Michael Malice, dubbed the "Willy Wonka of politics," traces the evolution from 1990s paleo-conservatism to the modern alt-right and dark enlightenment, arguing that media outlets like HuffPost and Vox falsely unify these diverse factions under racist labels. He defines trolling as an art form exploiting weaknesses to delegitimize opponents, citing Andy Kaufman and Donald Trump's tactics against Elizabeth Warren, while distinguishing between anti-racist and anti-Semitic elements within the movement. Malice advocates for decentralized platforms over tech giants, views North Korea's chaos as a mirror to Trump's rhetoric, and insists that dark humor remains essential for coping with tragedy and resisting progressive attempts to suppress dissenting voices through metrics of conversation quality. [Automatically generated summary]
I suppose at some level, because of the great honor that I've bestowed upon you by calling you the Willy Wonka of politics, but I just don't think anything could possibly be better than Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka.
So first off, I'm going to do this interview completely in a different way than I've ever done before, which is that you may notice I have no notes here.
Now, my policy is that when it's a good interview, I don't have to look down once.
But I thought, you're so bananas.
Your political theories are so...
Out there, I thought, I'm just gonna sit down and completely see what happens.
I am literally not going to write down one thing beforehand.
So the reason that I call you the Willy Wonka of politics is not just because of your high fashion style, but you actually do strike me as a unique political thinker, which is pretty freaking rare these days.
No, all right, so, but you really do, and even the way you tweet, the way you use trolling, you know, your out there political thoughts, all of those things, I mean, the way you present yourself, it's all like just this really bizarre package.
So, racist means that which is against progressivism.
And I have a list in the books of things that have been called racist, which includes moving into minority neighborhoods and moving out of minority neighborhoods, noticing races and not noticing races, milk, certain types of dinosaurs, I mean, picnics.
Wait, what type of dinosaur is racist?
In Jurassic Park, one of the dinosaurs was called racist.
I'm not sure exactly why I didn't follow reading through the article.
Okay, so for people that know nothing about this, the couple groups that you just mentioned there, Dark Enlightenment, the troll community, all of this stuff, can you just kind of break down all of it?
How did this start?
How did you even start caring about it?
Were you part of it?
What the hell's going on?
Because even for me, and I have some basic understanding of this stuff, I'm actually not totally clear on all the sort of markers and where everybody is online and all that.
So it starts, I ground it in 1992, when Pat Buchanan, who is regarded as a paleo-conservative, teamed up with Murray Rothbart, who was regarded as a paleo-libertarian.
So between those two men, You basically have everything that is happening today within this scene, meaning nationalism, trolling, flirting with racism, you know, contempt for authority, skepticism toward the establishment.
The two of them had many disagreements.
And at one point, you know, Pat Buchanan turned on Murray Rothbard, and later he asked Murray Rothbard's executor for forgiveness, literally getting on his knees and asking for forgiveness.
I broke that news in the book.
And that has come down to contemporary terms where the internet, what social media allows, and this is both a positive and a negative, is back in the day if you were that one person in your town with these weird fringe views, you're the freak.
But now that one person with their weird fringe views in that town can talk to the other person with their weird fringe views in the other town, or in Denmark, or in Asia.
So, but now they have a community and discussion and they can develop an ideology.
So, what I saw happening as a result of hanging out with the trolls is people falling into this group called, what was called at the time, Neo-Reaction or the Dark Enlightenment.
And it was things like, we need to return to monarchy.
America is this decadent Weimar Republic that's on the verge of destruction.
Well, what I knew from my, you know, I'm a big pop culture person, obviously, and I knew how culture develops, which is it starts at the fringe with the weirdos.
And then the edgy people, the cool people, like, hey, have you heard about this thing?
Then it becomes more mainstream and then, like, kind of the nerds get it.
Then the corporations appropriate it and kind of tone it down, right?
So all the intellectual momentum I saw on the right was a result of this stuff.
These are the people talking ideas, both nefariously and positively.
These are the ones asking the big questions and basically the radical questions.
And one of the big differences between conservatives and the new right is this.
Conservatives take what is given, and this isn't a slight against conservatives, and regard it as, all right, basically what we have, how do we fix it?
The new right often has a more radical approach, meaning just because something exists doesn't mean it can't be destroyed completely and started from scratch.
So these are two different approaches, and we see it regarding the press.
I got into an argument with Sean Davis, who writes for The Federalist, and his whole point is that, you know, the media, they're all dumb.
And my point is, no, no, these people are very, very bright.
And if they're all making the same mistake in the same exact way, that is not a function of stupidity.
So, when Trump was being elected, I had Eric Weinstein sitting in that seat, and what I said to him was, what most people seem to want is a panther in a china shop.
We know something's wrong with the system, but we don't want to blow up the system.
We want a panther to walk in there and knock something off with its tail, and bang one thing off with its head, and then close the door behind it, and a couple things will have broken, but we'll be okay.
But there's no such metaphor as a panther in a china shop.
It's a bull in a china shop that you just can't get it.
I sense that a lot of what you're talking about is these people want the bull in the china shop.
So you know people say that communism works in theory, not in practice, right?
Well, that doesn't mean anything because everything works in theory.
That's what theory means.
It practices how you figure out something actually works.
Democracy is one of the few things that doesn't even work in theory, and here's why.
They talk about voter turnout being a good thing.
Well, at what point does it become legitimate?
If 70% of people vote, They can speak for the 30% who don't vote.
What if it's 40% vote and 60% don't?
At what point is it that you can say this group of the population can dominate this other group who haven't voted?
That's one example.
But in even more technical terms, the purest, I use an example from this book called The Machiavellians, the purest exemplar of democracy is the town hall.
You have a bunch of people, everyone's there to kind of speak their mind, put their point of view across.
Even in a town hall, you're going to have to have limits on time, You're going to have an agenda, what issues we're going to discuss.
So even in the most democratic moment, you're going to have an elite setting the rules and boundaries.
So one of the ideas behind The New Right is this old school theory of 100 years ago called the circulation of the elites, meaning Hillary Clinton will always have more in common with George W. Bush than she will have with a janitor, and you can't get rid of an elite so much as replace it with another elite.
Well, there was another New Right moment early on, because didn't some person hold up like a piece of paper that says, you promised, and they basically ripped and laughed, right?
So this idea that the Constitution is somehow going to start working and save us is another thing that they're very skeptical of.
So I think most people hear anarchist and they just think, well, I mean, I say this all the time, it's just, you want to end up in Mad Max.
You just want sort of warring factions constantly trying to take each other out and that there is no sort of social cohesion.
There's no way to build big projects and things like that because we don't have something that's sort of bringing us all together, that the government is kind of sucky.
I mean, a lot of people think this, it's kind of sucky, but it's the best we got.
The best criticisms of anarchism are actually descriptions of the status quo.
Meaning, what you're describing is the status quo.
You have governments who are trying to take each other out.
China has, you know, hacked our systems.
Russia, you know, is interfering in our elections.
So, right now, nations have a state of anarchy with regard to each other to some extent.
What anarchism would do would provide more security because you wouldn't have to have a government monopoly.
The idea that you need the government to kind of build a big project is really not necessarily true.
And if anything, the government is probably the biggest hindrance towards people working together because they have to run things through some bureaucrat who has no accountability.
Okay, but wait, I wanna back up before we go too down that road.
So just break down a couple of these other groups that were sort of in this trolling community, and can you just explain, like, for someone of a certain age that really doesn't even under, that's not on Twitter, and they're not on 4chan, or wherever else is going on, or Discord, like, what is actually going on with the trolls?
The older people actually know trolling quite well, because the example I use in the book, the first troll was Andy Kaufman.
So Andy Kaufman, he was the great troll of all time, he was on Taxi as Latke, which is not what he's proudest of, and he would do things like, he had this character called Tony Clifton, who's basically this old lounge singer in a pink salmon blazer, and he'd come out and sing terribly and just berate the audience, and one most trolling moment is, he was performing I think in Atlantic City, And he says, oh, you know, my wife died a few years ago, and when I look at my daughter's eyes, I see my wife.
Come on out here, honey.
And she sits on his lap, and they sing, and her voice cracks, and he slaps her across the face, and he goes, what the hell are you doing?
And the audience is booing, and he goes, oh, don't boo, you're just making her cry more.
Well, not only wasn't his daughter, it wasn't even a child, it was an actress.
So trolling, correctly, is forcing a party, exploiting a party's weaknesses in order to turn them into an unwitting performer.
So other examples of this, there was a little kid, this little autistic kid, was on The Late Show in the UK or Ireland, and they asked him, hey, what do you want to do?
Huey, Huey, what do you want to do when you grow up?
And he goes, I want to fly planes into buildings.
And the guy goes, what?
He goes, I want to fly planes to skyscrapers.
And he's like, OK, if you can't do that, what would you want to do?
I'll move to Iraq and be a terrorist.
Now, it's this little 10-year-old boy, and the host now doesn't know what to do.
Yeah.
But on the spot, that is trolling.
Now, trolling is often used on the internet to be like being a jerk.
That's not, to me, a definition of trolling.
There's plenty of words for that.
And just going up to someone and saying, you know, you're this or you're that, that's not clever.
So now she's made a fool of, he is not at all engaging with her, and she's left, you can even hear the Curb Your Enthusiasm music playing as she talks.
And this woman has become a broken woman as a consequence of him clowning her so thoroughly.
Scott Adams, who I know you've had on, describes the lucky Hitler phenomenon, right?
That somehow it's just he always manages to say that what he needs to, to upset people.
The other scenario is like there's some kind of Rain Man thing going on, that he just sees people's weaknesses, he knows exactly what to say, and despite themselves, they lose their minds.
Another example of this was, I think it was Pixelated Boat, there's a Twitter account, and they made this fake screenshot from Michael Wolff's book, Fire and Fury, about how Trump Watches TV all the time, and the staff at the White House made something called the Gorilla Channel, and he talks to the gorillas on TV, and he says, oh, that gorilla's good.
And it was clearly a joke.
It was meant to be a joke.
People repeated this, like, oh my gosh, Trump is so dumb, he talks to television.
Like, wait a minute, you could think he's as dumb as you want.
You're telling me this man who's 70, who's had a TV show, doesn't understand that you can't talk to gorillas on a screen?
But that is the level that he's driven them to.
So it's hilarious to watch.
And it's beautiful from the anarchist's perspective because he's delegitimizing the political process and the presidency.
So the reverence that people have for the presidency has deadly consequences because it allows them to get away with things like war.
And if you think the guy in the Oval Office is a clown, and that clown is getting ready to send your kids overseas to possibly die or possibly kill people, you're going to be a lot more skeptical.
Right, one of the big views of the Murray Rothbard School
is that the two political parties are literally rival gangs.
And just like a gangster has the nice rings and the suits, they wear their suits, they go to the Senate,
but these are at base murderers who are plotting fighting with each other,
but it's infighting.
So anytime the mask is dropped and you realize these people are stealing your money, they're trying to control your lives, they're causing massive, you know, harm around the world often, that's a good thing.
What's the racial element that comes out of all of this?
Because for as much as I get a lot of this and I like a lot of the trolling, the good natured stuff that's really getting the people that I don't like to flip their lids, I love all that stuff.
And then there's this other piece of it that strikes me as, it's hard to tell, are they just intentionally inflammatory?
And they say, if you don't see that as the most important issue, you're blind.
So I had to engage with that writing this book.
Then there are the ones who are, everything's about the Jews.
The Jews, the Jews.
I was in Charlottesville.
I saw everything happening.
I couldn't go to all the events because my contact was told, don't bring the Jew to the party.
I was not wearing the blazer.
But so there is this whole subculture and they disagree with themselves and it was important for me to engage with them and express what their point of view is and show how they're wrong because what happens is when you drive people to the margin it's like telling and especially when you deal with young males it's like when you tell kids if you smoke The principal, your parents, and everyone's going to get upset.
And then you can't get a palm off fast enough.
So that's the same thing here.
It's like if you talk to these people and say certain things, people you hate are going to get upset.
It's like, sign me up.
So the point I make in this book is you take one red pill, not the whole bottle.
Because once they realize that the corporate press is often dishonest and has an agenda, they fall down this rabbit hole.
And unless someone grabs them by the collar and it's like, yeah, you don't have to go all the way.
So this is, you would argue then, the reason why censoring these people and suspending people on Twitter and booting people off Facebook and the rest of it is actually the worst possible thing that you could do.
I don't know if it's the worst, but if they're gonna say there is an elite agenda designed to drive us underground and keep the truth from coming out, now they have evidence.
Look!
We're being blocked.
They don't want to hear the truth.
And the fact that David Duke, for example, is still on Twitter is very curious to me.
And again, with the internet and technology... So wait, what do you think that's about, then?
Well, I think David Duke is a very useful foil for the left.
Because when he endorses people like Keith Ellison or Ilhan Omar, it's crickets, right?
But when he says something positive about somebody else, like, oh my God, David Duke... About Trump!
About Trump, yeah, yeah.
I don't think he likes Trump too much, because all of Trump's kids, except for one, married Jews, so he's not that fond of the president.
Everything's about Israel, David Duke.
And I trolled him once on Twitter, so that was a fun moment.
I think the solution is going to be just like back in the day we had OkCupid and now you have Tinder and all these other sites and they separate out.
There's no reason everyone has to be in one site.
If Twitter wants to say we're a site for progressive ideas, they have that right and that's perfectly fine, they're going to lose a huge market share because when you drive out fringe ideas where they're evil fringe, you're also going to be driving out the good fringe idea and that's where innovation happens.
So if you're gonna have this bourgeois, middle-of-the-road, I-don't-want-weirdness, you're going to lose the interesting people also.
But your frustration might be a feature, because they say, look, we're obviously doing things right.
We've got Dave Rubin upset.
So if we live in a culture that's heavily dominated by the progressive ideology, so for them, if they are getting certain people upset, they can say, hey, we're doing our job right.
The euphemism they currently use is the quality of the conversation.
I mean, this is the most Orwellian thing ever.
You're going to be judging quality, which is a very different thing from free speech, which is messy and ugly and often reprehensible.
How do you think that the new right, then, is supposed to... I know you don't like boundaries, and you don't like gatekeeping and any of those things, but how do you think it's... I like gatekeeping.
But all right, but in a wider group outside of just what's happening in your mind and your interactions with people, how do you think that this new sort of group of people that are all over the map politically, how do they keep the fringe people, the truly bad people out of the way?
This seems to be the biggest issue that nobody's solving.
I don't think you can, because technology has made it.
It used to be you had three networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, and between the three of them you get the news.
Then Drudge came along, as I talk about in the book, and the networks were like, he's not legitimate, he's not legitimate, he's not legitimate.
He breaks one of the biggest stories of all time, Monica Lewinsky.
They didn't know what to do.
He's not legitimate, he's not legitimate.
He broke news.
Who are you to say he's not legitimate?
This orthodox idea of legitimacy has no inherent meaning other than tribalism, right?
So once you have technology, and thanks to Twitter, Facebook, whatever, everyone has their own mic, and there are more and more mics being built every day, I don't see how you're going to be able to put that genie back in the bottle.
And you have to engage with bad ideas if you want to defuse them because you're not, thanks to technology, you're not going to be able to censor anyone.
Let me give you another example.
I have this in the book.
Let's suppose it's like 1990, right?
And you're having an argument censoring books.
And one guy's like, we need to censor books like Mein Kampf.
It has bad consequences.
Someone else is like, no, you need to hear a free speech.
I come from 2019, teleport back in time, and I say, look, someday you're going to be able to copy a book infinitely at no cost.
You press one button, you send it anywhere on earth at the speed of light for free.
I would sound like a lunatic, but that is the status quo.
Oh, and also you need a magic word in order to read it, a password.
Okay, crazy person.
That's the status quo.
And technology is only going to increase more and more and more to empower the individual at the expense of big conglomerates.
It becomes cheaper and cheaper to make your voice heard.
Back in the day, you'd have to be like, if you don't like it, make your own network.
There's a great book called The Goal, and the point of this book is, what's the goal?
What's the goal of a business?
And he says, to make money.
So how you do this is, you look at the pipeline from conception to production, and you look at what's slowing up your profits.
So maybe you don't have enough shipping boxes, maybe you're not producing enough bottles, maybe you have too much inventory, so you've got to have more marketing.
So you look at what the issue is, the bottleneck, you fix that.
Once that's fixed, there's going to be another worse thing, and you fix that.
So Twitter, in many ways, is a rearguard movement right now, because people are realizing it's PayPal, and it's the banks, and it's the fact that there's domain registrars.
Those are the next three that people are going to build alternatives to, because banks are shutting down accounts right now.
And that's what's being underreported.
So Twitter is kind of a little bit of a distraction, because you'll always be able to make some rival to Twitter.
Banking and PayPal, that's something people have to look at now.
Then she was like, okay, maybe it's 40% that we're done, because Trump got elected.
Oh, I got you, I got you.
I can't really speak for her, but she is a very kind of interesting character, and I discuss her ideas at length, because her book, Adios America, was probably the most influential book of the 2016 election cycle.
That's the book where Trump got the idea of they're sending the rapists.
Who do you find you can debate with on the other side of this?
So I get you can be around people on the right that you disagree on a lot of these different things and you don't come out of the racist camp and all that stuff.
Do you find that there are some good actors on the left that you can engage with?
Conservatism is... Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.
So one of the things I discuss in this book is National Review, my favorite paleontology magazine.
In the late 90s, they had this editorial comparing the fight for gay rights to a theoretical fight for necrophilia and saying, what's the difference between fighting for two men to have sex with each other as opposed to having sex with a corpse?
And it was just a very disturbing article.
But now, the conservative case for gay marriage.
So what principles are there that would have you say that then and have you say this now?
So it's disturbing then and the hypocrisy is disturbing to this day as well.
I mean, if you're going to have a principle, I would have more respect for someone to be like, gay marriage is wrong because of the Bible, blah, blah, blah, and stick to that, as opposed to, I'm anti-gay then because I'm a phony, and now I'm anti-gay now because I'm a phony.
But in all seriousness, what I would do is, if you look at when he was a Comedy Central roast, And they asked him beforehand, they said, what jokes can you make and can't you make?
The only thing he wasn't comfortable being joked about was that he's not as rich as he wanted, as he claims he is.
So since that's his line, I would hit him with that line as much as possible.
But at the same time, it's hard to troll someone who is that, you know, Hiroshima in a china shop.
I mean, he's... But I don't know, Justin Amash got him pretty good, I think, over the weekend with coming out in favor of impeachment.
I think that really ruffled his feathers.
You know what it is?
This is what I would hit him with.
I would say, you bragged during the campaign that you would hire the best and smartest people.
It's hard to tell because there's, I have that theory that probably isn't that crazy, that when you become president they sit you down, they're like, all right, this is what you can do and this is what you can't do.
The fact that Obama was droning everyone all the time, it seems like it's out of his, you know, peacenik background, or it could be that, you know, he was a closet, you know, hawk the whole time.
We don't know.
I don't think any of us really know what it's like to be president.
The fact that he hasn't gotten a lot of his big promises through is kind of a big deal.
The fact that he has taken on unprecedented opposition and his head is still being held high, his approval ratings are still relatively high, I mean, that's a bit of an accomplishment.
So since you wrote a book on North Korea, and there's been a little, I think last time I had you on, maybe they were in the beginnings of some of those discussions.
The thing I'm very happy with with President Trump is that North Korea is now on the front pages,
because we need to engage with this most evil country.
And I was on Fox & Friends first, a while ago, and they said, what is your big concern with the summit?
And I said, the continuing enslavement of the North Korean people.
So that whenever you're looking at this issue, always ask, in my view, what does this mean for these 20 million hostages who are being kept enslaved by this evil government that starved its population on purpose during the 90s and killed one to two million people?
So do you think that Trump is sort of the perfect person for this?
That as North Korea vacillates back and forth with all this rhetoric, that Trump can actually match them at that, and that might be the thing that kind of allows a detente?
I don't know about perfect, but you have to have hope for these people.
Especially, I mean, not to sound whatever, once you've been there and you've seen people there, everyone I met in North Korea is still there.
Like, every single person I saw on the street, every kid, every grandma, and it messes with their head, because this is, what, 2012?
Think how much your life has changed since 2012, think how much mine has, and none of theirs has.
I still see my guide, you know, pictures of her on Instagram, and she's still trapped, and she's like a millionaire there, but she's still trapped in that prison with those gilded bars, so it's very disturbing.
And, you know, being born in the Soviet Union, being Jewish, these were two chances my family could have been sent to concentration camp.
So the fact that we have concentration camps right now, that you can see them on Google Earth, you know, in high school we always talk about how the Holocaust happened, how the Holocaust happened.
Something similar happened in the 90s in North Korea against its own population.
This is something that maybe other people don't care, but for me, it's kind of like there but for the grace of God go I. And when I met the guy that I had, she had the same haircut my mom had in like 1982, which is a cutting edge for North Korea.
But it's just looking at like a sliding doors thing and it's like, holy crap, I could have been born here.
And instead of sitting here in my Willy Wonka costume, you know, who knows what would have happened to me.
I would love it if there was a complete Consensus in Washington that war is a last resort and an absolute nightmare.
That is my goal.
So, just like we agree that slavery is a non-starter, sure, I'll get the argument that maybe we have to go to war, but the fact that we can be so glib about it and be like, oh yeah, we're just gonna... Here's another example.
Do you think that we've crossed a little bit of a threshold when it comes to war?
I mean, I feel like the mistakes of Iraq and nobody knows why the hell we're in Afghanistan still.
Trump is not beating war drums.
You know, there's stuff about, there's always this over-the-top rhetoric related to Iran, but I don't sense this is a guy that wants to just, I think he's actually very against all of these nations.
The bloodlust of the establishment, which I include the corporate press, cannot be overstated.
When 2016 trumps the nominee, we heard it every single day.
He's crazy.
He's going to give us to World War III.
He's going to get pissed off at a tweet from China and press the nuclear button.
Remember, we heard this all the time.
Carly Fiorina got asked this in the second debate, the first question, do you trust President Trump with his finger on the nuclear button?
And now, China has hacked our systems, Russia has tried to interfere with our elections, and the press is constantly saying, do something about it, do something about Venezuela.
So the fact that he's not getting us into World War III is now being used as a slight against him by the same people who regarded that as a problem when he was a nominee.
It's horrific.
And this has been a long time coming.
We talk about yellow journalism in high school, remember?
The Spanish-American War.
And then they pretend it went away.
It didn't go away.
The same press, if it bleeds, it leads.
They can't wait to get us into another engagement.
The battle is won when the average corporate journalist is regarded with the exact same way as the average tobacco executive.
They have a job, they're promoting their product, their product is cancerous and deadly, they're often bright people, they're often good people, but be aware of what it is that they're selling you.
One of the things I defend in this book is dark humor.
Let's tie it back to North Korea.
I knew a refugee, and so when people say, that's not funny, Right?
It's this puritanism.
H.L.
Mencken said puritanism is the idea that someone somewhere is happy, right?
I knew this refugee, North Korean refugee, and he went to high school here, and he's talking to his friends, and they go, hey, remember when we were kids we had Pokemon?
And he goes, yeah, except instead of Pokemon, I watched my dad starve to death.
Now, are you going to tell him that's not appropriate?
Yeah, do you know what it's like to watch someone hungry, starve to death, and it's your own dad?
We can never wrap our heads around this.
So for you to tell him that kind of joke is not appropriate, how dare you?
Bonnie McFarlane, a great comedian, was roasting Jim Norton, and she said, Now, that's very dark, but are you telling me she doesn't love her daughter?
Are you telling me she's not a tell-a-joke?
So, the metaphor I use when people say a certain subject is not appropriate for humor, I say it's like flour.
F-L-O-U-R.
It's flour or food.
Well, no one eats flour, but everyone eats it when it's processed and baked, right?
So same thing with jokes.
The darker the subject, the harder it is to make it palatable.
And I have examples of, you know, they made me cut one joke, but I have examples of all sorts of, you know, subjects that are supposed to be off-limits.
And maybe you personally don't find it funny.
If someone's been assaulted and they're like, you know, these kind of jokes set me off, that's fair.
But the idea that no one should find that funny is not fair.
Well, it's also stealing something that's very human, is that we use humor.
Comedy is tragedy plus time.
We use humor to be able to look back on the past.
I mean, if Mel Brooks couldn't have made fun of Hitler, couldn't have made fun of the Holocaust, that was actually healing, I'm sure for him personally, but for millions of other people.
Oh, I think it's a degeneration of the social gospel.
So conservatives, when I talk to them, they're like, oh, they admit that the left controls culture and media and Hollywood and things like that.
And you say, how did this happen?
And they're like, we have to have our own version.
I go, how did this happen?
They're like, oh, it used to be.
I'm like, when?
When it was the 1930s when literal communists were running Hollywood, when Woodrow Wilson is playing birth of a nation at the White House, FDR has so many Democrats that they have to sit on the Republican side of the seats in Congress.
It's always been and there's a reason because leftism lends itself to innovation and creativity because one of the aspects of leftism is liking what's new, liking what's innovative.
This is a psychological thing and there's nothing wrong with being conservative saying I don't like new stuff, I like things the same.
That's fine for you but that's going to be a huge disadvantage when you're trying to attract people who are artistically minded because they're going to be drawn to those who are maybe not overly openly minded.
And I think the stability of like, let's suppose the 50s, and this is one thing I'm hopeful with social media, there were entire schools of thought that were made invisible.
Because they were threatening to the social order.
And now they have to pick people up one by one instead of entire schools of thought.
Sure, so one of the techniques that the Soviets did is, it wouldn't be like the worst people
who would get picked off.
Like Beria said, find me the man, I'll find you the crime.
So Stalin, and I do not think we're in a Stalinist society, I'm just using this as a metaphor, a very loose metaphor, I just really want that to be clear, because we've got a ways to go before that.
But the principle to keep a population kind of submissive is, it's not always the loudmouth.
You pick the housewife, or you pick this grandma, and then everyone knows you could be next.
So you only got to take out like three people, and that 100 are going to basically fall in line.
And because Twitter's rules are ambiguous, and it's seemingly at random, and they don't even give warning.
They could have sat down that AOC account and said, these three tweets are offensive, Delete them.
And also, if you want to have this kind of public square, you know, political conversation, once someone is a certain level of stature, who are, you know, kind of an influencer, it might be that Jack has to talk to them personally, or there has to be three checks before they're banned, or you could have warnings.
A lot of systems for keeping people who are part of this thriving conversation in place, but that's not what they want and that's their right, but this is something that people should recognize.
I don't know if it's easy, but it seems to be effective for them in terms of, because then you have self-censorship, right?
Because, you know, I had this tweet, I don't remember what it was, and I was scared to put it up because I'm like, any moment that I have sore on can fall on me and I'm booted.
Yeah, no, I know it extremely well, and it's like, if I'm even remotely close to where the cliff is, man, things have shifted in a seriously dangerous way.
I mean, look, there will be a certain amount of people that don't want me talking to you.
There are a certain amount of people that didn't want me talking to Cernovich, et cetera, et cetera, and I have to figure out who I think it's okay to talk to.
took a tweet of mine and put it on Instagram, and for days I was fending people off, basically it was like, well, they can't get a Trump, so they're going to get at me.
So you don't give a crap about media matters, I'm sure, but they can sure get to Pete because they'll have his ear.
Yeah, and we definitely focus, seemingly we focus on the negative more, but that is one of the things that when I see you on Twitter, I'm like, you are actually having fun with this.
And there is a need, this endless politicization, did I say that right?
One of the things I really hate about the left, and a certain kind of the left, is the idea that the personal is the political.
And to me, if I disagree with someone politically, that this would have any ramification on our friendship is so profoundly disturbing.
I can't even begin.
Like, if, God forbid, some of my family dies and I have to look at my phone and be like, well, I can't call this person because they're a Bernie person.
I think let's get people, regardless of where the politics fall on any of this, it's like let's get people to realize it's still pretty good and don't get too caught up in all the lunacy.