdotal examples, but it's so consistent that it has to be getting at something deeper.
[00:07:46]  Another thing, like we're all, everyone here is old enough to remember the obsession with blue hair.
[00:07:53]  You have died.
[00:07:56]  Okay, got a mute, guys.
[00:07:58]  I automatically.
[00:08:01]  Okay.
[00:08:02]  You're automatically muted when you come in, but you've got to mute.
[00:08:10]  But blue hair was the symbol of being an SJW or leftist.
[00:08:19]  I'm not even exaggerating right now.
[00:08:21]  I think if you see someone with blue hair and a nose earring, she's almost coded as MAGA now.
[00:08:32]  Don't you think?
[00:08:34]  Like, there's something about being like 10 years behind the trend that's just very consistent and very conservative.
[00:08:46]  I don't know if I accidentally muted you, RFH, but.
[00:08:51]  Yeah, sorry, you did.
[00:08:52]  There.
[00:08:54]  Yeah.
[00:08:55]  I mean, this has been like a discourse with liberals a lot lately, just in terms of like clothing in particular.
[00:09:02]  It's like almost like they've switched.
[00:09:06]  Like you see, conservatives now dress as liberals did like 10 years ago, kind of hipstery, kind of alt like tattoos, yeah, tattooed weird hair, weird things.
[00:09:21]  When you see someone like in, because I graduated from high school in 1997, so this has been wow, so old, but um, that was when tattoos, which had been basically the provenance of.
[00:09:38]  Criminals, military, super weirdos, or drug users.
[00:09:45]  Like you didn't have a tattoo.
[00:09:47]  That wasn't a thing.
[00:09:49]  And even when you saw sports figures like the NFL games, no tattoos.
[00:09:55]  And now it's ubiquitous, if not universal, in fact.
[00:10:00]  But like a guy wearing jeans and like an untucked shirt with tattoos up his arm or something.
[00:10:07]  20 years ago, that man is a liberal hipster.
[00:10:12]  Taking his cues from like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that is.
[00:10:16]  Now, when you see that man, you're like, oh, wow, he's a Trump turd.
[00:10:21]  It's everything.
[00:10:25]  Now that it's not edgy anymore, because 20 years ago, too, having any sort of visible tattoo precluded you from any sort of office work.
[00:10:34]  Yeah.
[00:10:35]  Like you could not get hired in many places having any sort of tattoo like that on you.
[00:10:39]  That's why it was like people in the military, people in prison, like it.
[00:10:45]  You didn't have that.
[00:10:49]  It really limited your options employment wise and your economic and social mobility.
[00:10:55]  Now that they're everywhere and it's normal to have tattoos.
[00:10:59]  My last job, I worked at a Fortune 400 finance company, and all my Zoomer co workers had tattoos, and it was fine.
[00:11:08]  Visible tattoos.
[00:11:09]  This was normal.
[00:11:10]  It's almost weirdly conservative coated.
[00:11:13]  I know the tattoo.
[00:11:16]  Craze is very widespread, but it's almost like conservative coded or something in a certain way.
[00:11:24]  Like you have a little, like, artsy tattoo, and that means that you live in the burbs and you go to a mega church or go to a church called like Fresh Life or something.
[00:11:39]  Yeah.
[00:11:39]  And, but then you also were like skeptical of Trump, but when RFK got on board, well, I was all in.

=== Tattoos Are Conservative Coded (04:55) ===

[00:11:47]  Like, you know, like you're that type of person.
[00:11:50]  It's like conservative coded to be tattooed.
[00:11:54]  Like, I think we're there, yeah.
[00:11:57]  Because now that it's become so oversaturated, it's everywhere now.
[00:12:01]  They jump on board because they're never leading the way with anything.
[00:12:05]  They're never like at the forefront.
[00:12:07]  They're never edgy.
[00:12:08]  They're never forward thinking.
[00:12:11]  I don't know.
[00:12:11]  Like they never take a risk.
[00:12:13]  They're more risk averse.
[00:12:14]  They're less high in openness.
[00:12:17]  So now that tattoos are accepted and common, and the liberals, they move on from things, and the conservatives now they discover and they're like, oh, and they think it's cool.
[00:12:30]  Yeah, it has to be oversaturated.
[00:12:32]  And in a way, the trend has to be over.
[00:12:35]  And then they jump on it.
[00:12:37]  And you were saying like the big five personality traits.
[00:12:41]  So ocean, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, I believe.
[00:12:50]  And so it's one of these psychological things where they're, I mean, I'm even kind of skeptical of the stuff like Sam Vatkin talks about, like the whole field of psychology is sort of suspect, or it's like the whole field is kind of like, We're putting words on things, but we have no real knowledge of causality.
[00:13:12]  You know, it's like, you know, I'm diagnosing you with BPD disorder.
[00:13:17]  Well, okay, but what is going on exactly?
[00:13:22]  Is that a gene?
[00:13:24]  Is that, you know, you're sort of finding categories that get codified in the DSM and kind of projecting them onto something, but in a rather, I don't know, like a somewhat dubious way.
[00:13:37]  Why was I saying this?
[00:13:38]  Oh, Ocean, the big five personality traits.
[00:13:41]  So we sort of think of these big traits as you know, you know them when you see them, basically.
[00:13:47]  And you, these are heritable to some degree, also cultural.
[00:13:55]  But they're kind of like ways of describing personality.
[00:13:59]  And the lack of openness does seem to be a clear component of being right way.
[00:14:07]  I mean, I think that's like the big problem.
[00:14:09]  Yeah.
[00:14:10]  I think that's probably the biggest.
[00:14:13]  One of the big five that probably has the most polarity between liberals and conservatives.
[00:14:22]  Because it's all like the disease metaphor is this right wing rhetoric.
[00:14:28]  What I mean by that is that if you look back at discussions of communism and things like that, it was always about the disease.
[00:14:37]  There's a red virus and it's going to get into your schools.
[00:14:42]  It might infect your kids.
[00:14:43]  Has it affected the president?
[00:14:45]  Maybe.
[00:14:45]  We don't know.
[00:14:46]  Like it's that kind of metaphorical thinking of the disease, the invader into the common body.
[00:14:53]  That's how right wingers think.
[00:14:55]  So they are sort of like an immune system, basically.
[00:14:59]  And they have these like walls build a wall.
[00:15:02]  What is the most powerful meme of Trump, at least 2016?
[00:15:07]  Build the wall.
[00:15:08]  What did it mean?
[00:15:09]  We have no idea.
[00:15:09]  But it just means what it means.
[00:15:12]  It's like outsiders beware, basically.
[00:15:16]  And so they just lack this openness.
[00:15:18]  I mean, for better or for worse, I'm not even necessarily bashing them for this.
[00:15:22]  It just is what it is.
[00:15:24]  But it also means that they are reactive against any sort of new trend or new idea.
[00:15:31]  So it's like the JFK.
[00:15:33]  Oh, yeah, right.
[00:15:35]  You know, tell me another one.
[00:15:36]  Yeah, JFK was assassinated by the CIA.
[00:15:41]  Okay.
[00:15:42]  And then 20 years later, they're like, listen, man, I've got to tell you like JFK was killed by the CIA.
[00:15:47]  And it's like, we know.
[00:15:51]  Not only that, JFK Jr. is going to Trump their alleys and he's alive.
[00:15:57]  Yes, right.
[00:16:00]  But it's like, Hey man, like, you know, there's this new thing.
[00:16:03]  It's called putting ink into your skin.
[00:16:06]  You use a needle, you decorate your body.
[00:16:09]  It's like kind of like tribal and badass.
[00:16:12]  And it's like, yeah, dude, I've heard of a tattoo before, you fucking idiot.
[00:16:17]  Like, there's just some degree in which that, I mean, that gets my criticism of conservatism is and like Tucker and the like neo alt right or whatever, where they reach, they're so far behind on the timeline, but When they get to like your tweet from 10 years ago, they think it's new and then they steal it.
[00:16:40]  They think they invented it.
[00:16:41]  They think they discovered it.

=== Tribal Mentality and Threat Detection (02:22) ===

[00:16:43]  Yeah.
[00:16:43]  Yeah.
[00:16:44]  And it's like, we, we taught, we discussed this and we're actually now over this thing and it's less, it's not really relevant now.
[00:16:56]  And so you're just like, I don't know.
[00:16:59]  I, it's a very weird mentality.
[00:17:01]  I think, I don't know.
[00:17:03]  I just, I don't, Think I was born with a conservative mentality.
[00:17:08]  I understand how I have these very strong, kind of hard right wing tendencies, like deep in my personality, to like root for the overdog or against the underdog or like only the strong survive.
[00:17:23]  I'm kind of that type, but I don't think I inherited the conservative mentality at all.
[00:17:30]  It just doesn't vibe with me.
[00:17:32]  And I find people who are lacking in openness annoying.
[00:17:37]  Yeah.
[00:17:38]  Actually, I think it's they just have like a completely different neurology.
[00:17:43]  Like, they've done like brain scans on liberals versus conservatives, and like conservatives have like more active amygdalas, like threat detection.
[00:17:51]  They have, they're more sensitive to their disgust response.
[00:17:56]  So, and you probably do need people like that in your population to be fair.
[00:18:02]  You can't have everyone just be like this really open minded, like, You know, edgy type person that's just like wanting to change things all the time.
[00:18:12]  You obviously need like a consistent, steady group of people, but I also don't really want to hang out with them or converse with them.
[00:18:22]  No, and I'm not going to pretend that their epiphanies are somehow groundbreaking as well.
[00:18:28]  Yes.
[00:18:29]  Chris?
[00:18:31]  Yeah, I sometimes, for what it's worth, have problems kind of disentangling the right wing and left wing elements of my psychology.
[00:18:39]  I have somewhat.
[00:18:40]  Silver struggles.
[00:18:41]  But also, I was going to say, you know, Ed Dutton, who's ironically a conservative, points out in one of his books that openness, those five personality characteristics, openness is the one that's most strongly correlated with intelligence.
[00:18:57]  In fact, sometimes when they present the ocean system, they actually say, oh, they describe that trait as opennesslash.